microwave when the chicken was ready, and she even had a little parmesan to crumble over the asparagus when it was cooked. It didn’t matter that Gwen thought parmesan smelled like puke and asparagus made her pee smell terrible; Rhys liked them, and this was all for him.
She crossed the room to the light switch and turned the lights down, just a little bit more, then went across to Rhys’s pride and joy, the stereo stack system that he’d bought, piece by piece, from an audio specialist in Cardiff, and set the CD going. The Flaming Lips burst from the speakers in a fanfare of confusion. Quickly she pressed the stop button and selected something quieter from the rack. Suzanne Vega; that should do. As the strains of ‘Luka’ drifted across the room she allowed herself to relax. Just a little bit.
Just two things left. One of them was Rhys.
She had texted him earlier, and told him he needed to be home by seven p.m. He’d texted back saying that he was in the centre of town on a job, but he’d be back on time. It was five to seven now, and she was beginning to get a little edgy.
Which reminded her. The alien device. She didn’t want to be edgy when that was switched on. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and held it, then let it out gently, visualising her tension flowing out of her with the breath. It worked: she could feel muscles that she didn’t even know were tense letting go and she could feel her fingers unclenching.
She had put the alien tech beneath the candle, in the middle of the table. She wanted it somewhere central, and that was the best place. It even looked like something decorative, albeit something one might buy from a seaside craft shop to remember a holiday by, rather than pick out of an Ikea catalogue. For a while she had thought of hiding it in the room, or beneath the table, but that had seemed wrong. Having it in plain sight somehow made her feel like she wasn’t actually manipulating Rhys’s feelings without him knowing.
Of course, explaining to Jack how wax had spilled on it was going to be tricky, but she had until tomorrow to think about that.
Gwen quickly ran her fingers over the blister-like controls on the ribbon encircling the device. Gwen had been listening carefully when Toshiko had been demonstrating the device, and she was sure she remembered what to touch in order to get a generalised amplification of emotion within a few feet of the device. All she had to do was think sexy thoughts, and hopefully Rhys should pick up on them. His sexy thoughts would echo back to her, and with luck they might not even get to dessert. Which was a shame, because she’d prepared a coffee creme brulee, just in case. Well, she’d bought a coffee creme brulee at the supermarket at least, and it had been expensive. Well, they were on a two-for-one deal, but it was the thought that counted.
Gwen took another deep breath. Was this right? Was she doing the right thing? In the short time that she’d been with Torchwood she’d seen what happened when people took alien devices home and tried to use them. It rarely ended well, and Jack came down hard on anyone who tried — but this was her and Rhys. This was their future. Jack didn’t understand, he didn’t have a life of his own, as far as Gwen could tell, but if Gwen lost Rhys then she would have lost the one anchor she had to the real world. Despite the risks, despite the danger, she had to try.
Things between her and Rhys weren’t exactly
A horrible thought occurred to Gwen. The definition of getting old was that you’d already made love for the last time in your life, but you hadn’t realised yet.
At which point, just as she got into the wrong frame of mind, she heard Rhys’s key in the lock.
For a moment, all Toshiko could see, illuminated by the orange ceiling lights of the tunnels, was the bulky, stooped shape of a Weevil. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was Ianto. Only Ianto, wearing a suit and looking like he belonged there, in the darkness, underground.
Physics. Light and shade, and the electrical reactivity of cells in the eyes. That’s all it was. Keep telling yourself that.
‘Ianto?’ Her voice was shriller than she would have liked. ‘What are you doing down here?’
He glanced casually back into the shadows behind him, and then turned back to Toshiko. ‘I’m… auditing the Archive,’ he said carefully. ‘The records from the early years of Torchwood are pretty vague. I try and get down here as often as I can and correlate the contents of the boxes with the files we keep in the Hub. You’d be surprised at the stuff I’ve discovered we have but don’t know about, or don’t have but think we do. There’s stuff here going back to 1885. I was just checking the chamber we have set aside for the remnants of Operation Goldenrod. Were you part of that?’
She nodded, remembering with a shudder the sheer chaos of Operation Goldenrod. It had been before Gwen had joined them, when Suzie was still part of the team. Toshiko had been working for forty-eight, perhaps seventy- two hours, on a hugely complex piece of alien technology that kept reconfiguring itself while she worked, but what she remembered, above all else, was the people that had been melted together during sexual congress by Goldenrod; their flesh joined, teratological monstrosities that Owen had to try to separate surgically leaving, for the most part, deformity and death behind him.
Ianto raised an eyebrow. ‘And what about you, Tosh? What are you looking for down here?’
‘That device we recovered from the nightclub — I think it’s part of a set. According to the files, we have several more of them in a box.’ She waved vaguely down the tunnel. ‘Down there somewhere. Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen.’
‘Ah.’ Ianto took her by the elbow and guided her back down the tunnel, the way she had come, away from the chamber where he had been working. ‘You’ve come too far. It’s a little confusing, down here. Let me help you orientate yourself.’
They walked back, Ianto holding Toshiko’s elbow all the way. Something made a noise behind them, a movement, a scuffling, but when Toshiko turned her head she couldn’t see anything. And Ianto didn’t turn his head.
It was a rat. Just a rat. That’s what Toshiko told herself.
‘This chicken is delicious. What did you do with it?’
Gwen smiled. Suzanne Vega was still playing softly in the background, the alien tech was glowing a soft amber, which had surprised her but fortunately blended in with the candle, and Rhys was wolfing everything down with an enthusiasm she hadn’t seen for ages. ‘Nothing, really. I just marinated it for a while.’
‘There’s nothing “just” about that. It’s inspired genius. And it certainly makes a change from the usual pasta in sauce.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘We used to eat like this a lot,’ he said reflectively. ‘We used to cook together, remember? We’d buy a recipe book and go through the recipes, one by one. Sometimes they were great, and sometimes they were… well, not so great… but they were always interesting.’
‘Remember the turkey with chocolate and chilli pepper sauce?’ Gwen giggled.
‘Which might have worked if we’d read the recipe properly and used dark chocolate instead of milk? I remember.’
‘Give us some credit, we were drunk.’ She wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the alien tech, but she was feeling like she was slightly out of control now as well. Or possibly she and Rhys were synching together, so in a sense they were both controlling each other. Whatever: it was a nice feeling.
He was laughing now. ‘What about the Brie wedges in breadcrumbs?’
‘Which we left in the deep fat fryer for so long that the Brie just melted away and all we had left were these breadcrumb shells that tasted faintly of cheese!’
‘What was the silliest thing we ever cooked?’ Rhys asked. He reached out a hand and placed it over the back of Gwen’s hand in a gesture of familiarity that took her breath away momentarily, it was so unexpected.
Gwen smiled at him, catching his eye for longer than they usually managed these days. ‘The pork, paprika and pears, when the pears just cooked down to this porridge-y mush?’
His gaze locked with hers. ‘No. No, I think it was the Cuban lamb. The one where the recipe said we had to marinade it in Coca Cola before barbecuing it.’
‘Oh! Oh!’ A sudden memory made her eyes widen. ‘Surely it was the peanut butter and apple soup?’
Rhys nodded. ‘Yes! Oh God, didn’t we do that for a dinner party?’
‘Rebecca and Andy came over. You found the recipe in a vegetarian cookbook. You were so proud of it.’
