The candle back in the dining room was flickering a deep crimson, casting dancing shadows across the hall and around the bedroom, illuminating Gwen’s incredible breasts with a bloody wash of colour. Although part of Rhys’s mind knew that he’d stepped into a minefield and he ought to back out rapidly, by far the greater part felt a sudden and brutal surge of anger, a dark wave that washed over him, knocking rationality off its feet and leaving something older and nastier behind. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘She’s just a
The light from across the hall was flickering faster and faster, casting Gwen’s ribcage into stark and ugly relief. ‘Fuck you if you can’t understand that I don’t want another woman in my flat. And fuck you if you can’t handle the fact that I have an important job. I guess simpering Lucy the simple secretary is more your type!’
Gwen sprang to her feet and jumped off the bed, clutching the bed-sheet to her chest. For a moment, Rhys thought she was going to push him out of the bedroom, but instead she sprinted past him and into the hall. The door slammed shut behind her, but not before he had seen, in the insane pulsating light, the expression on Gwen’s face.
And beneath the rage, which he had been expecting, which he was feeling, there was something else.
There was horror.
Nestled together inside the storage crate were a collection of rounded objects, each about the size of a small piece of fruit. No two were identical, but they were all alike, and they were all similar to the object that was currently sitting on her workbench. It wasn’t easy to tell, in the orange light that drizzled down from the overhead lamps, but their colours seemed to run the gamut from aquamarine to rose: nothing too bright or too dark, all pastels, all colours that would look good in a nice restaurant or bar. Relaxing colours. Their surfaces were blistered, but the blistering looked as if it was part of the design, not the result of extreme heat or extreme cold. The blisters were all the same size and the same distance apart, and they formed bands, or ribbons, around the objects, with areas of plain material — some kind of ceramic, she thought — between them. They looked to Toshiko like controls of some kind.
Each object was different in shape from its brethren. Some were long and thin, some were short and squat, and some consisted of globules all massed together.
There was a sheet of paper in the box. It had slipped down between the objects and the box wall. She fished it out. For a moment she thought it had been printed in an old-fashioned typeface, then she noticed that the paper was yellow and stiff, rumpled slightly by dry conditions in the way that old newspaper often got. The typeface was literally that — the note had been typed. By hand. On a typewriter.
It was a list of the objects: brief descriptions and colours, enough to be able to identify them uniquely. And there was a paragraph about how they came to be in Torchwood: two of them had been discovered in what was believed to be an alien life-craft ejected from a crashing spaceship, found in an archaeological dig on an Iron Age site near Mynach Hengoed in 1953; five had been bought as a job lot in an auction in 1948, provenance unknown; and one of them had been transferred from an earlier Torchwood box dating back to 1910. They had all been put together in the Archive based on a similarity of appearance, and the function of none of them had been discovered.
The paper was signed in a bold hand; the ink faded by the passing of years.
Beneath the signature was the name of the person who had signed these objects into the Archive, along with the date.
Captain Jack Harkness. 1955.
SEVEN
Friday morning arrived unwillingly in the city; dragging itself into existence with reluctance, grey and dull, sluggish and tired. The traffic moved as if drugged; the drivers slow to use their accelerators and brakes, slow to react to traffic lights or pedestrians on crossings. A haze seemed to hang damply in the air, coating the sides of the buildings and making people’s faces look as if they were covered in sweat, even though they were wearing thick coats. The pigeons huddled together for comfort, unwilling to fly for longer than it took to find a new space to land in. Even the water on the sculpture in the centre of the Basin trickled more slowly than usual. The heat and frantic activity of the past few days had ebbed away, leaving a muddy estuary of apathy behind it.
The mood in the Hub was equally funereal, as far as Gwen could tell. Toshiko looked as if she had worked all through the night again: she didn’t speak unless spoken to, and hardly even then. Owen’s hair was pointing in all the wrong directions and, although he’d left and come back, he was still wearing the same clothes, and he hadn’t shaved. Only Jack was cool and crisp, moving through the still air like a predator; a faint crease of worry between his eyebrows.
Gwen waited until Jack was talking to Owen before slipping the alien device back onto Toshiko’s desk. Toshiko looked at it blankly for a few moments, then glanced up at Gwen with an unreadable expression on her face.
‘Did you get what you needed from it?’ she asked.
‘I got what I deserved,’ Gwen replied, and turned away.
She couldn’t stand to be in the Hub with the others; the silence was too intense. Instead she wandered off, down one of the tunnels she rarely used. Her footsteps echoed off the red brick as she walked, the
Jesus, how had it all gone so wrong so quickly?
She had meant for the alien device to have boosted the affection between her and Rhys, cementing the relationship between them, repairing the cracks that had developed over the past couple of months. Instead, it had driven a wedge into those cracks and levered the two of them apart. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have guessed that the device would amplify
Alongside love, lay hate. That was what Gwen had to come to terms with.
She had slept on the sofa that night, wrapped in a sheet, the rage that had burned within her keeping her warm until it drained away and left her shivering and silently crying. She had showered early and left the flat before Rhys had woken up — assuming he had slept at all, and not just lain awake in their bed staring at the ceiling.
She needed to text him. She needed to call him and talk, but she needed to text him first to prepare the ground, because if she called him now she didn’t know what he was going to say.
Perhaps it was all over. Perhaps they had already broken up, in his mind, and she didn’t know it yet. Perhaps she was suddenly single.
Her blind footsteps had carried her far away from the Hub. She walked past Owen’s medical area, and the firing range. She walked past the entrance to the long platform that extended parallel to a set of metal rails which vanished into a black tunnel; the terminus, Ianto had once told her, of an underground railway system that linked the Torchwoods together, although she had suspected then that he was joking in that straight-faced way Ianto had. She walked past the archives into which Ianto placed the various alien devices Torchwood had confiscated over the years. She kept walking until she was deep into territory that she had never seen before.
A sudden wave of coldness passed over Gwen, raising goose flesh on her arms. She looked up to see an opening in the tunnel wall on her left. Light began to ripple on the ground, just within the arch of the opening; a deep, violet light. Entranced, she entered.
