down at the vertiginous drop, and then out toward the sea and the lights of distant ships.
'The Land of Horaizan,' he said, smiling softly.
'What's that?' asked Jack.
'It's something this little girl asked me,' said Michael. 'She asked me if I was from the Land of Horaizan. I thought she meant 'horizon', but now I'm not so sure. Jack… What's dying like?'
Jack climbed up onto the wall beside him, and held Michael's hand.
'I wish I knew,' he said.
Together they fell nine storeys, a moment that to Michael seemed stretched out into infinity, a moment when he was always falling, when his whole life had been little more than a descent. They crashed through the surface of the water in an embrace and plunged deep down into the black sea, deeper and deeper until the light from the surface was barely strong enough for them to look into each other's eyes. Michael smiled, briefly, and then breathed out, his last breath rising to the surface in a volcanic storm of bubbles. Jack did likewise, and moments later they died in each other's arms.
The black Land-Rover ground to a halt before the burning ruins of the Hamilton's Sugar warehouse, the magnetic blue beacon light still flashing on its roof. As Cromwell stepped out of the vehicle, he saw that the place had already been swept by the army, something he was far from happy about, but then there was no plan in place for this. Tonight had taken them all by surprise.
It was embarrassing, truth be told, that a KVI substation could be in operation only a mile and a half from Torchwood and them not know about it. How long had this place been operational?
The few surviving Russians had already been cleared from the site, taken away in armoured cars by the ground crew, while a fire team now worked at putting out the flaming ruins. Cromwell guessed that the whole site would be one big waste ground within a few hours, all evidence of the events that had taken place that night taken away for analysis or bulldozed into the sea. The incident at Hamilton's Sugar would never have happened. At least not officially.
Pausing to light a cigarette as he surveyed the destruction, Cromwell turned to the woman who had driven the Land-Rover; a tall brunette in a black miniskirt and leather jacket. She was already taking readings, walking around the rubble and the patches of blood where bodies had been, pretending not to notice the lustful looks from some of the soldiers.
'Lucy?' said Cromwell. 'Anything?'
'Nothing,' Lucy replied. 'They're gone.'
'All of them?'
She nodded.
Cromwell took a long drag on his cigarette and shook his head.
'So much death,' he said.
He was walking towards the edge of the quayside when two soldiers approached him, carrying a covered body on a stretcher.
'Sir, Captain Turner said you might want to see this,' said the first, indicating the body.
Cromwell nodded, took another drag on his cigarette, and lifted the sheet. Though covered in blood and ash, one side of the face partly staved in by falling masonry, it was the scar that identified the corpse. Valentine was dead.
'So it goes,' said Cromwell. 'Goodbye, Mr Valentine. Take him away, boys. Do with him what you will.'
Cromwell sat, a little awkwardly, on one of the mooring posts on the edge of the dock. Age, he felt, was starting to creep up on him. There had been a time, which didn't feel so long ago, when he would have been the one running around the ruins, noting every last detail, taking readings. He'd have shrugged off, or at least blocked out, the more gruesome details, like the pools of blood or the recognisable fragments of tissue and bone. Those days were leaving him now. How much more of this did he have left in him? Five years? Ten?
His moment's contemplation was interrupted by the sound of splashing water. He turned around suddenly, and looking down at the sea saw a figure emerging from the surface. It was a man, a man who gripped a rusting ladder with both hands and pulled himself, gasping as if in pain, up onto the edge of the dock. For a moment he lay there, on his side, coughing up water and simply staring into space, as if his mind were a million miles away.
'Harkness…' said Cromwell, but the man did not acknowledge him. Instead, he got to his feet and walked away, past the ruins of the warehouse, past Lucy, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.
'Jack?' called Cromwell, but it was too late.
Jack Harkness was gone.
SEVENTEEN
Jack's office was silent but for the whirr of his computer. He hadn't spoken in perhaps a minute. Ianto leaned back against one of Jack's archaic filing cabinets, drumming his fingers on one of the metal drawer fronts, and sighed.
'But Valentine?' he said. 'Why did they wipe all his records?'
'Embarrassment?' said Jack. 'Desperation? I don't know. They were different times. There weren't just aliens and the Rift to think of.'
Jack was quiet now. He wasn't in the mood for questions. As he'd told Ianto about the events at the KVI substation, he'd glanced occasionally at his monitor, and at the image of Michael, sleeping. The whole night had felt like a cruel dream; the kind of dream you have in which a loved one who has died comes back and, halfway through, you recognise it for what it is: a lie.
'But it's worse than a lie,' thought Jack, 'because it's a lie you tell yourself.'
'So where does this leave us?' asked Ianto.
Jack looked at him quizzically. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'I mean, if he's here now.
Jack shook his head. 'He won't stay,' he said. 'The guy sleeping down in the Boardroom… None of those things have happened to him yet. He's still alive, for one thing.'
'But maybe you could stop it… I mean…'
'No,' said Jack. 'Not in this universe. In this universe, Michael always goes back to 1967. He always dies.'
'So there's nothing we can-'
'No.'
Ianto thought about this for a moment. He'd been thinking of Lisa, ever since he'd told the others about his encounter with Cromwell at Torchwood One. Those days seemed a lifetime ago, now. Lisa seemed so many lifetimes ago.
'You need to go to him, then,' he said. 'Now, I mean. Go and talk to him. Just… just
Jack nodded, and smiled. As he walked out of his office, Ianto caught his hand, and held it for a second before letting go.
'So these Vondrax?' said Gwen. 'They look like people?'
Toshiko shrugged. She was examining the Orb, while Gwen sat at her workstation sipping coffee that was still a little too hot.
'Kind of,' she said. 'I can't remember. Or at least I couldn't remember. Until now.'
'And they wear bowler hats?'
Toshiko nodded.
'But why?' said Gwen. 'Why do you think they wear bowler hats?'
'I don't know. To fit in?'
'It's weird. It just reminds me of something Jack said a while ago. He said that in an infinite universe there must be a planet full of civil servants. Maybe that's the planet they're from…'
Toshiko laughed softly. 'I've seen one of them, Gwen,' she said, 'and they were not civil servants.'
Then she looked at Gwen with an expression serious enough to kill Gwen's smile. She looked strangely
