Dr. Matsumoto and Icrel were ordered to examine the inner-city plant life, along with Dr. Clayton and Dr. Zimorax helping them with analysis and excavation. The other students were confined to the base camp, passing the time and trying not to think about it.

Diana threw herself into her work, but gave up quickly.

'I had one idea and now I'm starting to look for patterns that just can't be there,' she said aloud, exasperating.

'Blue Box Phenomenon?' asked Chitra.

'Fuck Summerfield and her bullshit about repeating constants—she wasn't even qualified. Why do we even include her in our textbooks?'

'Because she is vital in understanding Martain and Earthling history,' said Orlo, who was tired of that argument. It was well-known Summerfield had no qualifications and was merely a hobbyist, hence all of her research was to be understood through that lens, like the racists babblings of the humans who encountered any other species.

'What patterns are you seeing?' asked Chitra.

Diana showed her a few: 'This is a Cool N, this a Cool S, I think this is a Peladonian thing the Lieutenant was talking about, and then this…'

Orlo's tendrils curled into the main body. He pulled himself across the room to get a better understanding of the images. He did not have eyes, but he was able to understand through various translators and light receptors.

'That one,' a tendril pointed to a symbol, a vertical straight line with a branching curve, with a bisecting line below the end of the curve and through the vertical line. It was somewhere between a P and an F. 'That's a Colix symbol, something… it's the plural name for their spirits or angels.'

'What's it doing here?' asked Chitra.

Diana's blood went cold. 'Angels, you say?'

'Yes,' said Orlo tentatively. 'Oh.'

'From what I can understand, the plants within the city, especially the ones among the mossy clusters, have a similar evolutionary path. And not just like all humans sharing a common ancestor, or in fact, all carbon-based life being related. I mean that these all have a similar genetic code millions of years more complex than the outside the city. Yes, they have much longer codes, but they've had no predators to evolve for, they mutate and live only by chance—yes, that is conjecture, I am being more broad with my explanation for you. And so, the inner city flowers have evolved greater sensory capacity and behaving almost like animals, hiding and flight from touch and sound.

'Here are images I had taken during my walks with Hestamoloc.' Here Dr. Matsumoto showed them six images, each dated a few days apart, where Hestamoloc would run his hand over the wall. The gap had widened significantly. 'We can see that they've moved. I also suspect that some of the cultivated reeds may have also reacted similarly, that our sickness was not just incompatible anatomy and a miscalculation, but a genuine attempt to attack a predator.'

Dr. Matsumoto's lecture could have continued for another ten minutes, but Lt. Castillo stopped him, satisfied with the information presented and asked for his usual report. When she read over it she understood that as long as they continued to wear their protective clothing and didn't let the local flora mix with their own, then nothing should go too wrong.

Dr. Chen and Dr. Matsumoto still had no answers for what was happening to Aumegden.

'I think we should form a vote to leave,' said Diana, loudly. If she were a different sort of person, she would have slammed her fist on the table to get everyone's attend and imply the threat of her if she was not obeyed.

'This is not a democracy,' said Lt. Castillo.

The Adults (Dr. Matsumoto, Dr. Zimorax, Lt. Castillo, Dr. Chen, Dr. Clayton) were presented with the combined findings of Chitra, Orlo and Diana.

'But look at it, you can't deny it.' Diana did this time tap the table with her finger pointedly.

Joshua and Gesto were listening from the corridor.

'Diana, I know it's been stressful and the world is opening up to you, but you are seeing patterns where there are none.'

'It's not just Diana,' snapped Chitra, a little more forcefully than she meant to, it had surprised everyone a little, she was the class clown after all, and now that she was being serious they had to take her seriously. 'It's the three of us. Three students who you picked because we are top of our class. I'm not top-grades, but you have always said my reasoning and rationale are consistently sound.'

Dr. Zimorax opened her mouth and Diana knew it was going to be patronising, so she turned to Dr. Clayton and called on her to speak. She had remained her usual quiet self. 'Dr. Clayton?' Diana prompted.

Doctor Clayton sucked her teeth and gave everyone a furrowed look, a plumber concerned that there wasn't going to be the chance to overcharge for this sink. 'Weeping Angels… are dangerous, if they were here I would say to leave, but I have no evidence that they are here.'

She meant she had been told there wouldn't be any.

'Quantum miracle creation,' said Orlo, who had read a few papers on the subject of temporal sciences and was now an expert.

'That phenomenon relates to smaller objects,' Doctor Clayton kindly reminded him. She had no interest in making him out to be a fool.

'You said these were time-space tears, meaning a Weeping Angel could get through by chance.'

'Weeping Angels are just bogeymen, they scare kids, bedtime stories like Pel'Jek the Shapeshifter,' said Lt. Castillo with an unconscious smoothing of her hair, along the white streaks amongst the brown.

Of course this was an old Peladonian reference that no one cared to ask about.

It's the Doctor, obviously, whose name/title had been degraded and mistranslated through the centuries—millennia, actually, at this point of the Peladonian timeline.

'Well, no, actually,' said the Doctor, this Doctor, the one using the alias Dr. Ruth Clayton. 'They are real, just not at the centre of every locked room mystery.'

'Well, there is an easy solution to the mystery—open the coffin,' said Diana.

'Absolutely not,' said Dr. Clayton.

'Why not?'

'Because we don't know what's in it, maybe if we get the chance for a spectrographic analysis, then we can see. I hate to what-if, but it could contain the virus that turned these plants nasty. This could contain infectious bacteria.'

But it doesn't, does it Doctor? You know what's in there.

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably.

'Yes, but I think you are all ignoring the important point!' cried Diana. It was The Adults against The Children, it was her against her aunt. 'The black sarcophagus, the goddess of fertility or maybe death had half her face as flowers. The symbol of the closed eye could just be the green crescent rotated,' Diana pointed to Dr. Chen's badge, 'a healer god who is blind to all, helping all. And not to be racist, but the bird-faced warrior is clearly Gesto, and the monster thing is supposed to be a crude interpretation of Hestamoloc.'

'I think that might be a stretch. We aren't gods. And where do you account for me, or Dr. Zimorax, or Lt. Castillo?' Dr. Matsumoto was sure he hadn't left anyone out, but he added, 'Or the rest of us,' just in case.

At this the students backed down and looked at one another.

'Doctor Matsumoto, are you maybe transgender? Or is Joshua? Or non-binary?' asked Icrel.

'I am not.'

'He's not,' said Lt. Castillo. 'You can ask him if you like, but I had a thorough psycho-social evaluation of all crew members.'

'Well, there's also the lover who holds hands with the beast, the two-headed prophet, the historian with the chained book,' said Orlo, a little meekly. He did not want to point out the obvious, he wasn't even sure it was obvious to anyone but him. He wished Icrel was there to be obvious and rude and not be scolded too harshly for it. Icrel could point out Dr. Matsumoto and Hestamoloc's infatuation, or at least, romantic tension, and that Dr. Zimorax would obviously want to record the living history for her future self. He couldn't calculate the two-headed prophet though.

'What about me and Lieutenant Castillo?' asked Dr. Clayton.

'We only know of three more deities.'

'What about those four wisdoms?' asked Dr. Clayton.

'What?'

The Doctor searched through the database. 'I could have sworn there were four wisdoms who served the historian.'

'The who? You mean the accountant?'

Doctor Clayton looked up. Icrel was with them now, also as frantic as the others. She looked around her and sniffed the air. Something didn't smell right. Time had shifted around them all and only she, a Time Lord, noticed.

She remembered the historian and the four wisdoms that were always depicted with it, but when she looked now there was just the accountant. She searched further back and found a note from Diana suggested the image could be 'the scholar' or 'the historian' but that 'the accountant' fit better with the consistent depiction with the prophet. Diana's conjecture was that the prophet prophetised and the accountant made note of its happenings.

The time track had slipped right in front of her, in the matter of a moment, and she barely noticed. 'Never mind.' She found the symbol for the two-headed prophet, she couldn't tell from just looking, but it did appear to be depicted as gynandromorphic, with one half of the body having breasts and wider hips.

The two soldiers outside, Gesto and Hestamoloc looked at each other. They didn't quite understand what the students were getting at, and they suspected that it was a case of fear making them see patterns that weren't there. Although, as Gesto listened on, she did see their reasoning about the eye and the half-face goddess.

'We are not leaving,' said Lt. Castillo.

'Doctor Chen, Nasti, surely there must be some safety protocol?' asked Chitra.

'There are, but we have to assess the level of danger. This can't be an airborne virus otherwise we would have detected it. All my readings show that we are completely safe as long as take precautions of protective suits and don't take needless risks.'

'Can we see her?' asked Icrel.

'Absolutely not.'

(Of course they got glimpses during the chaos of getting her safe, and had only theorised since. They imagined flowers and sprouts growing over her cheek, not the face-melting roots.)

'I think we're done here,' said Dr. Chen, she stood awkwardly. 'If you keep talking like this, I will have to sedate you—all.'

'Your silencing our voices!' cried Diana.

'I am keeping everyone calm and rational while we deal with a serious issue. It is my prerogative as the medical officer.' She stormed out, jumped at Gesto and Hestamoloc standing at the door, then continued to storm away.

Aumegden was kept in a remedial chamber. It was not stasis, it was not a Zero Room, it was a forceful slowing of the bodily processes to keep infections delayed, allowing time for research and life-saving procedures. In extremis, it was a quarantine isolation chamber. Aumegden was laid back, staring at the flat, grey ceiling, listening to the hum of the machinery, hearing the chittering, wet clicks of the plant-life eating her. She was constantly aware of the movements of Dr. Chen and Nursebot-W7Alpha.

'Is she stable?' asked Lt. Castillo, quietly entering the medical room. The chamber was set up in another room, an air-tight room with clear windows to allow Dr. Chen to constantly watch for any physical movements.

Dr. Chen checked the read-outs. 'Only her body temperature and heart rate are above the average, but no more than I'd expect from a fever. Her own body is working against the infection. I still need to give her antibiotics.'

Dr. Chen returned to the bench where she prepared the sedatives for each of the students. She didn't want to waste mood patches.

Lt. Castillo watched the green-skin-half of the face. 'Is she conscious?'

'Yes. She has to be. She goes to sleep out of boredom every few hours.'

'I never understood her celebrity. Her parents are interesting academics, attractive too. But hundreds of children are born and conceived outside of normal gravity. Millions of species travel and migrate from different planets with different gravity. My grandparents had to adjust to New Earth's gravity.'

'She was born and raised for the first three years of her life. She only survives on New Earth because of the bone replacements, her muscles—her heart—had to be stimulated with electrodes.' Dr. Chen was a little tired of Vanessa and didn't look away from her work. 'She is important because she is the transhumanist model, she is a debate about disabled persons who can't get the operations, she is a debate about disabled people who believe they shouldn't have to get the operations. Her celebrity is not her parents.'

'That's what she believes.'

'Because she grew up in their shadow. She also doesn't consider herself transhuman or disabled.'

'I suppose being fixed means you aren't broken. Pity she's failed like this.'

Dr. Chen sighed and let her head fall. For some reason, it occurred to her, just then, that her friendship with an Ice Warrior Martian hadn't intrude on her friendship with an ethnocentric third-generation Peladonian. Hadn't until now. 'Shut up, Vanessa, and get out. I don't need to hear your bullshit right now.'

'You're just as sharp as I am.'

'I am brisk and serious with my bedside manner, I know people need a gentle push to get better. I am not an asshole who thinks I'm somehow better than everyone.'

'I don't think I'm better. I'm just the commanding officer. We had a mission. Aumegden has compromised it.'

Dr. Chen whipped around. 'Don't say that. Shut up, shut up.'

'What's gotten into you all of a sudden?' Lt. Castillo was glad she hadn't formed a deep personal connection with Dr. Chen, just a surface one.

Dr. Chen looked at the door of the medical bay. It was shut. It wasn't sound-proof. She stepped close and whispered. 'I have two wives at home, one is pregnant with our fourth child on the way.'

'There's an easy solution for that,' said Lt. Castillo, darkly. 'If we are certain we—the rest of us—are safe, there is only one casualty that needs to be secured in order for us to return home.'

(Read 'secured' as disinfected with fire).

'I know. I am concerned about everyone's safety, psychological health too, and you and Dr. Zimorax dismissing and belittling everyone is not helping anyone, it is making things so much harder. So Vanessa, I need you to not be a bitch for another week and then we can go home and you be the most unpleasant woman in the military to someone else.'

Aumegden didn't hear them through the glass, but knew they were talking about it. If she could move, she would have tapped the glass and told them to leave and let her stay. Not kill, but throw her in a ditch and let her become one with the soil, become part of the root systems. She was born in the stars and finally found a land that wanted her. She wanted to go home.