around the wind and billowing like a leather sail. ‘Yeah… Tosh asked me to let you know something. She’s picked up little bursts of electromagnetic energy somewhere in the centre of Cardiff. It’s not one of the standard frequencies. She’s keeping an eye on it.’
‘OK.’ He paused. ‘Keep your mobile handy. Just in case.’
A sudden flush of anger at Jack’s casual assumption that she would come running when he called brought a bloom of heat to her cheeks and forehead. ‘What — just in case I actually manage to get a few hours to myself? Just in case I actually get a life?’
‘You can walk away any time you want, Gwen,’ Jack chided, a dark voice speaking to her out of darkness. ‘I don’t own you. Go back to the police, if that’s what you want. But you know what will happen. You’ll be on the outside again. You’ll see us walking past you, pushing through the barriers, taking control of your crime scenes and stripping them of whatever we want, and you won’t be part of it any more. Can you stand that? Having taken that peek over the garden wall into the wilderness, can you really pretend that it doesn’t exist and that the garden — the nicely ordered garden — is all there is?’
‘Go to hell,’ she said bleakly. ‘You know I can’t.’
‘Go to your restaurant. Make small talk with your friends. Fashion, politics, house prices, sport… It really doesn’t mean anything. Not when it’s compared with the stuff that’s drifting in through the Rift.
She turned away and pushed open the door that led down through the interior of the building. Twenty minutes to get to the restaurant, and she still had to get back to the Hub and retrieve her handbag and her high heels. Just for once, couldn’t they each get the chance to take one thing from the shelves and the storerooms in the Hub — one thing that would make their lives easier? A teleporter. That was all she wanted. Something to get her from A to B without having to go to all the tedious trouble of crossing the intervening ground.
The wind suddenly gusted around her, pushing her roughly against the doorframe. She thought she heard a flutter behind her, like cloth being blown away. She turned back, but the sky was completely black now, and if Jack was there then she couldn’t see him.
Owen was daydreaming, sitting at his bench in the darkened underground space of the Hub and letting his mind drift away into the higher levels of the empty atrium, up where the brickwork wasn’t quite so damp and the blanked-off ends of Victorian sewer pipes projected from the wall.
Sometimes, in the quieter moments — the moments between frantic chases around Cardiff in search of some piece of alien technology and long periods spent at his bench or in his lab dissecting out the form and function of the biological things they found — Owen daydreamed about writing up some of his stranger investigations in a magazine of some sort. The magazine didn’t exist, of course. There was no
It made him feel angry and frustrated, sometimes, the amount of stuff that he knew but could never tell anyone. And who else was there to tell? Torchwood Cardiff: five people, rushing around trying to solve all the problems they could, with barely enough time left over to get on with their own personal lives, let alone sit down over a cup of coffee and chat about chlorine-based enzyme chemistry and anomalies in osmotic transfer rates.
And only one of them had any medical training.
It was a waste. A real waste. Owen had discovered so much during his time working in the Hub. Things nobody else on Earth knew. The bizarre secrets of Weevil sex, for instance, which had almost made him throw up the first time he learned about them but went a long way towards explaining the expressions on the faces of the creatures. The various senses that creatures could have in place of sight and hearing, including things like biological radar that Owen would have thought impossible unless he’d actually experienced them. The way that vast diaphanous creatures could slip through rock with the same ease that whales slipped through water. The existence of single beings that took the form of flocks of bird-like creatures, with each little part being an irreplaceable part of the whole.
There were times he felt he knew so much about alien biology that he would burst, and yet he was just scratching the surface.
And that was just with the equipment he had: cutting edge, of course, but cutting edge for Earth. There were alien things on the shelf in Torchwood that would allow him to watch biochemical reactions on the cellular level like he was watching a movie, or to guide minute robotic scalpels along arteries by the power of thought alone. And they would stay on the shelves. Nobody was allowed to touch them. The risk was too great.
After all, they all remembered Suzie, and what had happened to her when she discovered that she could temporarily raise the recently deceased.
Thoughts of Suzie led Owen on to thinking about the other members of the team. Owen probably spent more time in their company than anyone else in his life, but he still felt as if he knew virtually nothing about them. What about Captain Jack Harkness, for instance: the enigmatic leader of the team? From things he said, and more things he left unsaid, Owen sometimes suspected that Jack was as alien as some of the things that drifted through the Rift, and yet there were other times when he seemed more grounded, more part of the moment than anyone else he knew. And Toshiko, the technical expert who could strip a device she’d never seen before down to wires and bits of metal, then put it back together again just the way it had been, but who didn’t know the first thing about how people worked. And Gwen. Beautiful Gwen…
The sound of the main door bursting open broke his concentration. Gwen rushed in, unbuttoning her blouse. For a moment, Owen was stunned. It was as if his dreams were coming to life.
‘Gwen… er… this is… Look, I thought…’
She glared over at him. ‘Down, Rover. I’m running late, and I need to get changed to go out. I left my glad rags here earlier.’ She dashed across towards one of the side rooms. ‘I completely lost track of time.’ She vanished out of the Hub, but he could still hear her voice. ‘Bloody Jack. I just went up to deliver a message from Tosh, but he kept me talking. Where is Tosh, by the way?’
‘She’s out trying to triangulate some signal she discovered.’
‘Great.’ She appeared again in the Hub, buttoning up a jacket over a silk blouse. She looked taller, and there was a
‘So what are you all dressed up for then?’ smirked Owen.
She glanced over at him. ‘You know the Indian Summer?’
‘Up on Dolphin Quay?’
‘That’s the one.’
“Contemporary Indian cuisine with a special touch, derived from the intimate geographical knowledge of our chefs”. That one?’
‘That one. I’m meeting… some people there tonight. I’ll take the scenic route, I think. It’ll save me a twenty-minute walk. In high heels.’
Without any hesitation, Owen said, ‘Hold on, I’ll come with you.’
‘To the Indian Summer? Dream on!’
‘No — out the scenic route.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s time for me to go, anyway.’ Getting up from his bench, he crossed to an area of flagstones in the centre of the underground space, picking up the remote control from a nearby bench as he went.
After a few moments, Gwen joined him. They had to stand close together to fit onto the flagstone, and Owen couldn’t help noticing that Gwen was holding her body tense, ensuring that nothing touched him, no folds of cloth and no bare skin. Fair enough — if that’s the way she wanted to play it. He pressed a button on the remote and suddenly the Hub was falling away from them as the flagstone rose noiselessly into the air. Within seconds they were high enough above the ground that a fall would have seriously injured them, but a faint pressure pushed them towards each other. A faint pressure that Gwen was obviously resisting.
A faint breeze stirred Owen’s hair. He glanced up, to where a square of darkness was approaching them, set in between the lights of the ceiling. The dark square grew larger, and then they were plunging into it: a slab-sided tunnel which took them upwards, the stone passing fast enough to rasp the skin from their fingers if they touched it.
