The city stretched out around them like an old scar.
Jayne moved first—down the ramp, boots hitting the pavement like he meant it. The Doctor followed, long coat snapping behind him, Benton bringing up the rear with a soldier's quiet readiness. None of them spoke.
Didn't need to.
They had a heading.
No shortcuts. Just three men walking into the wind, hunting a ghost with Jo Grant's voice caught somewhere in its teeth.
Jayne picked up the trail before they'd cleared the first block. Not in footprints—those were long gone under soot and city grime. But he read it in other ways. Burn pattern on the edge of a service panel. A smear of scorched plastic on a handrail. The faint scent of ozone bleeding into the cold morning air.
"Kathan passed this way," Jayne said, not bothering to explain what they all already knew: Kathan wasn't Kathan.
The Doctor didn't question it. Just followed.
Jayne led them through the broken veins of New Kettering—past empty tram lines, down service alleys too narrow for sunlight. A hollowed-out mess of a district, patched together with spit and welds. Street signs rusted to nothing. Power lines drooping like vines.
The building they found her in didn't look like much. Old judicial complex, three stories of rot and scorched bulkhead, tucked behind a dead transit node. Most of the upper floors were dark. But the third level still pulled power.
Jayne didn't say how he knew. He just stood still for a long moment, watching it like a man watching a canyon wall for movement.
Jo stumbled as she was dragged down the corridor, boots skidding on the warped metal floor. Jed's grip was iron, his posture unreadable now.
"Let go of me, you thug!" she snapped, twisting in his grasp. "If you bruise my wrist, I swear—"
BZZZT.
The stun prong hissed out near her ribs, bright and sharp.
She flinched, sucked in a breath, and stopped fighting. "All right! All right. You're worse than the Ogrons."
He didn't answer. Just pushed open a half-burnt door into the ruins of what used to be his office.
Or at least what he'd called his office.
The room smelled like scorched wire and rust.
Chairs overturned. Wall panels cracked. Lights buzzing low on emergency backup.
And the desk—center of the room, too clean, too deliberate—sat waiting.
He crouched, pressed something underneath.
The whole thing shimmered—folded in on itself like a trick of the eye, until what remained was a sleek capsule, chrome-skinned and humming softly. A control panel gleamed where the drawer used to be.
Jo backed away instinctively. "No," she breathed. "Not again."
"Yes," said the man beside her—no longer Jed, not even pretending. The Master, coat black as empty space, face composed, eyes glittering.
"Elegant, isn't it?" he said. "None of the Doctor's clutter. Clean lines. Compact function. I rather prefer it."
"You're not running."
"No," he said, smoothing a cuff. "Not today."
"Then what are you doing?"
He glanced at the pod. Back at her. "Keeping a promise."
Jo blinked. "To who?"
"The Doctor," he said simply. "I offered to help him repair his TARDIS. It was… a rare gesture. And I've decided to honor it."
He studied her face, like he might see something worth adjusting.
"I'm not kidnapping you, Jo. Do be serious. That sort of thing never ends well. Besides…" he trailed off, smiling faintly. "I'm trying something different today."
"Patience?" she muttered.
"Exactly."
He turned toward the console, hands behind his back.
Jo didn't move.
Didn't speak.
And somewhere out beyond those walls, the men coming to find her were closing the distance—steel in their steps, fire in their bellies.
She hoped.
Somewhere beneath the crust of a dead moon that didn't have a name anymore, past eight locked doors and four clearance codes no one had spoken aloud in fifteen years, was a place the Alliance didn't admit existed.
They called it Vault H-0. Not a prison. Not a lab. Just a room-shaped idea with reinforced bones and nothing human in its construction.
Most people who ended up there didn't walk out.
Some didn't even scream.
The chamber at the heart of it pulsed with low, almost imperceptible energy—like standing too close to an engine that wasn't quite powered down. The walls were coated in radiation-dampening mesh, reinforced titanium-laced stone, and a reactive acoustic layer that swallowed sound rather than echoed it. The floor was pressure-sensitive. The lights tracked breath.
The thing in the middle—what passed for the cell—wasn't built for punishment. It was built for containment. It existed because someone, somewhere, believed a cage for gods might one day be necessary.
Inside that cage stood a man-shaped sculpture in white crystal.
Not carved. Not grown.
Frozen.
The Master. Locked mid-motion, like a statue caught in the act of forgetting its own violence. Arms slack. Shoulders relaxed. Head slightly turned as if listening for a joke only he could hear.
He looked small in there.
Only he wasn't.
Colonel Dyson stood behind the one-way barrier. Tall. Slate-gray uniform cut with lines too sharp for regulation. A face like poured concrete—tight-jawed, deep-set eyes, not a flicker of warmth anywhere in the build.
He didn't speak right away.
Just watched.
"Begin depetrification sequence," he said finally. Voice low. Flat. Like an afterthought with consequences.
The tech beside him—a spindly thing with more interface ports than fingers—nodded, pale hands dancing across a console that didn't hum so much as thrum, deep and slow, like a heartbeat through stone.
Inside the cell, something shifted.
A sharp crack.
Then a ripple.
The stasis field fractured—first in spiderweb hairlines, then in long, glassy seams that sloughed off like dead skin. Light flickered. A pressure shift kicked out in a wave, loud enough to rattle the recessed monitors built into the observation wall.
And then he fell.
The Master hit the floor face-first, a boneless collapse, limbs awkward, chest rising and falling in shallow, painful gasps.
He didn't move.
Not right away.
Just lay there, breath rasping, eyes closed, blood dried dark around half a dozen bullet holes—each one a lesson in how close he'd come to staying dead this time. His coat hung off him like a thing left behind. His skin was pale. Waxen. His hair matted with cold sweat.
When he stirred, it was with a tremor.
A flex of fingers. A slow push off the ground.
By the time he got his legs under him, he looked like a man pulled up from the wreckage of a burning ship—raw-edged, swaying, but not broken. Not quite.
He blinked blearily at the glass. At Dyson.
"I require immediate medical attention," he rasped. The voice was still there, buried under blood and smoke—silken, smug, acid-lined. But thin. Shaky. "If you want me alive long enough to—"
Click.
A panel slid open in the far wall.
No fanfare. No footsteps. Just silence and chrome.
Out unfolded a surgical bay—compact, clinical, shaped like a coffin built by someone who liked knives more than stitching. A bed slid free. Arms descended. Precision instruments blinked to life one by one. Some looked like they belonged in a hospital. Some didn't look like they belonged anywhere near a human body.
Dyson's voice crackled over the intercom—clean, cold, impersonal.
"Fix yourself."
The Master turned his head, eyebrows twitching upward. "I beg your pardon?"
"I don't care how you do it," Dyson replied. "You're a Time Lord. A genius. A parasite in a velvet coat. That's a fully adaptive, neural-synced auto-surgeon with a hybrid control suite jacked off four different species. It'll stitch your lungs back together or melt your brain, depending on which switch you press first."
The Master coughed. Wet. Painful. "I've been shot. Multiple times. One punctured my lower lung. I believe another clipped a bypass node—"
"Then I suggest you get to it." Dyson's tone didn't change. "It's not like this is your first resurrection."
The line went dead.
The silence that followed wasn't still.
It watched.
The Master stared at the medbay. Then the glass.
And for once, he didn't smile.
Didn't gloat. Didn't monologue.
Just pressed a trembling hand to his chest, straightened his spine like it was a matter of principle, and took one step.
Then another.
Toward the machine that would either rebuild him or flay him apart.
He paused at the edge of the platform. Turned slightly, not to Dyson, but to the air.
"I'll remember this," he said. Quiet. Clear. "Every second of it."
Then he lay down.
The surgical arms stirred like birds scenting blood.
The lights dimmed.
The door sealed.
And behind the glass, Dyson didn't blink.
Just watched.
Because that's what Vault H-0 was for.
You didn't throw people in it to break them.
You put them there because nothing else could hold.