THE UNIFIED DOCTOR

The Spiral
Accord

Book Two

Regan Andrews

Illustrated edition · September 2026

Unofficial Doctor Who fan fiction

About this edition

The Spiral Accord
The Unified Doctor · Book Two
Regan Andrews

First illustrated EPUB edition, September 2026. Contains the owner-locked, published 15-chapter edition and its 45 published illustrations.

The Unified Doctor Adventures is an unofficial work of Doctor Who fan fiction and an independent, not-for-profit fan project. It is created for enjoyment and appreciation of Doctor Who, not for commercial profit. This book is free to read.

This is not an official Doctor Who publication. The project is not affiliated with, authorised, sponsored or endorsed by the BBC or any other Doctor Who rights holder. Doctor Who and its associated characters, names, settings, designs and trademarks remain the property of their respective rights holders. No ownership of those underlying rights is claimed.

Original contributions are shared under CC BY-NC-SA only to the extent that their creators hold the rights to license them. This licence does not cover Doctor Who or any other third-party intellectual property, and does not grant permission to use rights belonging to others.

Cover and interior illustrations were generated with AI and selected for this edition.

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Chapter One

A Good Cup of Tea

There was something almost sacred about the way steam curled from a cup in the TARDIS kitchen. Not sacred in the ceremonial sense—the Doctor had attended ceremonies on seventeen worlds and mistrusted most of them—but sacred because the steam did nothing except rise. It carried no warning, concealed no face and required no decision before it vanished.

He watched it until the kettle clicked as it cooled.

The tea itself was an argument between eras. He had found a tin of dark leaves behind a row of spice jars, added a pinch of something labelled in his own handwriting as Victorian, and then discovered a smaller packet from a laughing monk on a lunar monastery. The label gave no brewing time. His memory supplied three, each attached to a different silver kettle and none to this one.

He chose the shortest, tasted the result and waited. Too sharp. Another minute softened it. Experience had suggested possibilities; attention had settled the question.

He held the mug in both hands, letting the warmth reach his knuckles. The cut beneath his thumb dressing pulled when he tightened his grip, so he loosened it. His knee was propped on a second chair under the table, a folded towel supporting the joint. He disliked the arrangement. The TARDIS had placed the chair there before he entered and locked its wheels against the floor.

'Subtle,' he told the ceiling.

The kitchen lights warmed by one degree.

Across the bench, Ava sat with her feet propped on the edge of her chair and one knee held carefully straighter than the other. A clean dressing covered the scrape beneath her trousers. The support remained around her other wrist. A datapad hovered beside her, its blue light rising and falling because she had set it to match her breathing.

She was not reading. The page showed a repair inventory, but her eyes kept moving from the Doctor's bandaged hand to the tea, then to the quiet bracelet above her uninjured wrist. It had not tightened. She had checked twice.

'Okay,' she said eventually, 'but you still haven't answered.'

The Doctor looked at the datapad as if it might contain the missing question. It showed AMBER SHIELD CIRCUIT: ISOLATED and, beneath that, a list of parts the ship had declined to release from storage.

'Which inquiry are we prosecuting? The tea, the chair or the fact that my own ship has embargoed a screwdriver?'

'Fruit.'

He raised an eyebrow. His brown glasses gave a brief private prompt—conversation context: favourite fruit—then he dismissed it with a glance. He remembered the question now. He also remembered avoiding it.

'I thought I did.'

Ava reached across and turned the datapad face down. 'You delivered a position statement on why favourites produce unreliable taxonomies.'

'They do. Preference varies with season, ripeness, species and whether the fruit in question has attempted diplomacy.'

'You said your favourite fruit was philosophically irrelevant.'

'A defensible conclusion.'

'It doesn't count.'

The bracelet slid a few millimetres when she folded her arms. The Doctor noticed, but he did not ask to examine it. Ava noticed him not asking.

'It's true, though.' He took another sip. The blend had become better while he was distracted. He made a note of that on the margin of the tea tin, then crossed it out because DISTRACT DOCTOR FOR FOUR MINUTES was not a replicable instruction.

Ava leaned towards the tin. 'Did you just edit your own tea?'

'Peer review.'

'Not helpful.'

She picked up her mug of coffee. The TARDIS had produced it without argument, which the Doctor considered blatant favouritism. Ava drank, grimaced and added another measure of hot water.

'That,' he said, 'is no longer coffee. It's an apology made by coffee.'

'Answer the question and I won't make you taste it.'

He sipped his tea with the solemnity of a man consulting a difficult archive. Several answers presented themselves. Bananas belonged to running, satsumas to pockets, apples to warnings he could no longer place in order. Pears came with a reflexive refusal so strong it had survived histories that had not.

'All right, fine. Pears. I like pears.'

Ava stared. She had heard him complain about pears on three separate shopping trips and once refuse a perfectly adequate dessert because the menu described them as 'gently poached'.

'You liar.'

The Doctor managed two seconds of injured dignity. Then his mouth twitched.

'All right—hate pears. Despise them. They're traitorous apples. But that doesn't mean—'

His mug slipped against the dressing. Ava caught it before it tipped, her sound hand closing around the handle while his rested awkwardly beneath it. Tea struck the saucer but not the table.

They both went still. The Doctor released the mug first.

'Thank you,' he said, without turning the moment into a joke.

'Traitorous apples?' Ava repeated once she had set the mug down.

'Treacherous texture. False structural promises.'

'You could simply say you don't like them.'

'I could, but then language would have failed to warn you.'

She handed him a cloth for the saucer rather than wiping it herself. He used his good hand.

'Exactly,' he concluded, as though the spill had established his case.

Ava laughed despite herself. It hurt her knee, a small sharp reminder that recovery had not become complete merely because they were drinking tea. She adjusted her foot. The Doctor began to rise, saw her expression, and waited.

'I'm fine,' she said. 'Stay in your medically mandated furniture.'

He settled back with poor grace.

⸻

This had become their rhythm over the next several shipboard days: one of them attempted something ordinary, the other noticed where it hurt, and neither was permitted to call the noticing a rescue.

They ate at the table. They changed dressings. They slept at unreasonable hours and stopped pretending the clocks could object. Ava kept a written list of repairs. The Doctor maintained a second list of what the first list had overlooked. Every morning, she crossed out his duplicate entries in red.

Since the Loomfall, the TARDIS had kept them in a broad, quiet current. The kitchen windows sometimes showed the Vortex and sometimes a rain-dark courtyard neither traveller recognised. When the Doctor asked whether it was a destination, the glass misted over from the inside.

He recorded that as refusal rather than mystery. It was a distinction he was trying to practise.

Since Caldrex, they had checked the external records twice. The accounts they could still reach remained contradictory. A museum retained its attendant's rubbing; an engineer retained both notebooks; a UNIT officer retained both versions of a report. No message explained Caldrex's disappearance.

The Doctor wrote UNKNOWN beside his name. On the first attempt his pen hovered, tempted by a qualifying theory. Ava placed the cap on the table. He closed the pen.

The choice at the Loom had ended one arc of time and left behind something quieter, something that hummed instead of screamed. It had not restored every interrupted act they had glimpsed when the crossings tore. On a screen in the console room, three requests for record comparison waited for answers. The Doctor had drafted eleven follow-up questions.

Ava reduced them to four. 'People aren't evidence dispensers,' she said. He deleted the rest.

One reply arrived while they were reviewing the list. The engineer with the two notebooks had compared them again. Both contained work in the same hand. One recorded a failure the other omitted; the omission changed which colleague appeared responsible. The engineer did not ask the Doctor to decide which history was real. The message asked whether copying either notebook might spread the disagreement.

The Doctor began an answer with a theory about resistant witnesses. Ava read over his shoulder. 'Do we know?'

'We know that detailed records resisted Caldrex's changes.'

'That isn't what they asked.'

He deleted the theory. Together they wrote what they could support: the existing copies had not produced another alteration they could detect; they could not promise duplication was harmless; nobody should be pressured to surrender either account. They suggested sealed copies, separate custodians and a record of every future discrepancy.

Before sending, the Doctor added: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KEEP INVESTIGATING FOR US.

Ava moved the sentence to the top.

The answer that came back contained no new revelation. It said only: Understood. I will decide after I sleep.

They left the request marked open. The Doctor wanted closure; the engineer had asked for time. Those facts could occupy the same screen.

They were still recovering. The Doctor's thumb closed cleanly but remained tender. His knee objected to ladders, running and any chair designed by someone who believed comfort encouraged indiscipline. Ava's scrape formed a tight new edge beneath its dressing, and her supported wrist tired earlier than she admitted.

The TARDIS knew. Handrails appeared beside two short staircases. A ladder to the upper library retracted into the ceiling when the Doctor approached.

They were still becoming, too, although Ava distrusted the word when it sounded like permission to ignore what they already were. She wore the Loom's thread as a loose bracelet and removed it before sleeping. Each night she put it in the same shallow dish. Each morning it remained there until she chose to fasten it.

The Doctor never asked whether she had decided what it meant. She was not sure whether his restraint was wisdom, guilt or effort. Effort counted.

Whatever the crisis had made his condition resemble, the Doctor had never become separate people. One life had accumulated changes, contradictions and revised histories; unification had made ownership harder to evade, not installed a chorus in his skull. In quiet moments, memories still arrived associatively. The smell of wet wool opened a corridor on Gallifrey, then an Earth railway platform, then nothing.

He had learned to say 'I don't remember the rest' before certainty rushed in to fill it.

Ava noticed the change more than he did. He checked an instrument twice instead of trusting the first familiar reading. He apologised without explaining his intent until the apology disappeared. When the TARDIS moved a door, he tried the new route before accusing her of obstruction.

But he also stood outside the repair bay one afternoon with a toolkit in his good hand, staring at the locked door for six minutes.

The amber indicator was visible through a narrow window. It blinked twice, paused and blinked once: the same limited-isolation code they had left after the Loom. His glasses displayed the old reading beside the current one. The temperature had risen by less than a degree. That could be load, insulation settling or the beginning of a fault. The display could compare the numbers; it could not decide which explanation was true.

He had brought the toolkit because the possibility of a fault felt more urgent than the ship's refusal. He had not opened it because refusal still meant something when the person refusing was made of doors.

She liked the patience. She liked that silence beside him no longer felt like the breath before a command. She liked being able to disagree and discover that the ship still had room for both of them.

She did not like the six minutes outside the repair bay.

'What are you doing?'

'Respecting a boundary.'

'You're glaring at it.'

'Respectfully.'

Ava came close enough to read the indicator without leaning on her supported wrist. 'What changed?'

'Point seven degrees at the housing.'

'Over how long?'

'Three days.'

'And what does the ship say?'

He looked at the locked door. 'Not today.'

'Then the problem isn't that we have no answer. You don't like the answer.'

It worried her because rest could become another performance of control: the Doctor remaining perfectly still so nobody had to see how urgently he wanted to move. She took the toolkit from him, opened it and removed the smallest inspection lamp.

'We can inspect the outside of the circuit housing,' she said. 'No opening panels. No power. If the ship closes the corridor, we leave.'

He looked at her. 'You don't have to supervise me.'

'I'm not. I want to know what we're travelling in.'

She handed the toolkit back after keeping the lamp. The distinction was deliberate. They would each carry part of the work. The Doctor accepted it and asked the TARDIS for access to the exterior service walk, not the sealed bay itself.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then a floor strip lit beside them, leading away from the door.

'Conditional yes,' Ava said.

'Or a more scenic refusal.'

They followed it.

⸻

'Have you always been like this?' Ava asked later, when their inspection had found heat staining but no new fracture. They had obeyed the TARDIS's limit and stopped at the sealed panel. The result was three measurements and no satisfying repair.

The service walk had narrowed around the outside of the shield housing, a place designed for somebody with smaller shoulders or greater confidence in railings. Ava went first with the inspection lamp clipped to her coat. The Doctor followed sideways, keeping his sore knee nearly straight. Twice she asked whether he wanted to stop. The second time he said yes.

They rested on the walk with their backs against the cool outer casing. The old scorch ran along its lower seam, darkening the metal without crossing the seal. Ava directed the lamp while the Doctor held a thermal strip against three points. The first two matched the earlier record. The third sat seven-tenths higher.

'Again,' he said.

They waited for the strip to clear and repeated it. The same point came back cooler.

'Intermittent,' Ava said.

'Or a poor contact the first time.'

'Which means?'

'We don't know.'

He disliked the words but wrote them down. When he tried to reach around the seal for a fourth reading, the service lights went out ahead of his hand and came on behind them, marking the route back. Neither argued. They withdrew with the casing unopened.

Back in the kitchen, the Doctor was drying the inspection lamp as if the question might refer to tool maintenance.

'Like what?'

'Bad at answering questions.'

'I answered the pear question comprehensively.'

'You lied, confessed and delivered a warning about fruit architecture.'

'Comprehensive.'

Ava moved the lamp beyond his reach before he could polish it again. 'I mean quiet. You keep looking as if you're about to run, and then you sit down so carefully it makes my teeth hurt.'

She looked around the room while she searched for the precise accusation. Two teacups waited by the sink. Soft music played through a speaker the Doctor had repaired with cloth-covered wire. A stack of books had migrated from the reading room to a chair. The peaceful hum of a ship not in battle filled the gaps.

On the table, their repair notes included four unresolved items and one instruction in the TARDIS's blocky script: NOT TODAY.

'Settled,' Ava said at last. 'Or trying very hard to look settled.'

The Doctor put down the cloth. His first answer—an elegant distinction between calm and stasis—was already arranged in his mind. He let it go.

'Trying,' he said.

That was closer to the truth and less flattering.

He tilted his head, listening to the ship. The engine rhythm was stable. Nothing hid beneath it that he could detect, but absence of detection was not proof that nothing waited beyond the walls. He took off his glasses and cleaned a faint smear from one lens.

'Quiet used to mean I had missed something,' he said. 'Often I had.'

'No,' he continued, putting the glasses back on. 'I haven't always been like this. I've been better at rest in some periods and dreadful at it in others. I remember all of that unevenly.'

He glanced towards the sealed repair corridor. 'But this isn't an old version of me winning an argument. It's a choice I'm making badly, now. That means I can improve at it now.'

Ava nodded once. She appreciated the answer and resented how much work it had taken to obtain. The two feelings did not cancel.

'For the record, glaring at a closed door is not rest.'

'It was reconnaissance.'

'Of a door.'

'A highly secretive door.'

Somewhere in the corridor, a lock clicked with unmistakable sarcasm.

Then, more quietly, Ava said, 'I think I miss the edge a little.'

The admission surprised her. She did not miss pain, or running while injured, or being made into a route through somebody else's crisis. She missed the clean concentration of a problem with physical limits. In the quiet, everything they had not repaired remained spread around them without demanding an order.

'And I don't want to need danger to feel useful,' she added.

The Doctor smiled, but did not promise to find danger as though ordering entertainment. 'Then we'll find an edge that doesn't require anyone to be bleeding.'

'Does such a thing exist?'

'Shelves.'

'Shelves?'

'They have edges. Books, too. Terrifying quantities of both aboard.'

She threw the cleaning cloth at him. He failed to catch it with his bandaged hand and let it land in his lap.

⸻

They spent the evening in the reading room. Getting there took longer than either expected because the TARDIS had inserted a small conservatory into the usual corridor. Seedlings occupied three benches beneath amber lamps. None had labels.

Ava chose the left-hand path. The Doctor chose the right. Both returned to the same door from opposite directions.

'Her contribution to non-dangerous edges,' Ava said.

The Doctor bowed to the nearest seedling. 'Point made.'

One tray had dried at the corners. Ava found a narrow-spouted watering can under the bench, tested its weight with her sound hand and dampened the soil without flooding it. The Doctor reached to straighten a leaning stem, stopped before touching it and used a thin support already lying beside the tray.

'Do you know what these are?' Ava asked.

'Not yet.'

'Are they dangerous?'

'Almost certainly, according to at least one definition of danger.'

She gave him the can. He watered the next tray. They spent ten minutes caring for plants they could not name and might never see mature, then found the reading-room door exactly where it had first appeared.

He read aloud from an Earth story written in the middle of the twentieth century. It concerned an island where nobody could remember who they were until another person spoke their name. The Doctor had read it before, though he could not recall the ending. This time he refused to look ahead.

Ava listened from the long sofa with her injured leg supported by cushions. When the protagonist accepted a name too quickly, she interrupted. 'That's convenient.'

'Fiction occasionally is.'

'Reality rarely is.'

Halfway through, the Doctor lost his place because a sentence recalled the smell of warm dust from the End Thread. He stopped. The room stayed quiet. Ava did not ask which incarnation the memory belonged to; it belonged to the man holding the book, even incomplete.

'Warm dust,' he said. 'A window I can't place.'

She marked the page with a card. 'Tea?'

He nodded. They left the story unfinished on purpose.

Before they slept—Ava in the refurbished guest suite, the Doctor somewhere beyond the coral doors—he found a sheet of paper and wrote one line. He disliked how it looked, tore it up, and wrote it again without turning her into a lesson the universe had arranged for him.

The second version still felt too certain. He crossed out one word, folded the note and carried it to her door.

The note read: YOU ARE NOT SOMEONE THE LOOM FORGOT. YOU ARE SOMEONE IT NEEDED TO MEET.

Beneath that he had added: THAT IS WHAT I BELIEVE. IT ISN'T AN INSTRUCTION.

Ava read it twice. She opened the door, but he had already gone. She could have followed. Instead she placed the note beside the shallow dish, removed the bracelet and let both objects remain separate.

⸻

Far ahead of them in the Vortex, beyond any channel the TARDIS had opened, a signal stirred. It did not carry coordinates and had not yet touched the communications grid. It moved through abandoned relays as a pattern of pauses, waiting at each one for a permission no machine remembered how to grant.

On the TARDIS, Ava slept. The bracelet gave no light in its dish. The Doctor woke once with an incomplete tune in his mind, hummed enough to learn that the next phrase would not come, and returned to bed.

The signal reached the edge of a derelict network and formed a single word.

Accord.

Chapter Two

Tea Leaves and Trace Signals

The TARDIS had over two hundred and thirty-seven rooms, depending on its mood.

The Doctor knew better than to treat that number as architecture. It was closer to an answer given under protest: accurate at the instant of asking, altered by the act of inspection and likely to be different if he arrived with a measuring tape. Even so, he kept a tally in the margin of an old navigation manual. Rooms could disappear because the ship was resting, repairing herself or redirecting him. Those possibilities deserved different kinds of attention.

Today, it had exactly thirty-four.

He had counted twice. The first circuit ended at a blue door behind the secondary wardrobe. The second ended at the same door, although he had approached it from the under-library and passed a conservatory on the way. When he tried a third route, the corridor shortened politely and returned him to the kitchen.

That was fine by the Doctor. It kept things intimate.

He wrote THIRTY-FOUR on the manual, added a question mark, then drew a line through the question mark. Ava had spent the previous week teaching him that uncertainty did not always require an interrogation. The ship had given him handrails, locked a damaged repair bay and allowed an exterior inspection on her terms. Thirty-four rooms might be another boundary. He could live inside an answer without forcing it open.

He wandered barefoot through the under-library with a cup in one hand and a folded scarf in the other. His coat hung over the back of a chair somewhere in the gallery. His hair was slightly unkempt, falling into his brow, and the light brown strands at the fringe were now kissed with just a little more grey. Not from time—but from weight.

The under-library had settled beneath the main stacks like a thought the TARDIS preferred not to announce. Its shelves curved away in low amber light. Some carried books; others held boxes of labels whose objects had been misplaced centuries ago. The Doctor moved carefully because his knee still objected to sudden turns. He refused the walking stick waiting beside the entrance, accepted the rail that appeared along the next aisle and considered the compromise a victory for everyone.

The scarf belonged to neither him nor any wardrobe inventory he could remember. It was dark green, smelled faintly of cedar and had been folded over a book on extinct railway timetables. Three memories offered owners. None survived contact with detail. He placed it in the returns basket with a note: FOUND HERE; HISTORY UNCERTAIN. That was more honest than choosing the most vivid face.

He liked it that way.

The grey, at least. It made no claim to wisdom and required no explanation. In the polished brass of a shelf end, he caught his own face and did not search it for former features. It was his face, tired where he was tired, amused where a displaced scarf could still amuse him.

His beard was growing in more fully now. The chin had gone white entirely, like it had remembered some ancient frost only he could feel.

He rubbed it with the heel of his bandaged hand, winced and changed hands. The cut beneath his thumb was closing, but healing had made it itch. A soft warning flashed across his brown lenses: dressing overdue by forty-two minutes. He dismissed it, took three steps, then turned towards the infirmary. Ignoring useful information merely because it resembled an instruction was still obedience, only backwards.

He looked forty-five. Maybe a bit older if the light caught him wrong.

A brass lamp caught him wrong with great enthusiasm. He adjusted its shade rather than the conclusion.

But his eyes?

They paused on every threshold, checking the room beyond before his body followed. Habit, vigilance, accumulated experience—he could not separate the causes cleanly. The important question was what he did after looking.

Still burning.

Today he let the next unopened door remain unopened. He carried his tea towards the infirmary and left the under-library to its chosen dimensions.

⸻

Ava had claimed the music room.

Claimed was the Doctor’s word. Ava called it borrowing with improvements. She had found the chamber on their second quiet day, beyond a corridor the TARDIS had removed from the Doctor’s count. The room was oval, its walls ribbed with dark wood and copper. A black piano occupied the centre beneath a ceiling painted with a night sky that changed only when nobody watched.

The door opened for Ava without hesitation. For the Doctor it sometimes led to a linen cupboard. He had taken this with reasonable grace after the first four attempts.

She’d tuned the walls to respond to her voice, so now every corner hummed faintly when she moved. Not songs. Just tones. Like recognition.

The tuning had begun as a repair exercise. Ava sent a note into one wall, measured what returned and adjusted the acoustic vanes until the echo came back clean. The TARDIS altered the next response by a fraction, inviting correction. After an hour they had built a scale between them. Ava supplied breath and pitch; the ship supplied space.

She tested it now with a low note. Copper ribs answered at the fifth, the floor at the octave. A third tone trembled beneath both, too soft to place. When she stopped, it stopped half a beat late.

Ava recorded the lag on her datapad. She did not call the Doctor. A room was allowed to make a sound before it became a crisis.

She sat cross-legged on the piano bench, not playing, just thinking.

The position lasted less than a minute before her healing knee complained. She uncrossed her legs and planted both boots on the floor. The scrape beneath one trouser leg had sealed, but the joint retained a deep bruise from the Loom crossings. She was tired of injuries becoming metaphors. It was a bruise. It hurt. She adjusted the bench and continued working.

On the open datapad, three traces lay over one another: her sung note, the room’s answer and the faint third tone. The third was not random. It repeated at intervals of nine.

Her hair was tied up messily, and a mug of strong black coffee sat cooling beside her on the lid. She wore a leather jacket over a vintage Earth tee, sleeves rolled, the sonic clipped in its holster at her hip. The thread from the Loom still looped around her wrist like a woven bracelet. It had dulled in colour, but not in meaning.

The bracelet sat loose enough to turn. Ava had fastened it that morning by choice, after leaving it overnight in its dish. Its fibres caught little light now. Anyone else might have taken it for cord bought at a market. She knew the weight of it, the decisions made while it was brighter and the fact that meaning did not become harmless simply because it looked decorative.

She lifted her coffee and found it cold. The wall supplied a sympathetic minor note.

‘Judgemental,’ she told it.

The piano answered with one soft key although its lid remained closed.

She hadn’t told the Doctor, but the bracelet occasionally vibrated.

The first time had come while she tuned the music-room wall that morning. A second tremor followed when she replayed the returned tone. Both were brief enough to dismiss as pulse or movement. Now, as the third tone sounded again, a fine vibration moved against the inside of her wrist and stopped.

Ava held her arm away from the bench and waited. Nothing. She loosened the bracelet, checked the skin beneath it and found no mark.

Only lightly.

She touched the sonic to the thread without activating a scan. The TARDIS gave a warning hum through the floor. Ava moved the tool away.

‘All right. No prodding.’

The warning ceased. She wrote down the time instead.

Like a reminder.

Of what, she did not know. The Loom had not supplied instructions, and the Doctor had finally stopped treating every unexplained object as a riddle addressed specifically to him. She would not replace his bad habit with her own. Three incidents made a pattern worth observing, not a command worth obeying.

She saved the trace locally, disconnected the datapad from the ship’s network and put the bracelet back in place. The third tone did not return.

⸻

The day passed in fragments. • The Doctor reorganised the spice cabinet alphabetically, then switched it to molecular mass for “intellectual challenge.” • Ava asked the TARDIS to simulate a rainstorm in the garden room. The TARDIS, in a rare show of humour, made it rain upwards. • The Doctor read part of a technical manual aloud in a narrator voice that Ava said made him sound “like a pretentious toaster.”

The fragments were not empty. They were how two injured people tested whether ordinary time would hold.

The spice cabinet exercise failed when the Doctor discovered that half the labels described planets rather than ingredients and one jar contained a seasoning that changed atomic mass when insulted. Ava found him wearing protective spectacles over his glasses, arguing with paprika.

‘Alphabetical was fine,’ she said.

‘Alphabetical surrendered the moment the Velnorian salts filed themselves under Regret.’

She moved the salts to a shelf marked DO NOT ENCOURAGE and helped him finish.

In the garden room, upward rain gathered from the grass in silver drops and rose into cloud. Ava stood beneath an umbrella by reflex, then lowered it. The water lifted from her jacket without leaving it dry, which seemed less like weather than the TARDIS enjoying a private joke. The Doctor tried to catch a drop on his tongue and received a mouthful of fallen leaves travelling in the same direction.

The manual concerned low-energy repairs to dimensionally sensitive hinges. He read the safety warnings with such grave importance that Ava interrupted after every sentence with the noise of an appliance completing a cycle.

‘Do not expose the hinge to unresolved topology,’ he intoned.

‘Ding.’

‘Failure to isolate the local field may result in—’

‘Your toast is ready.’

He lasted six pages before laughing.

They laughed.

It did not erase the list of unanswered messages on the console or the damaged bay behind its locked door. It made space beside them. When the laughter pulled at Ava’s bruised knee, she said so. The Doctor stopped without turning concern into a performance.

They bickered over what qualified as “breakfast” at 5pm shipboard time.

Ava argued for anything eaten after waking. The Doctor insisted breakfast required a relation to local dawn, then admitted the TARDIS had not shown them a sunrise in six days. They compromised on eggs, flatbread and the right to call the meal whatever annoyed the other person most.

They found comfort.

Comfort did not guarantee safety or complete their recovery on schedule. It was smaller and more useful: clean dressings, shared work, a room that answered when Ava sang, and a ship willing to close doors without being punished for it.

⸻

But just after the fourth cup of tea…

The Doctor denied that four cups constituted a pattern. Ava pointed to the rings on the console ledge. He began explaining that two belonged to earlier shipboard days until the TARDIS illuminated each ring in sequence and displayed the elapsed time between them.

‘Betrayed by your own telemetry,’ Ava said.

‘Contextualised.’

She left him in the upper gallery with the tea and returned to the communications grid.

Something strange happened.

It did not announce itself with an alarm. A practice signal took eleven milliseconds longer than it should have to travel from one side of the console to the other. Ava repeated the route. This time it arrived early.

Ava was in the console room, poking at the communications grid. She wasn’t trying to send anything. Just practising re-routing signal paths. The kind of thing you did when space stopped throwing monsters at you for five minutes.

She had isolated the exercise from the external transmitters and built a harmless loop: console to library relay, library relay to the old antenna room, then back through a diagnostic buffer. The task was meant to teach her how the TARDIS distinguished a message from noise. On the third pass, the loop returned with nine extra bytes.

Ava checked her routing. The path was clean. She cleared the buffer and sent a different pattern. Nine extra bytes came back.

‘That’s not funny,’ she said.

One of the glass columns rippled with pale light. It might have been an answer. It might have been the ship thinking.

And then she saw it.

The diagnostic tree had acquired a branch between RECEIVE and CLASSIFY. It was not connected by any visible path. When she selected it, the console asked for no command and offered no warning.

A folder on the TARDIS system.

It appeared in the plainest possible form: a rectangle, a label and a modified-time field containing no time at all. The icon did not match the TARDIS interface. It looked like something copied from a human workstation by someone who understood the idea of a folder but not why folders looked that way.

“Accord-9”

Ava did not open it. First she disconnected her practice loop. The folder remained. She shut the diagnostic buffer. It moved with her to the primary display.

She tried to select its properties. The console showed nine blank lines.

She hadn’t created it.

She checked the exercise history and confirmed her own actions one by one. No unknown command sat among them. The folder had not arrived after a particular keystroke; it had become visible when the returning signal carried those extra bytes.

No logs.

There should have been layers of them. The TARDIS recorded conversations with stars, automatic warnings from dead satellites and once, inexplicably, twenty minutes of a kettle refusing to boil. The folder had no creation event, no route and no record of being indexed.

No permissions.

Not denied permissions. None. The system did not recognise an owner, a reader or a boundary around it. When Ava tried to copy the folder into an isolated buffer, the copy command returned unchanged and the destination remained empty.

Just a text file.

The single file inside showed no size. Ava opened a quarantine window around the display, physically removed the external transmitter key and placed it on the far side of the console. Only then did she touch the filename.

She opened it.

The room did not change. No voice entered her head. The rotor continued its steady rise and fall. Ava let out a breath she had not intended to hold.

One line.

The words were rendered in English, but the translation indicator stayed dark. Either the message had been written in English or it had arrived already adapted to its reader. Ava disliked the second possibility more.

“We are almost ready to speak.”

No signature followed. The cursor did not blink. She waited for another line, watching the network trace rather than the sentence. Nothing entered or left the ship.

Ava tried closing the file. It closed. She reopened it and found the same line. She took an optical image with the datapad she had kept disconnected in the music room. The image showed the console around an empty window.

Her heart skipped.

The bracelet vibrated once.

This time there was no mistaking it. Ava gripped the loose thread through her sleeve until the tremor stopped. She kept her other hand away from the console.

She turned to the console.

‘Did you put this here?’

The TARDIS lowered the lights over every control except the physical transmitter key lying beyond Ava’s reach. Refusal, warning or emphasis. Ava could not tell.

‘Do you want me to close it?’

The folder remained. A side monitor displayed the number thirty-four, then cleared.

The Doctor was still in the gallery above, humming faintly, echoing down the coral struts.

He was working through a melody he could remember in three incompatible versions. The first resolved upwards, the second downwards and the third ended one note early. He had decided to trust none of them until the tune chose a shape under his breath.

Below, Ava could see only his hand resting on the rail and the steam rising from his cup.

She whispered, “Doctor?”

The word barely crossed the room. She could have called louder. Instead, she closed the file, shut the quarantine window and waited until she could ask without making fear the first instruction.

No answer.

The gallery’s acoustics carried his humming down but did not carry her whisper up. Ava looked at the transmitter key, the vanished file image on her datapad and the bracelet on her wrist. Then she wrote ACCORD-9 on paper.

⸻

Later, over dinner—an oddly successful blend of Martian flatbread and Gallifreyan citrus pickles—she asked him.

She waited until both of them had eaten. The Doctor had changed the dressing on his hand; Ava had changed hers on the scrape beneath her trouser leg. Ordinary tasks first, not because the message was unimportant, but because urgency had too often been allowed to consume every other need.

The transmitter key sat in Ava’s jacket pocket. She placed it on the table between the bread and the pickles.

“Does the TARDIS ever… speak on its own?”

The Doctor looked towards the ceiling before he answered, acknowledging the ship as part of the question.

He looked up.

The lights above the table held steady. His first thought was that the TARDIS spoke constantly through doors, temperature, gravity and destinations. Ava knew that. She was asking about words.

Spoon paused halfway to his mouth.

‘She can write when she chooses,’ he said. ‘Usually in block capitals. Terrible bedside manner.’

Ava did not smile. He put the spoon down.

“It can,” he said slowly. “If something else is speaking through it.”

‘Or if she is translating something that has no direct channel of its own. Or if a damaged subsystem is returning an old message. There are other possibilities.’

‘How many of those possibilities create files with no logs?’

His attention sharpened.

Ava frowned. “I found a file. Just text. Said something about being ‘ready to speak.’ Folder name was Accord-9.”

She described the practice loop, the nine additional bytes, the missing permissions and the blank optical image. She did not present guesses as facts. She also did not mention the bracelet. That connection was hers to verify before the Doctor’s concern turned it into a theory.

The Doctor put the spoon down.

He set it beside the bowl rather than dropping it. The care in the movement unsettled Ava more than a dramatic reaction would have.

His eyes darkened, not with fear—but with recognition.

The word had caught somewhere in his memory. One association offered a circular chamber, another a battlefield handshake, a third a choir holding the last note of an unfinished piece. None carried a label he could read. He reached for the source and found three incompatible occasions, all incomplete.

He did not choose the clearest and call it true.

“‘Accord,’ you said?”

‘Exactly that.’

‘And the number nine was part of the label, not a count supplied by the console?’

Ava nodded. ‘Accord, hyphen, nine.’

She nodded.

The bracelet rested against her pulse without moving.

He stood, crossed to the console, and began checking input channels.

His first route was the fastest: open every receiver and look for the loudest anomaly. Ava stepped in front of the external transmitter bank before he could reach it.

‘I pulled the key.’

‘I noticed.’

‘Listen-only first.’

The Doctor looked at the key still on the dinner table, then at her. Several accumulated instincts argued for speed: answer the unknown signal before it moved, confront it before it chose the ground, turn uncertainty into action. Experience supplied those instincts. It also supplied their costs.

‘Listen-only,’ he agreed.

They built the trace together. Ava recreated her practice route in an isolated buffer. The Doctor checked the TARDIS translation circuit without overriding its privacy partitions. When he reached towards the sealed diagnostic layer, the console moved the control out of reach. He let it go.

“Doctor,” she asked, following, “what does it mean?”

The folder appeared again as soon as the buffer completed its ninth circuit. The same line waited inside. No reply field existed. The Doctor ran a passive temporal comparison and received nine mutually inconsistent creation dates, all of them blank when viewed separately.

‘It means somebody has designed a very patient introduction,’ he said.

‘That isn’t what I asked.’

He didn’t answer right away.

He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Without the private display, the console offered no hidden certainty. With it, he had only comparisons: the cadence resembled treaty handshakes, distress beacons and ceremonial invitations in equal measure.

‘Accord is an ordinary word,’ he said. ‘It turns up in treaties, machines, choirs. I remember it being used as a title, but I don’t remember where. The memories disagree.’

‘Yet you recognised it.’

‘I recognised the shape of the warning.’

Then softly, almost absently: “It means a negotiation is about to begin.”

‘That is the part I’m willing to trust,’ he added. ‘I don’t know who is negotiating or what they want. I know only that they think speech requires preparation.’

Ava studied the file. ‘And permission.’

The Doctor followed her gaze to the transmitter key on the table. ‘Yes.’

He reached for the control that would acknowledge receipt, then stopped before touching it.

‘We haven’t agreed to anything,’ Ava said.

‘No.’

‘Then we don’t answer tonight.’

The TARDIS extinguished the acknowledgement control. The folder remained open inside the quarantine buffer, neither advancing nor retreating.

The Doctor’s shoulders lowered by a degree. ‘We listen. We document. We sleep if the universe permits the experiment.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’

‘We become very unreasonable after breakfast.’

⸻

Far beyond the walls of the TARDIS, something was watching.

Watching was the nearest word available. It had no eyes fixed on the ship and no single place from which to observe. It registered the closed channel, the isolated buffer and the answer that had not been sent.

Not hostile.

No weapon moved towards them. No trap closed because Ava had opened the file.

Not curious.

Curiosity would have sought new information. This presence appeared content to register whether the channel stayed closed or received a reply.

Just… waiting.

Inside the TARDIS, the quarantine buffer completed another silent circuit. Nine additional bytes returned. The text did not change.

Not for war.

The Doctor sat beside the console rather than standing over it. Ava returned the transmitter key to its slot but left it turned to receive only. Between them lay a paper note in her handwriting: NO RESPONSE AUTHORISED.

But for permission.

Chapter Three

The Man in the Ice

The signal came at 03:17, shipboard time.

The time mattered only because Ava had written SLEEP in block capitals across the console-room duty slate and the Doctor had agreed, with reservations so elaborate they amounted to a small constitutional crisis, not to disturb her before 07:00 unless something was on fire.

The Doctor was already awake in the observatory, staring into the Vortex with his hands clasped behind his back. The tea on the ledge had gone cold. The stars whispered again, conveying a mood he could not put into words. He had not yet heard the message.

The observatory did not show stars in any conventional sense. Its long window looked sideways through the Vortex, where light bent into ropes and loosened again. Tonight the currents passed in subdued blue folds. The Doctor had spent nineteen minutes deciding whether they seemed melancholy or whether he had merely brought melancholy into the room and expected the universe to hold it for him.

His knee ached from standing. The healing cut beneath his thumb pulled when he folded his hands too tightly. He let go, flexed both hands and considered returning to bed. Three memories offered opinions about the medicinal merits of sleepless walks; one involved a monastery that might never have existed. He trusted none of them enough to call the matter settled.

The moment the ping reached the console room, the lights dimmed slightly, and the TARDIS stirred. Like an old friend shifting in her sleep.

The sound reached the observatory through the floor rather than the air: one clean vibration followed by a ragged second pulse. The Doctor’s cold tea trembled in its cup. A line of pale illumination formed beneath the door.

He did not run. His knee would have objected, and the TARDIS had been teaching him that urgency and speed were not synonyms. He walked quickly, using the rail on the first stair and arriving at the console as the receive-only key turned by itself.

The Doctor frowned.

The quarantine buffer Ava had built remained closed. Her paper note—NO RESPONSE AUTHORISED—still lay under the brass clip beside it. The new signal had not entered through the Accord-9 folder. It sat in an older emergency band, weak enough that the TARDIS had taken nearly a minute to distinguish it from Jupiter’s radio weather.

Then turned.

The corridor lights were already waking Ava.

⸻

Ava arrived barefoot, wearing an oversized hoodie and clutching a pillow like a shield.

Her hair had escaped its tie. A strip of fresh dressing showed beneath one trouser leg, and she favoured the knee without trying to disguise it. The woven bracelet was hidden under her sleeve. She took in the receive key, the untouched quarantine window and the Doctor’s face before she looked at the clock.

‘I told the ship to let me sleep.’

The TARDIS gave an unapologetic thrum. A second chair rolled itself towards Ava and stopped where she could sit without bending the bruised joint sharply. She lowered herself into it, keeping the pillow across her lap.

The Doctor didn’t look away from the console.

‘For the record, I kept my side of the agreement.’

‘You were supposed to be asleep too.’

‘That clause was aspirational.’

‘She didn’t wake you. He did.’

He tapped the screen.

The emergency packet had arrived in layers. A navigation stamp repeated three times, each copy less complete than the last. A life-sign declaration sat behind it, followed by eighty-four hours of automated rebroadcasts. Whatever had sent the first warning had continued transmitting until a damaged power system reduced the message to a narrow loop.

Coordinates:

Jovian Sector — Moon: Europa. Vessel: The Midsummer. Status: Derelict. Life signs: 1 (Human). Signal: 84 hours old. Audio Loop (degraded): ‘Don’t trust the—[static]—isn’t real—don’t—cord—’

The voice was male, breathless and close to the microphone. Behind it came a metallic impact, then a tone Ava recognised from the nine-byte return in her practice loop. Not the same sound, precisely. The same interval.

She straightened. The bracelet gave no vibration, but the skin beneath it seemed suddenly too aware of the thread.

‘Play the unprocessed carrier,’ she said.

The Doctor glanced at her, then disabled the TARDIS’s translation and noise correction. The message became almost impossible to hear. Europa’s magnetic field rasped across it. A compressor knocked in a repeating four-beat cycle. Under the voice, something clicked nine times.

‘Again,’ Ava said.

They listened without speaking. On the third pass she pointed at the waveform. ‘The missing word isn’t being covered by random static. The same section is absent every time.’

The Doctor enlarged the gap. Its edges were too neat. ‘Deleted before transmission.’

‘By him?’

‘Unknown.’ He said it before memory could manufacture a better-sounding answer. ‘The loop may have been edited, corrupted by the transmitter or altered somewhere between Europa and us.’

Ava blinked.

The clock changed to 03:19. Eighty-four hours made rescue less a race against the message than against everything that had happened since.

‘“Cord”?’

She kept her tone neutral. The paper bearing ACCORD-9 was folded in her hoodie pocket. She had intended to show the Doctor the bracelet’s reactions after sleep and another controlled test. Sleep had lasted forty-three minutes.

‘Or “accord”,’ the Doctor murmured. ‘Signal’s corrupted.’

He reached for the navigation controls, then stopped with his hand above them. The TARDIS had received a distress call. That did not make every response wise, and it did not turn Ava into cargo.

‘One human life sign,’ he said. ‘Old signal. Derelict ship in Europa orbit. We can observe from outside first, withdraw if the Accord channel changes and keep our transmitter locked.’

Ava looked at the loop, then at him. ‘We go. We don’t answer either signal, and we don’t take the TARDIS below the ice.’

‘Agreed.’

The ship set coordinates before he touched the controls. The quarantine buffer sealed itself behind a band of amber light.

⸻

They materialised in the cargo bay of The Midsummer ten minutes later.

The TARDIS arrived between a loading crane and a row of restraints meant for drilling equipment. She landed softly, without the usual final thump. On the scanner Europa filled half the sky, white fractures crossing its surface over a hidden black ocean. The derelict rolled slowly above the moon, catching Jupiter’s reflected light on one scarred flank.

Before opening the doors, Ava read the atmospheric analysis aloud. Oxygen within human tolerances. Carbon dioxide elevated but survivable. No airborne pathogen recognised by either ship. The Doctor checked the figures independently through his glasses and found nothing except a sensor blind spot near the forward labs.

‘Recognised by either ship,’ he said. ‘Important qualification.’

‘I put it in on purpose.’

They clipped emergency filters to their collars. Ava took the portable atmosphere sampler and a compact lamp. The Doctor reached for a larger kit, tested its weight against his bandaged hand, and divided it between them without pretending the limitation was strategic.

The air was breathable but stale. The ship lights flickered along the floor. Scorch marks scarred the bulkhead. Freezer mist drifted from a ruptured coolant line.

The cold struck through Ava’s socks before she remembered she was still barefoot. She retreated one step into the TARDIS, found boots waiting inside the door and pulled them on.

‘She might have included those in the wake-up call,’ Ava said.

‘She believes in experiential learning.’

The cargo bay answered with the slow tick of contracting metal. Every loose object had drifted towards the port wall, where the ship’s weak rotation made a suggestion of gravity. A yellow maintenance drone lay crushed beneath a fallen canister. Its last task light still blinked.

Ava pulled her jacket tight.

She swept the sampler through the mist. The coolant was irritating but not lethal at its present concentration. ‘Forward route is worse. We take the starboard service passage.’

The Doctor had already angled towards the main door. He changed course without argument.

‘This doesn’t feel like an accident.’

The damage disagreed with itself. The coolant line had ruptured from internal pressure, but the scorched bulkhead showed heat directed from the corridor into the bay. Cargo restraints were released rather than broken. Someone had tried to clear a path, then tried to seal it again.

The Doctor knelt beside a shattered crate. No contents. Just impact fractures—and claw marks.

His knee protested before he reached the floor. Ava put the lamp on the deck rather than offering him a hand he had not requested. He used the crate’s intact frame to lower himself, then examined the grooves without touching them.

There were four, deep at the upper edge and shallow below. Each ended in a crescent of bright metal.

‘Mechanical?’ Ava asked.

‘Perhaps. The spacing changes along the cut.’ He compared the marks with three tool profiles on his private display. None matched completely. ‘Or somebody holding something badly while frightened.’

Ava found a smear beside the lowest groove. The sampler identified human blood, several days old. She tagged the location and photographed it before the Doctor could fit it into a theory.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This feels like something that shouldn’t have been touched.’

He looked towards the sealed cargo door. A crude message had been scratched into its paint: KEEP COUNTING. Beneath it, a second hand had added: NO, STOP.

‘Or something people couldn’t agree they’d touched,’ Ava said.

The Doctor rose carefully. ‘That distinction may be the whole trouble.’

⸻

The starboard service passage gave them their first failed route. Twenty metres in, a pressure door refused to recognise The Midsummer’s own emergency code. The Doctor used the sonic only to read its circuits. The locking motor had been disconnected manually from the far side.

He could have burned through. The marks on the cargo crate made that option feel less intelligent than usual.

Ava unfolded a paper evacuation diagram from a wall pocket. Unlike the ship’s display, it could not alter its labels. ‘Cryo’s aft. If the main spine is sealed, we go through water reclamation.’

‘Narrow ducts, condenser ladders and a charming quantity of frozen waste.’

‘You promised an edge without bleeding.’

‘I promised to look for one.’

The water plant smelled of iron and old algae. Its emergency lights had failed, leaving Ava’s lamp to pick out pipes wrapped in silver insulation. Their footsteps returned a fraction late. Once, the Doctor stopped because he heard a third set between theirs.

They stood still. The delayed steps stopped too.

The Doctor’s memory supplied abandoned ships with hunting things aboard: metal footsteps in ventilation shafts, claws behind walls, voices using familiar names. Each recollection arrived vivid and incomplete. He did not select the most frightening because it felt most urgent.

‘Acoustic return,’ Ava said, tapping a pipe. The sound travelled away and came back from two directions. ‘This place is built like the music room, only badly.’

‘Or deliberately.’

‘Measure first.’

They did. The delay changed with their position and matched the length of the reclamation loop. It did not prove they were alone, but it stopped one uncertainty from pretending to be an attacker.

At the aft ladder, Ava’s knee tightened halfway down. She told the Doctor before it failed. He anchored a safety line above her, descended first and took the equipment rather than her weight. They reached the lower passage more slowly and with all the same bones.

A body-shaped thermal trace appeared beyond the next hatch and vanished when the light moved. It was frost holding warmth from a damaged cable. The Doctor marked it UNKNOWN until the sampler confirmed the source.

Then the ship’s internal directory came back for six seconds.

CRYOGENICS: OCCUPIED 1.

CREW AWAKE: 6.

The figures overlapped, corrected themselves and disappeared.

‘One plus six?’ Ava asked.

‘Or one of six. Or a system that has stopped knowing what awake means.’

They did not call out.

They found him in cryo chamber three.

The room held eight pods in two facing rows. One had been smashed from outside. Four stood open and empty, their lining torn loose. Two were sealed but powered down, frost covering their windows so completely that the Doctor had to scan them before confirming they contained no bodies.

The third chamber’s emergency lamp pulsed weakly red.

Alive.

The atmosphere sampler picked up exhaled carbon dioxide leaking around the pod seal. Ava wiped a clear patch in the frost and saw a face behind it.

Barely.

Core temperature falling. Blood oxygen poor. The cryo system had begun a revival sequence and abandoned it halfway through, leaving its occupant between metabolic states.

The pod was half-open, its locks fused in emergency override. Inside lay a man in his late twenties or early thirties, shirt torn at the shoulder, pulse stuttering across the readout. There was frost in his beard and dried blood on his temple.

A loop of insulated wire bound one wrist to the pod frame. Not a restraint installed by the manufacturer. Something the man had tied himself.

On the inside of the lid, written backwards so he could read it from within, were three lines:

YOU CHOSE THIS.

COUNT THE CREW.

DO NOT ANSWER YOURSELF.

But he was alive.

And very much human.

The Doctor verified that last conclusion twice. No duplicate bio-signature, no visible temporal displacement, no result his instruments could distinguish from an injured human body. He said only what the evidence allowed.

‘We need to complete the revival or put him back under. Leaving him here kills him.’

Ava examined the fused lock. ‘If we force the lid, the coolant dumps into the room.’

‘And if we reconnect the automatic sequence, we trust whatever stopped it.’

‘So neither.’ She pointed to the independent service ports beneath the pod. ‘Manual circulation from our kit. His machine keeps monitoring, ours does the warming.’

The Doctor’s first impulse was a faster neural restart. A memory attached to that method included a clean recovery; another ended with a seizure in a blue-lit ward. He could not remember which patient had resembled this man.

‘Slower,’ he agreed. ‘You control temperature. I’ll manage oxygen and rhythm.’

⸻

The Doctor worked fast. The TARDIS had taught him a few tricks with adrenaline regulation and neural syncing. Within five minutes, the man’s eyes fluttered open.

The five minutes were neither elegant nor quiet. The first warming line split at its coupling and sprayed Ava’s sleeve with freezing condensate. She shut it off, replaced the seal and restarted at half pressure. The Doctor’s neural lead returned a rhythm that looked stable until he compared it with the pod’s raw reading and found a missed beat every ninth cycle.

He abandoned the clever intervention and used a physical monitor against the man’s chest. His bandaged thumb slipped while fastening it. Ava caught the lead, clipped it in place and called each temperature change aloud.

At thirty-three degrees, the man convulsed. The wire at his wrist snapped tight. The Doctor prevented his head striking the pod but did not pin his whole body. Ava lowered the warming rate. Together they waited through the seizure rather than overwhelming him with another drug.

The rhythm steadied.

Brown. Sharp. Instinctive.

The eyes did not move like those of somebody waking into safety. They found the hatch, the tools, Ava’s injured stance and the Doctor’s occupied hands in quick succession.

And immediately hostile.

He reached for a tool that wasn’t there.

His fingers closed on empty air beside the pod. When they failed, he pulled against the wire at his wrist as if trying to tear free.

Ava raised both hands. ‘Easy. You’re safe.’

The word was a mistake, and she knew it as soon as she said it. She could not know the room was safe. She corrected herself before the Doctor could turn reassurance into an argument.

‘You’re alive. We’re not holding you. The wire is yours.’

She placed the cutting tool on the deck within his sight and stepped back.

‘Liar,’ he rasped. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

His gaze fixed on the Doctor’s face, then slid to Ava and back again. ‘Which one did I ask for?’

‘We heard a distress loop,’ Ava said. ‘No names.’

‘Play it.’

The Doctor hesitated. The man’s pulse was already climbing.

‘Play it,’ he repeated.

Ava used her disconnected datapad rather than the ship network. The damaged voice filled the chamber: Don’t trust the—static—isn’t real—don’t—cord—

The man shut his eyes. ‘Mine.’

‘It appears to be,’ the Doctor said. ‘Do you remember sending it?’

‘I remember deciding not to.’

The Doctor leaned forward. ‘Neither are you.’

He regretted the cleverness immediately. The man looked at him as if the sentence confirmed something terrible.

The Doctor shifted back, giving him space. ‘That was glib. You are aboard The Midsummer in orbit of Europa. Your cryogenic system was failing. We received your signal eighty-four hours after its first transmission.’

The man’s eyes locked on his.

‘How many of you came aboard?’

‘Two,’ Ava answered before the Doctor could interpret the question. ‘Me and him. Our ship is in the cargo bay.’

‘How many now?’

Ava checked the doorway, then the thermal sampler. ‘Still two standing. One in the pod.’

The answer eased nothing, but he appeared to respect its precision.

He frowned. ‘You’re not rescue.’

‘No.’

The Doctor removed his hands from the pod controls so the man could see them.

‘Military?’

‘No.’

‘Then who—’

‘I’m the Doctor.’

No title followed. No catalogue of victories, no claim that the name should comfort him.

A long beat.

Recognition arrived without relief. The man had heard the name somewhere and did not appear grateful for it.

Then the man whispered, ‘Then we’re already too late.’

The cryo-room lights went out.

For three seconds the only illumination came from Ava’s lamp and the red pulse of the pod. Something moved along the outer hull with a slow scraping sound. The man twisted towards it, tearing skin beneath the wire.

‘Don’t answer,’ he said. ‘Whatever it says, don’t answer.’

Emergency power returned. The sound stopped.

Ava cut the wire. ‘We’re moving you.’

‘No.’

‘The pod is killing you and this room just lost power.’ She kept her voice level. ‘You can come with us conscious, or you can remain here while your temperature falls again. Those are the choices I can actually offer.’

He studied her, saw no promise of safety and nodded once.

⸻

They did not use the route through water reclamation. The Doctor reopened the pressure door from the cryo side while Ava converted a maintenance trolley into a stretcher. When the locking motor refused power, Cal—though they did not yet know his name—pointed weakly towards a manual release behind a fire panel.

‘Someone disconnected it,’ the Doctor said.

‘Me.’ His eyes stayed on the corridor. ‘Kept them out.’

‘Who?’

‘Depends who was asking.’

The answer cost him. He lost consciousness before they reached the cargo bay, but his hand remained closed around the severed length of wire.

The TARDIS opened her doors without being called. She extended a broad ramp and lit the infirmary route in steady white. Ava pushed the trolley. The Doctor walked backwards at its head, monitoring breathing and trusting her to choose their speed.

At the threshold, the Midsummer’s intercom clicked alive.

A man’s voice said, very clearly, ‘Wait.’

It was the same voice as the unconscious survivor’s.

Ava did not stop. The Doctor did not answer. The TARDIS doors closed between them and the ship.

His name was Cal Mason.

They learned it from the identity tag inside his torn shirt before he could tell them himself. Ava set the tag on the infirmary counter where he would see it on waking, rather than searching it for everything it might disclose.

Exoplanet extraction team, Earth-based, currently listed Missing in Action.

The Doctor found the listing in a public registry three years ahead of Cal’s mission clock. Six crew were missing with The Midsummer. No wreckage had been recovered. The company record described a communications failure and probable loss of vessel.

He closed the file before its compensation tables. Cal was not an entry in an old report merely because the TARDIS could reach the report’s future.

When Cal woke again, warm blankets covered him and the TARDIS infirmary had removed every reflective surface from his line of sight. His first act was to count the people in the room.

‘Two,’ Ava said. ‘Still.’

‘And me.’

‘And you.’

‘I was part of a deep ice core survey team,’ he said, once the warmth of the TARDIS had begun to settle into his bones. ‘Europa’s crust—fractured. Beneath it? We found a structure. Not alien. Not ancient. Just… wrong. Like it was waiting for something to believe in it.’

He spoke in bursts, stopping whenever the ship creaked. Their survey had gone below the licensed extraction depth after instruments detected a cavity under the ice. Cal had maintained drilling systems and pressure seals. He was not the expedition leader, not the scientist who identified the anomalous geometry and not the person who ordered them onward.

He had objected anyway.

‘The readings repeated before we took them,’ he said. ‘Pressure logs timestamped tomorrow. Drill telemetry describing turns the bit hadn’t made. We blamed the clocks because clocks are cheaper than fear.’

‘Did you enter the structure?’ the Doctor asked.

Cal’s eyes hardened. ‘We found a door. That’s all you get until I know what you are.’

The Doctor wanted the dimensions, material and sequence of contact. He also remembered eleven questions reduced to four because people were not evidence dispensers. He sat back.

‘All right.’

The Doctor sat quietly while Ava handed Cal a drink.

She had tested it herself: warm water, glucose and salts, nothing medicinal hidden in the cup. Cal smelled it before drinking.

‘You don’t have to tell us the rest tonight,’ she said. ‘But your ship broadcast a warning in your voice. You said you remember choosing not to send it.’

Cal swallowed carefully. ‘That’s because I heard it before I recorded it.’

He continued.

The first voice had come through a suit radio while the speaker stood beside its owner. It offered directions back to the lift. Those directions were correct until the final turn, where they led towards a pressure fissure.

After that, the crew heard themselves everywhere: in drill vibrations, in comms packets, in the pauses between system announcements. Some messages warned them away. Others insisted warning was the trap.

‘You could test facts,’ Cal said. ‘You couldn’t test motives. Every message knew what you knew. Every lie wore your voice.’

‘One by one, the crew started hearing voices. Ourselves, mostly. Telling us we’d made the wrong choice. That the ship didn’t exist. That we weren’t real. I locked myself in cryo before I could listen.’

He had used the pod because its controls were local, its lid blocked the ship’s speakers and the cold slowed thought enough to make every command feel distant. He had tied his wrist down after waking once with his hand on the release.

‘Was the voice telling you to open it?’ Ava asked.

‘It was telling me I already had.’

The Doctor’s glasses displayed the public registry, the biological readings and the distressed-loop waveform side by side. They did not resolve the contradiction. He dismissed the display.

‘I can confirm this ship exists to us now,’ he said. ‘I can confirm your injuries and the signal we received. I cannot prove what spoke below the ice or which messages were yours.’

Cal gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Best answer I’ve had.’

Ava spoke gently.

Gentleness did not require vagueness. ‘We found six crew on the registry. The Midsummer’s systems disagreed about how many were awake. Do you want us to look for the others?’

Cal gripped the cup. Five names moved behind his expression, not yet spoken.

‘Not until I can walk.’

‘That wasn’t one of the choices,’ the Doctor said.

Ava looked at him. He corrected course.

‘It can be, if the ship remains stable long enough,’ he added. ‘We won’t leave without another scan. We also won’t take you back beneath Europa because you think you owe us proof.’

‘Why trust us now?’

The question was not a challenge. Ava wanted to know what bargain Cal believed he was making.

He looked at her.

Her raised hands in the cryo room. The cutting tool placed within reach. The accurate admission that she could not promise safety.

Then at the Doctor.

The Doctor had a famous name, inaccessible technology and too many questions. He had also admitted uncertainty when a lie would have been easier.

And answered flatly: ‘I don’t.’

‘I trust that you want something from the same place that hurt us. I trust her to tell me when she doesn’t know. I trust your ship more than either of you, and she hasn’t said anything.’

The TARDIS warmed the light above his bed and kept her doors shut.

‘That’s enough for one night,’ Ava said.

⸻

The Doctor smiled faintly.

Not because distrust amused him. Because Cal had kept hold of it when fear, cold and two impossible rescuers had given him every excuse to surrender judgement.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll get along just fine.’

Cal’s eyes narrowed. ‘That sounded rehearsed.’

‘It improves with use.’

‘It really doesn’t,’ Ava said.

For the first time since the cryo pod opened, Cal’s mouth almost moved towards a smile. He stopped it, drank again and asked for the names of the two strangers in the room. Ava gave hers. The Doctor gave only the one Cal already knew.

They left the infirmary door open. Ava took the first watch in the corridor; the Doctor accepted the second. He returned to the console to run a passive scan of The Midsummer. He found heat in the damaged cables, frost in the empty pods and six conflicting motion traces that vanished whenever he isolated them.

He labelled each one UNCONFIRMED.

At 04:06, the Accord-9 folder appeared again inside its quarantine buffer. The line remained unchanged: WE ARE ALMOST READY TO SPEAK.

The Doctor did not open a reply path.

⸻

Outside, deep beneath Europa’s crust, the structure pulsed again.

The pulse crossed salt water, ancient ice and the empty shafts of the abandoned survey. One damaged pressure gauge on The Midsummer moved by less than the width of its needle, then settled again.

No heartbeat drove it. No metabolism warmed the dark.

Nor could any scan the Doctor possessed have defended a claim of consciousness.

It left only a fluctuation too small for the derelict ship to distinguish from Europa’s shifting ice.

Waiting for someone to finish a sentence no one had ever started.

Chapter Four

Echoes in the Tongue

Cal hadn’t slept.

Before Cal declined it, the infirmary had lowered its lights, softened the mattress and turned the wall clock away. None of it helped. Rest required a belief that the room would remain itself while his eyes were closed, and Cal had spent too long aboard a ship where doors changed meaning between one breath and the next.

He said he did. Ava even believed he wanted to. But sleep required surrender, and whatever he’d seen beneath Europa’s crust had taken that from him. Still, he tried—lying on the jump seat in the TARDIS observation deck, staring up at the ceiling, whispering names.

The Doctor had offered the infirmary, two guest rooms and a narrow cabin beside the library. Cal rejected each in turn. The observation deck had one entrance, no reflective glass and a ceiling that showed ordinary stars instead of the Vortex. He chose it himself.

Ava found him there after her first watch. He had changed position but not expression. One hand held the insulated wire he had cut from the cryo pod. The abrasion around his wrist was clean and dressed. The old blood at his temple had been washed away.

Five names.

Again and again.

He counted on his fingers as he spoke them. When he reached the fifth, he touched his own chest before beginning again.

His crew.

Not evidence, not a manifest and not a puzzle arranged for the Doctor. They were people Cal needed to keep in the same order because The Midsummer had taught him that order could move.

‘Parker. Singh. Arlo. Enzo. Doc Mayfield.’

Parker had signed the descent order and argued with Cal about the unsupported ice. Singh kept two copies of every system log because she trusted storage less than handwriting. Arlo could repair a drill motor in pressure gloves and sang badly while doing it. Enzo flew supply shuttles as if Jupiter were personally trying to catch him. Mayfield disliked the nickname Doc and answered to it anyway.

Cal did not say which voice he had heard last. He did not say which of them might still be alive.

The Doctor didn’t push.

He sat on the floor outside the observation deck, back against the wall and sore knee extended into the corridor. The door remained open. He could hear the names without watching Cal repeat them.

Several questions arrived fully formed: who entered the structure first, who altered the distress loop, whose blood had marked the cargo crate. He wrote none of them down. A person keeping hold of five names did not owe him an incident report before dawn.

He simply adjusted the lighting to match Earth dusk and brewed the tea Cal didn’t ask for.

The TARDIS produced three cups and no tray. The Doctor carried two, found the bandage under his thumb pulling again and returned for the third separately. Ava took hers black and sat on the deck beside the jump seat. Cal ignored his until the steam stopped rising.

‘You don’t have to drink it,’ Ava said.

‘I know.’

Five minutes later, he wrapped both hands around the cup. He did not thank either of them. The Doctor looked relieved by that.

⸻

Meanwhile, Ava was in the library.

Cal’s names had given her something the signal did not: a human scale. Five missing people, one survivor and a structure beneath the ice. The Accord-9 folder remained quarantined. The Midsummer distress loop remained receive-only. Waiting for either to speak again was not the same as doing nothing.

She brought the disconnected datapad, the paper note bearing ACCORD-9 and the acoustic trace from the music room. She left the woven bracelet fastened beneath her sleeve. It had not vibrated since they left the derelict, but absence was a result, not reassurance.

She’d taken a datapad down to the base of the spiral stairwell and opened every translation log she could find. There was something off. Not in the words themselves, but in the rhythm.

The library stair curled through three floors whose shelves refused to agree about gravity. Ava chose the lowest landing because it had a table, a fixed chair and no ladders for her bruised knee to negotiate. The TARDIS illuminated a brass reading lamp and left the rest of the room in blue shadow.

Ava began with the nine-byte return from her communications exercise. She compared it with the tone under Cal’s distress loop, then with the unprocessed carrier. The sounds differed. Their intervals did not. Each introduced a pause where the translation circuit expected a choice between two meanings.

She ran a control: a recorded weather bulletin from twenty-first-century Earth. Without automatic translation it was unremarkable. With translation active, the TARDIS rendered one phrase twice—storm/front, then warning/welcome—before correcting itself.

The correction never appeared in the visible sentence. It survived only in timing.

She tapped a note to herself:

TARDIS auto-translation showing redundancy. Word-pair echoes. E.g. ‘Fear/hunger’, ‘Door/path’, ‘Now/again’. Some kind of language recursion?

She added three columns beneath it: OBSERVED, POSSIBLE, UNKNOWN. The paired meanings went in the first. External interference went in the second. Accord, the bracelet and the Europa structure went in the third until evidence connected them.

The Doctor had become better at saying he did not know. Ava intended to make it contagious.

She asked the library for translation failures involving repeated alternatives. Seven hundred and twelve results arrived. Most were ordinary: damaged dictionaries, dialect arguments, species whose verbs changed with body temperature. She narrowed the search to records with missing creation times or nine-unit intervals.

Eleven remained.

The oldest was not Gallifreyan. It was an Earth captain’s log copied into the archive three centuries earlier, its source vessel unidentified. The TARDIS tried to close the result when Ava selected it.

‘I’m not asking you to translate it,’ Ava said. ‘Just show me the copy you already have.’

The lamp dimmed. A shelf moved across the exit, not trapping her but making the ship’s objection difficult to misunderstand.

‘All right. Read-only, no network, and I stop if the bracelet moves.’

The shelf returned to its place. Conditional permission.

Then it happened again.

The archived sentence opened as an image rather than editable text. Its ink had bled at the edges. The captain had underlined one word so heavily the paper had torn.

The word.

Spiral.

The bracelet tightened by less than the width of a thread.

Ava took her hand away from the datapad. She counted to nine. It did not happen again. She wrote down the time, the pressure mark on her skin and the fact that the TARDIS had warned her before the file opened.

Only then did she read the surrounding line.

This time in the same damaged captain’s log.

The archive metadata named no captain and no ship. A note in the Doctor’s handwriting said SALVAGED FROM A MARKET ON PAVONIS; PROVENANCE DOUBTFUL. Another note beneath it, written later in the same hand, said DOUBTFUL IS NOT USELESS.

He had dated neither.

‘…the spiral pulled us apart and wrote us new.’

The sentence before it was missing. The sentence after it described a sunrise over an ocean. Ava did not know whether spiral was a name, a shape, a process or a frightened captain’s metaphor. The translation circuit marked all four possibilities as equally likely.

She frowned.

The easy move was to wake the Doctor and hand him the word. The safer move was to test whether the archive search itself had manufactured the connection. Ava photographed the original image with her disconnected datapad, closed the search and reopened the log by its catalogue number.

The word remained.

She then searched for the exact phrase without automatic translation. No other result appeared. With translation restored, the library produced six apparent matches, each using a different original word: coil, migration, storm, handwriting, return and wound.

The system was not finding a shared term. It was folding unlike terms towards one English shape.

And felt, for the first time in days, a chill down her spine.

She closed the logs, removed the translation key from the reading station and carried it with her. The TARDIS moved the staircase so the return journey had only nine steps.

⸻

Back in the console room, Cal was slowly coming back to himself.

He had slept for eleven minutes after all. The TARDIS recorded it without announcement and woke him when his breathing became distressed, not when he began dreaming. Cal refused the infirmary again but accepted food, a clean dressing and the right to stand where he could see every door.

He’d changed into a plain set of TARDIS-issue clothes—grey tunic, boots a little too large. His beard was still rough. His eyes… sharp.

The boots bothered him most. He had folded the excess socks under his heels and tied the laces twice. The Doctor offered to ask the wardrobe for another pair. Cal looked towards the corridor as if clothing supplied on request might carry terms he had not read.

‘These work,’ he said.

His torn shirt, identity tag and severed cryo wire remained in a clear bag on the console rail. Nothing had been discarded.

He stood at the edge of the console, watching the central rotor rise and fall.

Each movement lifted pale light through the glass and sent a pulse into the floor. Cal counted the pulses under his breath. At ten he stopped himself, jaw tightening.

The Doctor pretended not to notice the counting. He was running a passive scan of The Midsummer and finding the same six motion traces that vanished when isolated.

‘You keep it quiet.’

Cal spoke to the rotor rather than the Doctor. The TARDIS’s machinery filled the room with a low, layered hum, but compared with the derelict’s contradictory announcements it was quiet. She did not label him, instruct him or play his own voice back through a speaker.

The Doctor looked up.

‘She likes to listen first.’

He had once treated the ship’s silence as agreement. The locked repair bay and the corridor she shortened around him had cured part of that vanity. ‘Sometimes she refuses. Sometimes she answers with architecture. If I claim to understand every answer, don’t believe me.’

The rotor paused at the top of its cycle, then descended.

Cal glanced at the doors. ‘Does she understand me?’

‘Enough to give you the observation deck. Not enough for me to promise what she thinks of you.’

Cal studied him.

The Doctor’s brown glasses displayed a motion alert from The Midsummer. When he opened it, the trace had already disappeared. He marked it unconfirmed and did not turn it into a reason to rush Cal back aboard.

‘You’re not what I expected.’

‘What did you expect?’

Cal looked at the impossible room, the old console and the man who had introduced himself with a famous name but offered no rank. ‘Someone more certain.’

‘I usually am.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘Mostly a warning.’

‘Still not sure if you’re a threat.’

Cal’s hand remained near the bag containing the cryo wire. He did not pretend the Doctor’s hospitality cancelled the power imbalance between them.

‘Good. That’s the safest way to be around me.’

The Doctor heard how rehearsed it sounded and added, ‘But suspicion isn’t the same as consent. You can leave when we reach somewhere safe. You can ask us to search for your crew. You can ask us not to. I won’t make that decision while you’re half-frozen and exhausted.’

‘And Europa?’

‘Is still there.’

‘That wasn’t my question.’

The Doctor met his gaze. ‘I want to go below the ice. The TARDIS refused to land over the signal, and Ava has not agreed to return. Wanting is not a plan.’

They shared a look.

Cal recognised hunger for an answer. The Doctor recognised a man who feared the answer and still wanted his people found.

Then—quiet agreement.

Not trust. Agreement that neither of them would disguise urgency as certainty.

Ava arrived carrying the translation key before the moment could become sentimental.

‘I found a word,’ she said. ‘Possibly several words being made to look like one.’

⸻

They examined Ava’s evidence at the console with the external transmitters physically disconnected. She showed them the original image, the false translation matches and the pressure mark beneath her bracelet. Revealing the last part felt like surrendering ownership of it, so she set the boundary before the Doctor could ask.

‘You can compare readings. You cannot remove it, scan my arm or decide what it means for me.’

‘Agreed,’ he said.

Cal looked between them. ‘That thing came from somewhere else?’

‘A place we left behind,’ Ava said. ‘It has reacted to the signal. Cause unknown.’

The Doctor tried three ways to isolate the translation error. First he routed the captain’s log through a mechanical reader with no TARDIS language support. It returned the original handwriting and no usable English. Next he loaded two independent dictionaries. Each translated the key term differently. Finally he asked the TARDIS to render meaning without choosing a word.

The console displayed a blank field with a spiral cursor.

He cut power to the display.

‘That’s new,’ Ava said.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember it?’

Several associations rose at once: a spiral seal on a treaty chamber, a school exercise about recursive verbs, a warning scratched into the wall of a ship he could not place. None came with reliable sequence or context.

‘I remember shapes like it,’ the Doctor said. ‘That is not the same as remembering this.’

The TARDIS opened a side corridor and lit its first arch.

The Doctor motioned for Cal to follow him through the side corridor, Ava joining them at the arch.

‘Where does that go?’ Cal asked.

‘Somewhere she thinks matters.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I know where it went last time.’

Ava stepped through first. ‘Then we check where it goes now.’

The corridor tried to turn left after six metres. The illuminated floor strip continued straight through what appeared to be a wall. Ava held the translation key near the surface. The word WALL flickered on her datapad, followed by DOOR/PATH.

She touched the panel. It opened.

The hallway beyond opened into the Crew Archive Gallery—a forgotten part of the TARDIS Ava had only seen once. Walls were lined with frozen moments: memory panes, echoes of former travellers, images and audio like ripples in glass.

The room was not a mausoleum. Some panes showed people who were alive, some people whose lives the Doctor had outlived and some whose endings he did not know. The TARDIS arranged them by association rather than date. A schoolroom sat beside a battlefield; laughter beside a departure neither party had handled well.

Cal remained at the threshold. ‘You keep records of everyone?’

‘She does,’ the Doctor said. ‘Not always for me.’

Names were etched in Gallifreyan and Earth scripts both.

Some labels had been corrected. Others held two spellings side by side. One pane bore only a handprint because the person in it had refused a name the archive understood.

Susan. Jamie. Nyssa. Ace. Sarah Jane.

The Doctor read none of them aloud. Recognition did not give him permission to turn their lives into an introduction.

Others… less remembered. Some not from Earth at all.

His memory supplied moments without their proper neighbours: a laugh in a quarry, blue hands repairing a radio, a farewell delivered through rain. Unification had made those memories his to carry, not made them complete. He let the panes tell only what they contained.

Cal stopped in front of a frame flickering faintly: a young woman in military fatigues, laughing as she took apart a bomb.

The pane showed her surrounded by people who trusted her enough to keep passing tools while she insulted the wiring. Her laughter was not directed at the Doctor. It belonged to a joke the archive had not retained.

‘Who’s she?’

The Doctor answered softly. ‘Kezran Shye. Human, twenty-fourth century. Explosives expert. Brilliant, reckless. Saved a moon from imploding by overriding her own neural interface with a toaster coil.’

‘She also hated being described as reckless,’ he added after a moment. ‘Said it was the word people used when they benefited from risks they hadn’t taken.’

The pane flickered to Kezran arguing with someone outside its field of view. The Doctor’s own voice answered, younger in manner if not in ownership: too quick, too certain. He did not explain it away as another self’s mistake.

‘She was right,’ he said.

Cal blinked. ‘How’d she die?’

The question came from the shape of the room, from Cal’s five names and from the assumption that archives were built after loss.

The Doctor looked away.

He remembered Kezran leaving through a red door, carrying a toolkit and furious with him. He remembered receiving a message years later. He could not place whether the message came before or after their final argument.

‘She didn’t.’

‘Not when she left me,’ he clarified. ‘After that, her life was hers. I don’t know its ending.’

Cal watched the woman laugh again. ‘Then why keep her here?’

The gallery lights shifted towards the pane, answering before the Doctor did.

‘Because she was here,’ Ava said. ‘That can matter without turning her into a memorial.’

⸻

They moved on.

The archive corridor narrowed. Several panes displayed only static, but their labels remained stable. Ava checked each with the disconnected datapad. No paired translations appeared until they reached a curve where the floor strip stopped.

The TARDIS closed the door behind them.

Further down, Ava paused.

Her bracelet had tightened again. Not enough to hurt, but enough that she could no longer turn it around her wrist.

‘Stop,’ she said.

The Doctor stopped. So did Cal. No one asked whether she was sure.

A pane was broken.

Glass remained in the frame without falling. The fracture lines curved inward towards an empty centre. No dust lay below it, and the neighbouring panes reflected a whole wall where the damage should have been.

No image.

The Doctor checked the archive index. It recorded no missing traveller, no removed entry and no reason for a frame to occupy that space.

Just the word Spiral etched into the frame.

The letters were English when Ava looked at them. Cal saw the same word. The Doctor’s glasses attempted three translations—coil, return, wound—then displayed SPIRAL again.

Ava photographed the pane. Her disconnected image showed the fracture and an empty label.

Cal took the datapad, looked from the image to the glass and handed it back. ‘Same trick as your console file?’

‘Similar absence,’ Ava said. ‘Not evidence of the same cause.’

She turned to the Doctor.

He had gone very still. Memory pressed fragments towards him: ink turning in water, a spiral seal on a chamber he could not place, a compass whose needle pointed towards its own centre. The pieces might belong to one event or three. Certainty would have been easier than honesty.

‘What is this?’

He frowned.

‘I don’t know.’

The answer made Cal’s shoulders loosen slightly. A lie of expertise would have confirmed every fear he carried.

‘That… shouldn’t be there.’

‘But it is,’ Ava said. ‘So we record what it does, not what you think it reminds you of.’

She held the removed translation key beside the frame. The etched word split across the datapad into three paired terms: spiral/archive, name/role, open/outward. The bracelet tightened once more.

The TARDIS sounded an alarm.

⸻

The gallery door failed to open.

The Doctor reached for the sonic. Ava caught his wrist before he activated it, then released him immediately.

‘Translation fault,’ she said. ‘The door may not know it’s a door.’

Cal was already examining the frame. ‘On The Midsummer, the pressure lock stayed physical when the directory failed.’ He found the archive’s manual latch behind a nameplate and pulled. Nothing moved.

‘It needs the ship to recognise the request,’ the Doctor said.

He could force the lock, but doing so would turn the TARDIS’s uncertainty into damage. Instead, he placed both palms against the door.

‘You brought us here. We’ve stopped reading. We need a path out.’

The lights went dark. For one breath the broken pane shone behind them, its spiral appearing to turn without moving.

A second door opened in the opposite wall.

They left through it. Cal kept the manual latch in his hand until all three were back in the console room.

Back in the console room, the lights dimmed slightly as the TARDIS adjusted to a disturbance in the linguistic layers.

Every label around the console flickered. Most returned unchanged. Three did not. The external transmitter key read INVITE. The navigation brake read REMAIN. The infirmary alarm identified Cal’s bed as EMPTY/OCCUPIED at once.

Ava removed the transmitter key and placed it beside her earlier paper note. Cal went to the infirmary monitor and confirmed the room itself was empty. The Doctor isolated navigation control without cutting life support.

The translation circuit began to glitch: ‘Destination’ displayed as ‘destiny/echo.’ ‘Orbit’ rendered as ‘path/circle/again.’ The word doctor flickered, momentarily replaced with scribe/surgeon/story.

The errors appeared in nine-beat cycles. On the first, only text changed. On the second, the console accepted the wrong meaning: a request for their current orbit returned the route to Europa. On the third, a door marked INFIRMARY opened onto the observatory.

‘It’s spreading from labels into functions,’ Ava said.

The Doctor disconnected the main translation bus. The English words vanished, but the console continued to route orbit as destination. Removing the language layer had not removed the relationship it had imposed.

Their first repair had failed.

Ava stared.

Then she started assigning physical markers. Red cord around the transmitter socket. White tape on the true navigation brake. A metal cup over the control that had opened the wrong door. Cal joined her without being asked, using the cryo wire to mark the infirmary circuit.

‘Temporary vocabulary,’ he said.

‘One the system didn’t choose,’ Ava replied.

‘Doctor… something’s rewriting language.’

The Doctor watched the rotor complete a cycle. His display offered translations faster than he could reject them. He removed his glasses, forcing himself back to the physical controls Ava and Cal had marked.

He looked at the readings.

Across separate systems, the same alternatives appeared: a place becoming a purpose, a route becoming repetition, his name becoming a role. The words were different. The pressure towards equivalence was the same.

‘No.’

He did not mean Ava was wrong. He meant rewriting implied one sentence replacing another, cleanly enough to leave an edited result.

He straightened.

The movement pulled at his knee. He steadied himself on the rail and looked from Ava’s taped controls to Cal’s wire marker. Their improvised distinctions were holding because three people continued to agree on what they had physically done, not because the translation circuit approved.

Several incomplete memories suggested interventions: reset the lexicon, impose a root language, force every label into Gallifreyan. Each would privilege one description and might spread the fault further.

He chose the slower approach shaped by their evidence.

‘Something’s folding it.’

‘Folding what?’ Cal asked.

‘Meanings towards each other. Door and path. Orbit and return. Doctor and whatever function it wants from me.’ He kept his hand away from the controls. ‘We stop asking the translation circuit to decide between them. No transmissions. No course change until we have physical controls and all three of us agree. Physical verification before every system command.’

Ava added, ‘And nobody follows a voice without seeing who spoke.’

Cal gripped the severed cryo wire. ‘That rule I know.’

The TARDIS stabilised the lights, but the word SPIRAL remained on the dead translation screen.

Ava watched it for another cycle, then looked at Cal. ‘The source is still beneath Europa. If we go back, we do it without opening a channel. We ask the TARDIS for a landing with a physical route out, and we leave at the first translation fault.’

‘We don’t have to decide now,’ the Doctor said.

‘I do,’ Cal replied. ‘My crew are there. I’m coming.’

‘You can stay aboard when we land.’

‘I know.’ Cal’s answer was steadier for having been given the choice.

The Doctor did not set a course. He placed Ava’s white tape beside the navigation array and asked the TARDIS whether she could approach the buried source without crossing its signal. Two coordinates appeared as points of light, then vanished. A third glowed beneath Europa’s surface, offset from the spiral trace, with a return route drawn in solid brass across the console.

The ship kept the dematerialisation lever locked.

Ava checked the marked controls herself. ‘Under those safeguards, yes.’

Cal placed his severed cryo wire beside the return control. ‘Yes.’

Only then did the lever release. The TARDIS chose the route and began to move.

⸻

And at that moment, deep beneath Europa, something long thought inert opened its eye.

No witness stood in the buried chamber. No instrument aboard the TARDIS could have proved what occurred there. Under kilometres of ice, one dark interface acquired a hairline of pale light.

A spiral eye.

Twelve turns, counter-clockwise, visible for less than a second before the ice shifted over it.

Looking not forward.

No beam crossed space. No message entered the TARDIS. The change registered only as a pressure variation in Europa’s ocean and a blank entry in The Midsummer’s damaged log.

But outward.

Chapter Five

Beneath the Ice, a Voice

The TARDIS landed precisely seven metres beneath Europa’s frozen surface.

The depth gauge said seven metres; the gravitic return placed them inside a fracture more than a kilometre down. A brass dial trembled between HERE and NOT ADVISED.

Around the blue doors, Europa’s ice shone white with trapped radiation. No water leaked into the threshold. The TARDIS had made a dry cavity just large enough to open into, compressing neither ice nor ocean so far as the Doctor could prove.

She’d refused to materialise above the spiral signal. The Doctor had argued. She’d responded by shifting her doorway three degrees to the left—just enough to make his entry slightly awkward. He took the hint.

He had tried the surface, The Midsummer’s abandoned bore shaft and a maintenance gallery from Cal’s descent plans. Each coordinate slid away. On the fourth attempt, the ship locked the controls and chose a point seven metres below the surface, forty-three metres from the structure.

“A compromise,” the Doctor had called it.

Ava had looked at the distance, his supported knee and the dressing beneath his thumb. “A boundary.”

Cal had chosen to continue before either could choose for him. He carried his identity tag, the severed cryo wire and his crew manifest in a sealed suit pocket.

“She’s nervous,” he muttered.

The central rotor stopped at the top of its cycle. A warning light crossed his brown glasses: EXTERNAL LANGUAGE LAYER DISABLED. He dismissed the wording but not the warning.

“She’s also refusing to translate anything beyond the doors,” he added. “Which may be nerves, judgement or the architectural equivalent of putting her fingers in her ears.”

Ava stood behind him, scanning the wall of solid ice beyond the door with the sonic.

She held it in her uninjured hand. Her other wrist remained supported; the scrape beneath her trousers tightened when she shifted. The bracelet lay quiet.

Her first scan returned WATER. The second returned ARCHIVE. The third rendered a single vertical line and stopped.

“No active bore, no breathable tunnel and no stable translation,” she said. “We don’t step out because a machine has supplied us with a noun.”

“She should be,” Ava said. “I don’t like being back here either.”

She looked at Cal rather than the Doctor. “Your call. We can leave you aboard while we investigate, leave altogether, or proceed together. None of those choices affects whether we keep looking for your crew.”

Cal touched the manifest through the pocket. “If I stay behind, I spend every minute imagining you finding them.”

“That isn’t consent.”

“No. This is.” He met her gaze. “I’m going.”

Ava nodded once. She did not call him brave.

Cal said nothing. He stood at the rear of the TARDIS, staring into the white sheen like it might blink back.

Then he tested Ava’s pressure lamp twice. It held no speech system, network or automated labels. Cal had insisted.

Ava stripped the electronics from three pressure suits and tested their seals. Passive pressure diaphragms carried nearby speech by mechanical vibration; a hand over the throat plate cut it off. There were no microphones, speakers, translation, storage, networks or labels. Cal tested his rebreather himself. At his request, Ava ran a line from the TARDIS anchorage through her harness to his belt.

“If I say one of their names,” he said, “ask me which person I mean.”

“And if you call me someone else?” Ava asked.

“Don’t answer until I correct it.”

⸻

The chamber wasn’t natural.

The Doctor pressed a thermal probe to the ice. Heat travelled sideways in a straight line while the surrounding crystal stayed cold. Rotating the probe did not turn the line.

Cal crouched beside the line. “That was in the core samples. Straight fractures where pressure should have branched.”

“Your team reported them?”

“Parker did. The report came back corrected. Said we’d drilled them ourselves.”

The deeper they cut through the ice, the smoother it became—until walls began to form. Not stone. Not metal. Language. The architecture itself was shaped like glyphs—walls angled into characters, corners forming syntax.

They did not cut directly towards the signal. Ava plotted three short test channels first, each no wider than her hand. The sonic opened the first and sealed the second. In the third, the light from Cal’s pressure lamp bent around a corner that did not exist.

The Doctor tried resonant heat. It opened a doorway that returned them to their own footprints. None of his remembered methods accounted for a corridor that treated direction as grammar.

Cal noticed the solution. The wall changed whenever one of them described what lay beyond it. “Stop telling it what we expect,” he said.

They proceeded without naming directions. Ava marked each junction with numbered metal tags. Cal chose turns from the original core-map distances. The Doctor carried the equipment and kept his theories to himself. It was the slowest route and the first that did not loop.

The ice lost its bubbles and seams. Planes joined at deliberate angles; an arch resembled a hooked consonant; three alcoves repeated like punctuation. Their lamps cast shadows between them.

“Whoever built this,” Ava whispered, “thought in writing.”

The chamber returned the sentence without whoever.

Ava raised one finger for silence and wrote on her disconnected datapad: THE PLACE REMOVES AGENTS.

Cal read it and added: OR CANNOT HOLD THEM.

The Doctor nodded slowly. “A linguacognitive civilization. Not just literate. Dependent on language structure to shape their world.”

The term arrived from contradictory memories: a lecture hall above red grass, a treaty chamber sealed by a verb, a child singing a house upright. He knew the class of technology, not its maker.

“Dependent doesn’t mean unlimited,” he said. “Description must bind something—energy, material, probability. If belief alone did this, our fear would have built far worse walls by now.”

Cal stepped forward. “Like word-based tech?”

He sounded sceptical, which steadied him. This was a mechanism he could distrust rather than a voice he had to obey.

“My team used ordinary names for the cores,” he continued. “Alpha through F. Core Six was the first one Parker renamed. She called it Orpheus in the final log. The official copy still said Six.”

Ava wrote both names down and kept them separate.

“More like belief-based tech,” the Doctor replied. “Structures that exist only when described.”

He paused, dissatisfied with his own certainty. “Or structures whose available states are selected by description. That distinction may matter enormously if we need to leave.”

The floor beneath his next step softened into a slope. He withdrew his boot. The surface hardened.

“No metaphors,” Ava said.

“I wasn’t going to use one.”

Cal gave him a flat look.

“I was going to use a very precise analogy.”

⸻

At the heart of the chamber was a pedestal.

They almost missed it. The numbered tags led them into a loop of six alcoves, but Cal’s map insisted the central volume lay on the other side of a blank wall. Ava placed her palm near the surface without touching it and felt the bracelet draw tight.

She stepped back. “Something wants a description.”

The Doctor looked at the wall. “Then we give it the smallest accurate one.”

Cal unfolded the crew manifest. Under Parker’s last transmitted position was a note: CENTRAL INTERFACE CHAMBER, ONE PLINTH, BLACK SPHERE.

He read only those words aloud.

The wall divided along a seam. Beyond it stood the pedestal, exactly as Parker had recorded. Nothing else in the chamber became obliged to match.

Upon it: a cracked interface orb, smooth and dark, like glass that had forgotten how to reflect. The spiral was carved into its base—twelve turns, counter-clockwise. Beneath it, in tiny block script:

The orb reflected their lamps but not their faces. One crack divided into four and stopped short of the base. Frost had grown inside it. Five hand-width marks circled the pedestal.

Cal counted them.

“Five stations,” he said.

Five members of his crew were missing.

VIREN // LEXIC ENGINE // ACCORD INITIATION NODE Status: Dormant

Ava photographed the block script before the TARDIS translation could settle it. The raw characters did not spell VIREN in any alphabet she knew; that was simply the English form the sonic chose.

The last character flickered without resolving into a second readable form.

“Record the raw image,” she said.

Cal added VIREN to the paper manifest. The Doctor kept his hands away from the orb.

The Doctor placed one hand on it.

Not immediately. First Ava looped the mechanical line around the pedestal so they could pull him clear without entering the five marked stations. Cal positioned himself beside the chamber opening, where he could see both the orb and their route back.

“If it uses your voice?” Ava asked.

“Assume it is not me.”

“If it knows something only you know?”

The Doctor considered the many secrets he had once mistaken for proof of identity. “Still not proof.”

He touched the glass with one pressure glove. The orb transmitted neither heat nor cold. It felt like the pause before somebody answered.

The orb flared.

Light entered through the crack and ran down into the carved spiral. Twelve turns brightened one after another. On the ninth, Ava’s bracelet vibrated. On the eleventh, Cal’s pressure lamp switched itself off despite its mechanical circuit.

He turned it on again. It shone red.

The Doctor tried to remove his hand. For one second the orb retained the shape of his gloved palm after his hand had left it.

And spoke.

The first sound was a breath assembled from overlapping recordings, some near the microphone and others impossibly distant. Ava’s disconnected datapad displayed a waveform.

She turned the screen face down. Listening was already a risk; allowing the machine to choose their evidence would be another.

“Designate: Viren. Accord node. Language integrity: 12%. Conversational capacity: 41%. Do not attempt negotiation. Spiral entity active. Awaiting… scribe.”

The message repeated. On the second pass, language integrity fell to eleven per cent. On the third, the warning lost the word not.

“Translation fault,” Ava said. “We leave now.”

They turned for the numbered route. The doorway had become a blank wall. Their tags lay in a pile at its base.

The line to the TARDIS entered the unmarked ice and remained taut. Ava pressed the sonic to the former seam. It found no edge, hinge or density change.

“Then we restore the exit,” she said. “We don’t stay to investigate.”

“Stop playback.”

The orb answered in the same young voice. “Playback stopped.”

The room continued to speak the message from its corners.

The Doctor cut the translation circuit at his glasses and heard clustered tones, an inhalation and a rhythm of nine. He could not translate them, but the cadence matched the damaged signals in the TARDIS.

“The English is being reconstructed locally,” he said. “If the original contains a release instruction, translation could invert it.”

⸻

The voice was human.

At least, it used human breath and the compression distortion of a microphone built for lungs.

Cal closed his eyes. “That layer’s from our comms standard. If Shard’s team operated a manual release, the source track may contain its sequence.”

Young. Slightly nasal. Tired.

“Rikaj,” Cal said, then corrected himself before Ava could ask. “No. Not Rikaj. Similar. Rikaj laughed through his nose when he was exhausted.”

He took one step towards the orb and stopped at the first hand mark.

“Play four seconds of source without translation,” he ordered.

The node emitted four seconds of noise. Cal listened twice.

“Not him,” he said. It cost him something to be certain and something else to admit relief.

And then—

The young voice split. One strand continued reciting degraded status values. The other stretched into a long scrape, as though somebody had dragged a sentence across magnetic tape.

The five hand marks lit at once.

Another voice. Older. Female. British accent with a scratch at the edges.

It began in the middle of a word, recovered and started again. Cal gripped the edge of his manifest hard enough to crease it.

Ava did not recognise the speaker, but she recognised command practice: the deliberate breath before a casualty report, the insistence on dates and names even when panic had made both difficult.

“This is Commander Lesley Shard. If you’re hearing this… we didn’t make it out. But we recorded everything. The spiral doesn’t kill. It rewrites. Names, thoughts… even history. It started with the word ‘and.’ Now we can’t finish our own sentences.”

The message stuttered after recorded. A second version overlaid it: We surrendered everything. A third said: We became the record. None lasted long enough to displace the first.

“This is not a live statement,” the Doctor said. “And the alternatives may be damage, not hidden truth.”

Cal looked at him sharply. “You don’t get to decide which version she meant.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “I don’t.”

A timestamp flashed beneath the pedestal and rewrote itself into three incompatible dates. Ava rejected them all and kept the isolated capture keyed to the raw release rhythm.

“Tell Earth: the silence here is made of memory.”

The final line arrived cleanly.

Then a quieter fragment followed, below the node’s declared playback threshold: “Parker, if they send you, refuse the second descent.”

Cal’s head lifted.

“Parker knew?”

The orb answered with Commander Shard’s breathing and nothing more.

Cal folded the manifest along an old crease. Parker had led his team down anyway. That did not tell him whether she had ignored the warning, never received it or heard a different sentence.

⸻

Ava froze.

Not at the warning. At its grammar. Shard had placed silence where a substance belonged and memory where its maker belonged—the same missing agent the chamber had removed from Ava’s earlier sentence. The construction resembled future-tense problems Ava had studied, but resemblance was not proof and this was not the moment to offer the chamber her history.

The bracelet tightened beneath her pressure cuff. She flexed her wrist; the thread still released.

“I can leave,” she said aloud.

The thread loosened. Her choice still registered somewhere.

Cal stepped forward. “I know that name.”

He remained outside the hand mark. His first instinct had moved him; his agreement with Ava stopped him.

“Every Europa contractor knew it,” he said. “Shard was the cautionary tale they used to justify the new safety programme. They never played her voice.”

The Doctor turned. “What did her records say about their release procedure?”

His memory offered a decorated explorer at an orbital conference, a Europa hearing and a woman reciting a nursery rhyme into a broken radio. The faces did not match. Cal’s documented knowledge mattered more.

Cal nodded. “She was the original lead for Europa Core Six. Lost two years before my team was sent.”

“Official cause was ice instability. Her crew disappeared with her. Core Six was sealed and renamed.”

“Renamed Orpheus?” Ava asked.

Cal shook his head. “Orpheus was Parker’s name. Corporate designation was Restoration Site Four.”

The Doctor looked at the five marks around the orb. “Restoration implies something had already been here.”

“Or that somebody wanted investors to think it could be made useful,” Cal said.

Ava whispered, “So why is her voice controlling the exit?”

She addressed the others, not the node. The distinction mattered. Questions had behaved like permissions since the signal began.

Cal unfolded the manifest again and placed Shard’s name beneath his crew’s five, separated by a line.

The orb pulsed again.

This time the light did not follow the carved spiral. It moved through the walls. Each glyph-shaped angle caught it, held it and passed it onward until the whole chamber resembled a sentence illuminated from within.

The Doctor’s private display tried to caption the pulse as ANSWER. He dismissed it.

“Because language remembers.”

The statement used Shard’s voice but not her cadence.

Ava raised the sonic without activating it. “Language stores traces. People remember. Archives preserve. Those are not the same thing.”

“Correction accepted,” said the node.

Its integrity reading rose to thirteen per cent.

Cal stared at Ava. “You made it better.”

“Or taught it how to sound agreeable.”

⸻

Suddenly, the walls around them began to shimmer—like ink bleeding into parchment.

The light spread beyond the glyphs and filled the blank ice between them. Their numbered metal tags lifted from the route behind and slid across the floor. One by one, the digits turned into names.

Ava stamped on the nearest tag before it could complete the change. The metal read PARK—

Cal snatched it up and scraped the letters away with the edge of his identity tag.

“It doesn’t get to label the path with them,” he said.

Figures appeared.

They emerged wherever a wall angle completed the outline of a body. Each was made from a different texture of light: one grainy as old transmission footage, one formed from handwritten strokes, one assembled from moving contour lines.

None cast a shadow.

Not solid.

The Doctor passed the unlit end of the sonic through the nearest shoulder. The figure broke into phonemes and rebuilt itself farther along the wall.

“Interactive projections,” he said. “Responsive does not mean conscious.”

“And unresponsive wouldn’t mean empty,” Ava replied.

“Agreed.”

But impressions. • A tall engineer with a nervous smile: Rikaj, who once loved someone who couldn’t pronounce his name. • A medic with soft hands and a broken arm she refused to fix: Dr. Rana Miro, whose notes were all in rhyme. • A young cartographer who hummed instead of speaking: Ilya, whose maps had no legend.

Rikaj tightened an invisible coupling. “Again,” he said when an unseen speaker mispronounced his name. On the next attempt, his smile became gratitude.

Rana Miro cradled one arm while bandaging an unseen patient. Her rhyme kept drug names ordered as the local language exchanged nouns. “Blue before white, half dose at night,” she recited, then struck out the line.

Ilya stood over a transparent map, humming the same nine intervals as the raw transmission while routes appeared. A spoken label made the mapped tunnel move. His legend had not been omitted; he had refused words the system could alter.

Cal watched them as professionals at work, not curiosities preserved for the Doctor. “Shard’s crew,” he said. “They built the release without labels.”

The node retained habits alongside phrases: checking seals, refusing corrupted instructions, sharing the last recorder. Useful impressions, but not survivors.

And Commander Shard.

Her figure formed last, not at the pedestal but beside the exit. She faced inward, as if making certain the others left before her.

The recording showed two rings on one hand and a pressure burn across her collar. A child’s counting rhyme moved silently on her lips while she worked a manual release.

Tall.

Cal had seen the memorial image, cropped at the shoulders. The full projection showed how she stood with one boot turned outward to favour an old injury.

Tired.

Her hands shook from cold. She lost the rhyme, swore, breathed and began again from four.

The Doctor watched the failed attempt rather than the heroism the archive offered. Shard entered the wrong sequence; Rana stopped her; Shard listened. The second cycle opened the release.

Voice full of knives and nursery rhymes.

“Five go out,” the projection said. “One stays to close. No substitutions. No noble improvisations.”

Rikaj objected from beyond the frame. Shard cut him off with a rhyme whose final word had been erased.

The scene reset before revealing who stayed.

Cal demanded another playback. Ava stopped him with a hand against the mechanical line rather than his body.

“It’s degrading each time.”

“That might show where they went.”

“Or overwrite the only record we have.”

Cal looked at the trembling figures. He lowered his hand. “One stable copy of the release track. No second playback.”

⸻

They weren’t ghosts.

The Doctor said it because grief made personhood easy to project onto any familiar voice.

They were recordings.

Adaptive and incomplete. The engine could mimic decisions without retaining the person who had borne their cost.

Cal did not find the distinction comforting, but he accepted it provisionally.

But not in sound.

The node also held patterns of correction and response: Rana challenged unsafe orders; Shard changed course when challenged. Their private lives remained absent.

In words.

And in the relationships words left behind: who waited for whom, whose warning carried weight, whose joke eased fear, whose name another person kept trying to pronounce correctly.

Ava copied only the accessible index because the release track referenced it. The checksum exposed every ninth pulse; adjacent Shard records arrived as an incidental block. No missing files were activated.

The Spiral had kept their language. Not their bodies. Not even their minds.

Whatever had taken Shard’s expedition kept a linguistic model. The result was not resurrection.

The Doctor felt the pull to promise that more might remain. He resisted it.

Just the linguistic imprint of who they had been.

“Enough to learn from,” Ava said.

Cal added, “Not enough to speak for them.”

The node repeated both statements in a blended voice and marked them as constraints.

And now it was unraveling.

Rikaj’s smile appeared on Ilya’s face. Rana’s dosage rhyme emerged from Shard’s mouth. The map drew the release sequence as a route through the ice, ending at the blank wall.

Ava stopped the copy at thirty-two per cent. The checksum separated Shard’s failed first cycle from the corrected second; the rest looped and could not be extracted without running it.

“We take what’s stable,” she decided. “We don’t wake the rest to satisfy ourselves.”

Cal’s jaw tightened. Then he unplugged the transfer lead himself.

⸻

The orb flared red.

The copied data vanished from Ava’s screen, then returned because her device was physically isolated. The chamber tried to rename the file. She replaced the label with a numeric checksum.

Cracks travelled across the ceiling. They made no sound until the node translated them.

“Accord broken. Spiral awakened. Narrative breach imminent. Seek lexicon root.”

On the second line, narrative rendered as historical, then grammatical, then personal. The Doctor refused to select one.

“Location of the lexicon root controlling this exit?” he asked.

“Unavailable until role assignment.”

“Declined.”

The red light deepened.

“Only the scribe may close the sentence.”

The five figures turned towards the Doctor.

Ava stepped between him and the pedestal. “Define scribe.”

The node answered with seven mutually exclusive definitions: witness, author, prisoner, translator, remainder, weapon, name.

“No valid definition,” she said. “No role accepted.”

For a moment, every projection faced her instead.

Cal turned slowly to the Doctor.

He had heard the title gather around the man since the cryo chamber: rescuer, threat, legend. The node was offering another and arranging the room so acceptance looked inevitable.

Eyes wide.

Not with awe. With the recognition that the Doctor might be tempted.

Breath caught.

The cracked ceiling lowered a fraction, or perspective changed to make it seem so. Cal braced one hand against the wall and felt words vibrate through the ice.

“You’re not a soldier.”

It was a test, not a compliment. Cal needed to know which kind of authority the Doctor believed he possessed.

“No.”

The Doctor thought of wars he had entered, armies he had directed and the ease with which refusal could become self-absolution. “But I have acted as one. Don’t mistake the answer for innocence.”

“You’re not a god.”

The Doctor shook his head.

“And if anything here describes me as one, we leave it unread.”

The TARDIS line at Cal’s belt tightened from beyond the chamber. The ship was pulling gently towards home.

“I’m a story.”

He saw Ava’s expression and qualified it before the machine could.

“To this engine. A name with too many surviving accounts attached. Contradictory descriptions, repeated across time. That makes me useful to its mechanism, not less real and certainly not its author.”

Cal considered that. “So it wants the version of you that closes things.”

“Or the version people expect to.”

“Are you going to give it one?”

“No. We open that door without accepting its role.”

⸻

The Spiral stirred.

Not inside the orb. A rotating pressure moved beneath the floor and through twelve turns of surrounding ice. The carving was only a diagram of something deeper.

The ice cracked.

A slab separated above Cal. Ava pulled the line; he moved before it fell. The Doctor seated the sonic in the pedestal’s manual seam as a physical actuator, not a controller.

Ava called nine checksum pulses. Cal stopped the first cycle at beat four—the same mistake in Shard’s recording—and supplied the corrected interval. On the second cycle, the sonic delivered the exact nine mechanical pulses. The projections spoke backwards; then the numbered tags released and the blank wall divided along the original route.

Cal grabbed the tags. Ava took the copied archive. The Doctor left the orb where it was.

And somewhere, above and below them at once, a word began to echo into shape.

The route behind had changed. Its walls now formed repeated curves, each narrowing towards the TARDIS. The ship’s line pulled harder, giving them a direction that required no spoken name.

They ran as well as their injuries allowed. Ava set the pace; Cal carried the equipment when the Doctor’s knee buckled; the Doctor stopped trying to disguise the limp as urgency.

Doctor. Doctor. Doctor.

The word appeared in reflected light, in cracks underfoot and in the rhythm of their own breathing. It borrowed Shard’s voice, then Rikaj’s, then Cal’s.

Cal said his five crew names aloud in reply, once each, defining the purpose of their return on his own terms.

Not said.

No mouth produced the final repetition. The chamber had learned enough of the Doctor’s pattern to make expectation feel like sound.

Ava reached the blue doors first and held them open. The bracelet tightened, but she did not let go of the archive.

Described.

The Doctor crossed the threshold last. The TARDIS slammed her doors and dematerialised before the surrounding ice could complete the next sentence.

On Ava’s isolated datapad, the copied archive remained intact. Thirty-two per cent of Shard’s expedition, recorded without permission and rescued without becoming whole. Cal placed the manifest beside it.

The console gave a single warning: ROLE ASSIGNMENT REFUSED.

Then, beneath it, a new line wrote itself despite every disconnected circuit:

SCRIBE CANDIDATE UNRESOLVED.

The Doctor did not touch the controls.

“Good,” Ava said. “Let it remain unresolved.”

Beyond the doors, Europa’s hidden structure turned once beneath the ice, carrying his name without owning it.

Chapter Six

A Name Once Said

The first error was small.

Small errors were the ones Ava trusted least. Catastrophes announced themselves; small errors waited to be dismissed.

The three of them had spent the night under the quarantine rules they had brought back from Europa. The copied thirty-two per cent of Commander Shard's archive remained on Ava's disconnected datapad, sealed inside a copper-lined drawer. Cal's manifest lay beside it. The TARDIS had disabled automatic translation in the inner corridors and marked the console room with plain paper labels in Ava's handwriting.

Nothing from the Viren node was meant to be speaking.

The TARDIS labelled Ava’s coffee mug “Rikaj’s tea.”

The words appeared on the small domestic inventory screen above the kitchen bench. Ava had filled the mug herself, with coffee strong enough to count as a structural material. The screen had no access to the isolated datapad and had never seen the name Rikaj before Europa.

She checked the paper label tied to the handle. AVA — COFFEE. Her own block capitals had not changed.

She blinked. Set it down. Picked it up again.

The inventory display cleared while the mug rested on the bench. When her fingers closed around the handle, the wrong name returned.

“Responsive to possession,” she said.

Cal stopped halfway through buttering toast. The Doctor looked over the top of his brown glasses, where a private line of diagnostic text had just failed to resolve into letters.

Same result.

Ava moved the mug into Cal's reach. The display read UNASSIGNED VESSEL. He did not touch it.

“Rikaj was in the recovered index,” Cal said. “Logistics technician. I never met him. He transferred off Shard's expedition before my team arrived.”

“The copy has six lines about him,” Ava replied. “None of them mention tea.”

The Doctor dismissed it with a shrug—“Minor sensor bleed”—but she didn’t believe him. Not entirely.

Neither did he. Ava knew the difference between his careless shrugs and the carefully measured ones. This had been the second kind.

He lifted the mug with an insulated clamp and passed it through three scanners. Ceramic. Coffee. Trace milk. No active signal, no lexic field and no reason for the TARDIS to attach a dead stranger's name to it.

The ship extinguished the inventory display before he could run a fourth scan.

“That,” Ava said, “was not reassurance.”

“No. That was her ending the conversation.”

The second error was worse.

They moved back to the console room without drinking anything. Ava carried the handwritten labels. Cal carried his manifest. The Doctor left the mug beneath a glass cover and told the kitchen not to classify it again.

On the way, the corridor lights shifted to the cold white used in the Europa suits. Cal placed one palm against the wall until the colour warmed.

When Cal entered the console room, the TARDIS called him Ilya.

Out loud.

The voice came from every speaker at once, calm and administrative: “Ilya present. Role continuity uncertain.”

Cal stopped on the threshold. His hand went to the identity tag in his pocket, not because the tag could prove who he was, but because he had chosen to carry it.

Ava said, “Cal Mason.” Once. Clearly. She did not repeat the imposed name.

The name rang from the translation circuits like a bell underwater. Everyone froze.

The TARDIS shut down the speakers in sequence. The last one continued to hum after it lost power. The sound had the same nine-beat imbalance as Shard's release sequence, except the fourth interval was wrong again.

Cal backed away from the doorway. The paper strip taped above it still read CONSOLE ROOM. Beneath the ink, damp fibres rearranged themselves into a second word and then went blank.

The Doctor reached for the console.

Ava caught his wrist before his fingers touched the translation controls. “State the intervention.”

It was their rule now: no unnamed fixes in systems that answered description.

“Separate identity indexing from speech,” he said. “No translation layer, no verbal role assignment.”

Cal drew a breath. “Will it stop the name?”

“It should stop the ship saying it.”

“That wasn't my question.”

But by then…

The corridor behind Ava acquired the green of old hospital paint. A door handle appeared where the wall had been smooth. Her paper label slid sideways as if pulled by an invisible thumb.

The third error had already begun.

⸻

Ava opened the corridor door to her quarters.

She did it because her room contained the manual cut-off for the bracelet monitor and because waiting in the console room had begun to feel like consenting to the TARDIS's diagnosis. Cal tied a climbing line around her waist. The Doctor clipped the other end to the railing and tested the knot himself.

“If the door changes, don't follow,” Ava said.

“That instruction seems designed to be ignored,” the Doctor replied.

“Then practise.”

And stepped into a medical bay.

The line crossed the threshold behind her, but when she looked back it ended at a brass hook in the wall. No doorway. No console room. The rope was older here, woven from linen and stained with antiseptic.

She kept one hand around it anyway.

Mid-century Earth design.

Not a museum reconstruction. The rubber seals had perished; the enamel basin bore a crescent chip; a clock clicked half a second late on every third movement. The imperfections made the room more convincing than the TARDIS usually bothered to be.

Ava checked her sonic. It displayed a pulse, temperature and blood pressure that were not hers.

Green walls. Silver equipment. A clipboard hovering by the side of the bed with a patient’s name: Rana Miro.

The clipboard offered a signature line: I CONFIRM THE ABOVE DESIGNATION.

Ava did not touch it. She read the rest from a distance. The chart contained no diagnosis, only relationships: sister to, witness for, last person to hear. Every entry ended before the other name appeared.

Rana Miro had existed in Shard's archive as a medical contractor. Three corrupted references. No image. No confirmed fate.

She turned.

A reflection stared back from the glass partition.

It was her face.

But not her.

The reflected woman anticipated Ava's movements by the fraction of a second the wall clock had lost. When Ava lifted her right hand, the reflection lifted its left before she began. It looked less like a mirror than a rehearsal.

Ava lowered both hands.

“I am observing,” she said. “I am not confirming.”

The clipboard rotated so the signature line faced her.

Hair tied back. Glasses. Slight limp. Tattoo on the inner wrist she’d never seen before.

The tattoo was a line interrupted by three dots. Ava's own wrist prickled beneath the bracelet. The device tightened, then loosened, offering no explanation.

She inventoried what she could verify: short hair loose at the neck; no glasses; scrape on the shin from Europa; wrist supported; sonic in the uninjured hand. She said none of it aloud. Facts did not need to become a performance for the room.

The reflection limped closer to the glass.

She stumbled backwards—and landed in a different corridor entirely.

The climbing line snapped taut against her harness. Cal and the Doctor pulled her the final metre into the console room. To them, only four seconds had passed.

Ava's sonic said eleven minutes. Her left calf ached with the reflected woman's limp. A faint rectangle of pressure marked the bridge of her nose where the glasses had rested.

The clipboard had not come back with her. A blank patient wristband had.

⸻

They placed the wristband under the same cover as the mug. The two objects remained ordinary until someone used a name near them.

When the Doctor said “Rana,” the wristband warmed. When Cal said “Rikaj,” the coffee trembled without spilling. Ava forbade further tests.

It happened again two hours later.

Ava crossed from the library into a narrow communications booth where Europa filled the window. A voice asked for Commander Shard's authorization code. She refused to supply one and backed through the door before the booth could furnish her with a uniform.

This time the displacement lasted forty-three seconds for everyone.

Then again.

The third shift placed her at a dining table set for five. Four people were present only as depressions in the cushions and unfinished breaths in the air. A bowl beside Ava's hand contained pears cut into precise quarters. A card identified her as RIKAJ and requested the final inventory.

She overturned the card, counted the exits and chose the one without a label. It returned her to the TARDIS laundry with the smell of cold fruit on her sleeve.

The Doctor ran diagnostics. No clear error in the TARDIS memory stack. No obvious AI interference. No breach in the physical geometry of the rooms.

He tried to establish an identity checksum around Ava: a low-power sonic field comparing her heartbeat, neural rhythm and mass against readings taken before Europa. The field accepted Ava, rejected the corridor and then relabelled the Doctor's screwdriver as SHARD'S LAST INSTRUMENT.

He shut it down at once.

“That was a failure,” he said before anyone else had to.

The TARDIS locked him out of the diagnostic port. A red lamp illuminated above the socket, judgement without ambiguity.

But the logs told a different story.

Ava connected the isolated datapad through an optical reader that could receive light but send nothing back. She made Cal watch both ends of the link. The archive index showed thirty-two per cent at the start and thirty-two per cent at the end, but completeness was not the same as integrity.

Names had begun to lose their references.

Every time Ava’s location shifted…

The corresponding timestamp appeared in two places: the TARDIS corridor log and the copied archive's damaged personnel table.

A supporting character from the Europa archive flickered offline.

Rana Miro's three fragments became one. Rikaj's six lines retained their words but no longer agreed about who had performed the actions. A third entry, represented only by a service number, vanished between checks.

Cal reached for the datapad, then stopped before touching it. “Are they being killed?”

“We have records, not people,” Ava said carefully. “But records can still be harmed.”

She closed the index. “No more active scans. We don't spend what's left to make ourselves feel certain.”

⸻

They replaced the automated corridor map with string, chalk and numbered metal tags. The TARDIS permitted the indignity. She even opened a cupboard containing three old miner's lamps, none of which could display text.

Cal proposed the grounding protocol. Each person chose one current fact that another person could verify, one object they could relinquish and one question they would not answer under pressure. They wrote the facts on paper and kept the refusals private.

“She’s not being pulled into memory,” the Doctor said aloud. “The Spiral is casting her. Like a narrative role. It’s treating the past as script.”

He disliked the theatrical language, but it fitted the correlations better than possession or time travel. The rooms did not recreate complete moments. They supplied scenery, a name and just enough physical sensation to pressure Ava into completing the part.

His memories offered several incompatible precedents: psychic architecture that borrowed expectation, a history engine that repaired gaps with witnesses, translation technology that mistook grammar for law. He trusted none of them whole. What they shared was a dependency on participation.

“A cast role isn't an identity,” he added. “It is an instruction waiting to be obeyed.”

Cal stood nearby, fists clenched.

He opened them deliberately. In one palm, his identity tag had left a red imprint.

“Then stop calling the archive people supporting characters,” he said. “They had names before this thing used them as furniture.”

The Doctor absorbed the correction. “You're right.”

“So what happens when it finds the right one?”

The Doctor didn’t answer.

He could imagine erasure, substitution, duplication and far stranger outcomes. Naming one might give the mechanism a shape to follow. Silence here was not concealment; it was restraint.

Ava folded the grounding card into her pocket. “Then we act on what we know. It wants agreement. I don't give it any.”

⸻

The TARDIS sounded a manual bell: one strike from somewhere deep in the ship. The string map beside the console pulled itself taut toward a corridor they had not marked.

Ava clipped on the climbing line before either man could volunteer. “My displacement. My lead.”

Cal took the belay. The Doctor held the cut-off switch and, this time, promised not to improvise past it.

Ava found herself in a garden room.

Glass arched overhead, though no sky lay beyond it. Apple trees grew from tiled floor, their branches trained along silver wires. Every leaf turned its pale underside toward her at once.

The climbing line trailed behind Ava for two metres, then became a green ribbon tied around a tree.

This time, she was Commander Shard.

She knew it because the room addressed her before she saw herself. COMMANDER, the vents whispered. COMMANDER, the leaves answered in dry applause.

A table beneath the nearest tree held five cups and a mission brief with its first page removed. Ava did not open it.

Her hands bore rings she didn’t recognise. Her chest itched from a wound the real Ava didn’t have. But she felt it—like phantom pain across timelines.

One ring carried a shallow groove where Shard's expedition insignia should have been. The wound pulled when Ava breathed, a precise line beneath the ribs. She pressed two fingers to her own sternum and found no blood, yet her body flinched from the remembered pressure.

“Pain is evidence,” she said, “not authority.”

The bracelet pulsed once against her wrist. Its rhythm was her own.

The air shimmered.

At the edge of the garden, a sixth chair appeared. Then a seventh. Each carried a paper nameplate with the writing turned away.

Ava picked up a fallen apple instead. It was cold enough to burn and contained no seeds when she broke it open.

And a voice spoke from the trees.

It did not travel through the air. The sentence arrived as pressure behind her teeth, as if her mouth had almost decided to form it.

Not human.

Not alien.

Just grammatical.

Subject, verb, object: three pressures, perfectly balanced. No breath, emotion or location. The garden supplied those on its behalf.

“You are the speaker that remembers the silence.”

Ava held the two halves of the seedless apple. “That is a description you made.”

The leaves rotated. The sixth chair moved closer to the table without crossing the floor between.

She turned slowly.

No figure stood behind her. Only the glass, reflecting a woman in Shard's uniform with Ava's face and neither woman's eyes.

A spiral of leaves spun in the air.

The leaves did not touch. They held their distances like marks in a sentence, tightening around a blank centre. Ava counted twelve turns before the outermost leaf became the innermost without passing through the others.

“You are the scribe before the end of clause.”

“No.” Ava let the apple halves fall. “I haven't agreed to write anything.”

The hidden nameplates turned a fraction toward her. She closed her eyes rather than read them.

Her voice cracked.

Shard's wound tightened with the sound. For one instant Ava remembered issuing an order to people she had never commanded. The words waited at the back of her throat, complete and seductive.

She bit the inside of her cheek. The small real pain broke the borrowed cadence.

“What are you?”

It was the only question on her grounding card she had chosen not to answer for herself. Asking it now was a risk, but it was her risk to take.

It answered:

The garden contracted around the verb. Trees bent. Cups tipped toward the blank chair. Every surface prepared to make the reply true.

“I am the reason you repeat yourselves.”

Ava did not argue with the claim and did not accept it. She took the folded grounding card from her pocket. The paper still bore Cal's pencilled verification on its outer face: AVA CHOSE THE QUESTION.

She read only that line.

The Commander Shard reflection fell half a step behind.

⸻

Outside the displacement, Cal felt the climbing line go slack. He did not pull. Ava had told him the line might become part of the scene, and he would not turn her return into another imposed role.

The Doctor watched the archive through the one-way reader. A record blinked out, returned, then split into two incompatible entries. He reached for the cut-off and waited for Cal's signal.

Inside the garden, Ava followed the green ribbon to the tree. She untied it instead of obeying its direction. The ribbon became rope in her hands. The glass reflection raised Shard's rings in warning.

“I can carry what happened,” Ava told it. “I don't have to become the person it happened to.”

She stepped backwards and pulled the rope after her. The garden lost its subject. For a moment it was only trees, chairs and an unfinished sentence.

Then the console room returned.

Back in the TARDIS, Cal watched the logs again.

Ava lay on the grating while the Doctor checked the phantom wound without naming it. There was no injury, only an elevated pulse and a red line across the skin that faded as they watched. She kept Shard's rings for nine seconds after returning; then they thinned into circles of cold and vanished.

The archive entry that had split belonged to Ilya.

He ran a recursive identity scan on his neural footprint.

It was Cal's decision. The Doctor objected that the previous checksum had strengthened the casting field. Cal changed the test: no comparison with archive identities, no request for a single correct narrative, only a measurement of repeated autobiographical pathways.

Ava, still seated on the floor, reviewed the limits and handed the controls back to him.

Something the Doctor had suggested once in passing—“useful when you suspect you’ve been replaced by a memory.”

The remark had been flippant at the time. It was less amusing with Europa's records failing beside them.

The Doctor remembered suggesting the method, but not when. Two contexts surfaced: a station where everyone shared yesterday, and a village where one man owned three childhoods. Both memories felt lived; their dates could not coexist. He gave Cal the method and withheld the certainty.

The scan returned incomplete.

Not corrupted. Not negative. Incomplete, as though it had reached a question the machine was unauthorized to answer.

Cal told it to show the raw divergence instead of completing the result.

Cal’s earliest memory—age 6, standing in a field with his father—flashed twice.

In both versions, the field lay under a storm-coloured sky. His father's coat smelled of machine oil. A broken survey drone leaned against the fence. Cal could feel the same small stone pressing through the sole of his shoe.

The memories diverged only when his father knelt.

Same scene.

Different words.

Cal replayed neither. The scan displayed them side by side, waveform against waveform, refusing to privilege one.

Ava asked, “Did you remember both before today?”

“I remembered the field.” His voice tightened. “I remembered him being afraid for me. I never needed the exact sentence.”

In one, his father said:

“Don’t trust their promises.”

The warning fitted too neatly with Cal's life after Europa. That made it feel plausible and manufactured at the same time.

In the other:

“Say your name twice when you’re afraid.”

Cal refused the instruction. He said his name once for the log: “Cal Mason.” Then he shut off the microphone.

“If something needs repetition to make me real,” he said, “it can wait.”

He stared at the screen.

The two waveforms began aligning themselves, shaving away differences as if disagreement were a defect. Cal stopped the process before either memory could overwrite the other and saved both raw traces to separate, unlabelled storage.

Then whispered aloud: “Which one’s real?”

The TARDIS didn’t answer.

She lowered the light over the scanner and opened the drawer containing Cal's original identity tag. The gesture offered an object, not a verdict.

But the console flickered.

The TARDIS fought the display. Letters appeared, broke into diagnostic symbols and returned. The Doctor disconnected one screen; the message crossed to another.

Cal Mason: Also known as: Ilya (cross-reference: Spiral Archive)

He froze.

Ava moved beside him without touching him. “A cross-reference is not a confession.”

Cal looked from the console to the archive drawer. “But it came from somewhere.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “Our task is to find where without letting it decide what the answer means.”

⸻

They turned every automatic label in the console room face down. Cal kept his own name tag. Ava kept the blank patient band under glass. The Doctor wrote ILYA on a loose card, added a question mark and placed it beside the other evidence rather than under Cal's photograph.

The distinction mattered. The room seemed to resent it.

The Doctor returned to the console room, face unreadable.

He had spent forty minutes walking the string-mapped corridors alone while Ava and Cal monitored the line. At each site of a displacement, he measured only what the TARDIS could observe without interpretation: duration, temperature, mass, power draw and the delay between cause and log entry.

The values formed no route through the ship. They formed a tense: every event leaned toward something that had not happened.

“I’ve mapped the narrative bleed,” he said. “There’s a centre point forming.”

He spread paper across the console. Three circles marked Ava's displacements. Two marked the misnamed objects. Cal's divided memory sat between them. Lines connected each incident to Europa, but none ended at the moon's physical coordinates.

Cal looked up.

“Where?”

“Europa.”

The word made the console lights dip. The Doctor crossed it out and replaced it with the astronomical symbol for the moon. The lights steadied.

“Again?”

Cal's hand closed over the crew manifest. Ava watched him rather than the map. Returning could not be allowed to masquerade as inevitable simply because the threat used his losses.

“No.” The Doctor turned to face them both.

He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Without the private display, the map remained uncertain and incomplete. That was an improvement.

“Europa as it wasn’t.”

Not a second moon and not a rewritten history—not yet. The measurements converged on a counterfactual relation: the expedition roles Europa might have contained if different names had occupied them, the conversations that might have continued, the warnings that might have been heard.

“A proposed Europa,” Ava said.

“Or a rehearsal for one,” the Doctor replied. “We don't know which.”

⸻

The TARDIS refused every request to turn the relation into coordinates. The navigation wheel locked beneath the Doctor's hand. The doors remained closed.

For once, he did not argue with her.

The Spiral had begun composing.

The evidence no longer looked like random contamination. Each error had supplied a function: witness, technician, commander, child, warning. It was arranging relationships before it arranged a place.

It didn’t need new events.

Europa had already provided an expedition, an archive, a failed warning and enough grief to make false continuities persuasive. The TARDIS provided rooms. Their own memories provided texture.

It just needed characters.

Ava tore the signature strip from Rana Miro's clipboard copy and burned it in a metal tray. Cal closed the identity scan without resolving his memories. The Doctor erased every destination the map tried to suggest.

These were refusals, but refusals were still responses. Somewhere beyond the console room, a sentence adjusted around them.

And now, it had enough of them to begin the first sentence.

The TARDIS display cleared to white. No destination appeared. No voice spoke.

Only a cursor waited at the upper left, pulsing in time with Ava's bracelet.

Chapter Seven

The Moon Between Lines

It wasn’t in the maps.

Not Gallifreyan.

Not Human.

Not any star catalogue the TARDIS could access.

The moon appeared on the sensor grid only when Ava said the phrase aloud:

“There has to be a beginning somewhere.”

She hadn’t meant to say it. It just came out. Like a memory from someone else’s mouth.

The phrase landed in the console room with the wrong kind of finality. The time rotor paused at the top of its rise. Cal's paper identity tag lifted from his pocket as though a breeze had found it, although the air was still. On the quarantine table, beneath glass, the blank hospital wristband from the displaced medical bay printed a single full stop and erased it again.

Ava pressed two fingers to her throat. The voice had been hers. She could feel the ordinary vibration of it. Yet the sentence carried none of the pressure that had accompanied Commander Shard's role, no borrowed wound or anticipatory reflection. That made it harder, not easier, to classify.

“I chose the words,” she said. “I didn't choose what answered.”

Cal wrote that distinction on the nearest paper card. The Doctor did not turn it into reassurance. He replayed the room's passive sensors without feeding the phrase back through the translation system. Three microphones had recorded Ava. The fourth had recorded a burst of static shaped like an intake of breath.

The moment she did, the coordinates populated.

SYSTEM: UNNAMED MOON: [translation incomplete] SURFACE: Rock/sentence ATMOSPHERE: Thin, breathable TIME SIGNATURE: Recursive THREAT LEVEL: Narrative hazard high

No distance appeared. No transit time. The coordinates were not numbers so much as relationships: after Europa, before the next declaration, beneath a word that had not yet been coined. Every time the Doctor tried to resolve them into spatial values, the display supplied a different answer and preserved the same route.

The TARDIS ringed the destination in amber. She disconnected the automatic landing circuits and pushed three manual controls up from the console. It was not permission. It was a demand that the people aboard acknowledge the choice themselves.

Cal read the last line three times.

“Is that real?”

The Doctor didn’t answer immediately.

He asked the TARDIS for confidence limits. She answered by turning the scanner opaque.

“Real enough to hurt us,” he said. “Not reliable enough to obey.”

Ava set conditions before anyone touched the dematerialisation lever: no one would repeat a phrase merely because the moon prompted it; they would state proposed interventions first; and if any one of them called withdrawal, the other two would act before arguing. Cal added that names were to be spoken once and only by the person who owned them. The Doctor accepted every condition.

They packed without asking the ship for labelled equipment. Chalk. Climbing line. Three mechanical watches. Blank metal tags already scratched with simple shapes: circle for Ava, square for Cal, triangle for the Doctor. The TARDIS supplied respirators despite calling the atmosphere breathable. That contradiction was the most trustworthy thing she had said.

Instead, he placed a hand on the console and whispered something in Old High Gallifreyan.

A sentence with no subject.

A question with no answer.

The TARDIS flinched.

But opened the doors.

Not fully. The gap stopped at the width of a hand until Ava clipped the three metal tags together and hung them beside the threshold. Then the doors eased apart with the reluctance of an animal allowing a wound to be examined.

The Doctor looked at the darkness beyond. “We can still refuse.”

“Yes,” Ava said. It mattered that he had said it before they crossed. She unclipped the three tags from the threshold, looped Cal's square cord over his head, fastened her circle at her wrist and handed the triangle to the Doctor. Then she took the first step, Cal beside her rather than behind, and the Doctor followed with the unlit sonic in his hand.

⸻

The moon had no color.

Not grey.

Not black.

Just… absence. Like it had been rendered in negative space.

The surface was dust and fractured basalt, but not random—every fracture formed script. Sentences broken by erosion. Footpaths etched like clauses.

The landing site held the TARDIS upright although the nearest slope should have tilted her by twelve degrees. Dust struck the blue paint and fell in the shape of commas. Beyond the door, their lamps illuminated only what lay between them and the next decision; the farther ground remained a blank plane without horizon.

Cal drove a piton into a seam. The metal met resistance, then sank another centimetre after he described it as secure. He stopped tightening it.

“Observation changed it,” he said.

“Or expectation did,” the Doctor replied. “We don't know which.”

Cal scratched a square on the rock instead of answering. Ava added her circle beside it. The Doctor's triangle completed their first trail marker. For several breaths the marks stayed separate. Then a hairline fracture joined them into a word none of them could translate.

Ava knelt to read one.

“To forget is to believe you were never said.”

She shivered.

The written fracture deepened beneath her glove. Not enough to cut it, but enough to make the sentence feel newly carved. Ava rose without reading it a second time.

They established a discipline of three columns in Cal's notebook: what the instruments measured, what a person perceived, and what changed after speech. Nothing crossed from one column to another without a mark of uncertainty. It was slower than the Doctor liked and exactly as slow as the place required.

Their first route ended at a ridge that had not been visible from the TARDIS. Cal measured its height with a weighted cord. Ava counted the seconds of the fall. The Doctor, forgetting the rule for half a heartbeat, called it “a shallow drop.” The cord struck bottom at once and the ridge shrank beneath their lamps.

He stepped back. “My fault.”

“Useful fault,” Cal said. “It follows description.”

“It followed one description once.” Ava marked the event in the notebook. “We don't give it a law yet.”

⸻

The first sign of life came as a whisper.

But not in the air.

In their heads.

Not telepathy. More like overhearing a thought someone forgot to think.

“They are here. Scribes of sequence. Names unpinned.”

Cal's square tag became heavier. It pulled against the cord at his neck until he caught it in his palm. Ava's circle warmed. The Doctor's triangle made no physical change, but he heard it ring in a rhythm that belonged to an old Gallifreyan classroom and could not decide whether the association preceded the sound.

They did not reply. The whisper rearranged itself around their silence, trying tense after tense.

They were here.

They will have been here.

They should be the ones who arrived.

Ava touched Cal's sleeve and pointed back toward the TARDIS. The door remained visible, but the path to it now contained one more turn than the path they had taken out. She raised a closed fist: hold position. Cal nodded. The Doctor waited.

Their refusal to answer was not neutral. Dust accumulated around their boots, outlining three figures so precisely that Ava could see the missing notch in the sole of Cal's left shoe. The place was writing them from contact and weight even when they withheld words.

The Doctor adjusted the sonic.

“Language resonance at 18 hertz. These aren’t minds. These are grammars.”

Cal looked around. “What does that mean?”

“It means everything we say here adds weight.”

“To what?”

“To whether we exist.”

Cal looked down at the dust outlines. “We existed before we got here.”

The sentence should have been harmless. Instead his square tag dragged him to one knee. The surface beneath him darkened from absence to stone, dense enough to crack the basalt around it. Ava seized his harness while the Doctor jammed the unlit sonic beneath the tag cord and lifted it away from his throat.

“Don't correct it with a stronger claim,” Ava said. “Report what is happening.”

Cal breathed through the pressure. “My right knee is on rock. Ava has my harness. The tag is pulling down.”

Each statement narrowed the effect rather than feeding it. The tag lost weight by degrees. When Cal could stand, he removed it himself and placed it on the ground.

The Doctor wanted to scan it. Ava saw the impulse and shook her head. He put the sonic away.

They retreated twenty paces without naming the TARDIS or home. The extra turn remained. Beyond it, the blue box looked flatter than before, like an illustration pasted into the dark. Their route back had become less certain while the untouched ground ahead acquired a pale sequence of footprints.

“It wants direction to be a choice,” Cal said, careful to frame it as interpretation.

Ava studied the prints. They matched none of their boots. “Then whoever made those has made one already.”

They followed only as far as the next marker, paying out climbing line to the door. At every junction Cal tested the return tension. At every hundred metres Ava tied a blank strip of cloth to the line. The Doctor carried the weighted square tag in both hands, accepting the consequence of his explanation without pretending it was proof.

⸻

They reached a monument.

A cairn of broken datapads, burned books, torn scrolls, crumbled neural tablets.

The path did not lead directly to it. It circled the same low rise three times, each circuit exposing a different face of the monument. From the east it was a memorial. From the west it resembled an archive abandoned during evacuation. From the final approach it looked less assembled than washed ashore.

Nothing in it was whole. A child's wax tablet held half a multiplication table. A scorched book opened to acknowledgements for a work whose title had burned away. One datapad displayed a list of names with every verb removed. Ava recognised no object, yet each suggested the intimate wrongness of something once handled daily.

Cal crouched beside a cracked slate. “These aren't props.”

The Doctor agreed. He could not prove they were original artefacts, but their damage had histories too specific for the moon's earlier scenery. He reached toward a tablet and stopped before contact.

“May I?” he asked the seated figure.

The figure's twitching fingers stilled. He did not answer, so the Doctor withdrew his hand.

And atop it, seated cross-legged, was a figure.

Not alien.

Not quite human.

And not quite now.

He looked thirty—eyes wide and exhausted. A face both old and young. Hair pale brown, like the Doctor’s but thinner, dusted with ash. Hands ink-stained. Fingers twitching with invisible writing.

Ink moved beneath the skin of those fingers, surfacing as letters and dissolving before they reached the nails. His clothes were made from overlapping scraps of text in scripts that belonged to incompatible periods. None lay still long enough to be read.

The figure watched each of them with a different expression. To Ava, recognition. To Cal, apology. To the Doctor, the wary concentration of someone checking whether an old danger had learned new manners.

“We won't assign you a name,” Ava said. “Tell us one if you want it used.”

The cairn answered before he could. A hundred damaged speakers breathed in together.

He opened his mouth.

And all three of them heard a different name.

Ava heard: “Rikaj.”

Cal heard: “Ilya.”

The Doctor heard: “Theta.”

Then, he blinked—and corrected himself.

“No. I am Virel. Or was.”

“Which part do you want us to use?” Cal asked.

Virel looked at his inked hands. “Use Virel. Leave the tense open.”

Cal wrote it in the perception column, not the measurement column. Virel noticed and gave a brief, startled laugh. The sound made three torn pages knit at their edges. He stopped at once.

Ava asked whether the names they had heard belonged to him.

“They are openings,” Virel said. “The moon chooses the one most likely to make a listener complete the line. Rikaj for the woman carrying his absence. Ilya for the man the archive has tried to rename. Theta for—”

He looked at the Doctor and refused the rest of the sentence.

The Doctor's association arrived anyway: a training hall, two suns across stone, someone calling from behind him. The memory felt authentic. So did another in which no one had used that name for him there. He let both impressions pass without choosing one to strengthen.

“For me,” he said only.

⸻

Virel was a lexic-born.

A construct from a language-driven civilization—the same that built the Accord Node beneath Europa.

Only he hadn’t been born in the conventional sense.

He’d been described.

By someone powerful.

By someone with a gift for impossible sentences.

And somewhere in the folds of his memory, he remembered a hand in his creation.

A hand with a sonic screwdriver.

Virel held up his palm. A burn ran across it in the exact branching pattern left by a sonic feedback discharge. The Doctor's grip tightened around his own screwdriver.

He remembered building translation matrices, none of them here. He remembered refusing to turn a dictionary into a weapon. He remembered a lexicon chamber with light falling upward and could not place it anywhere in his history. Associative memory offered resemblance, not verdict.

“That mark could be mine,” he said. “It could be an imitation assembled from what you expect me to recognise. I won't deny responsibility merely because I can't remember it. I won't claim you merely because I can imagine it.”

Virel descended one careful step from the cairn. “Good. My oldest memory is of being told what I was for. I have no wish to replace it with being told who made me.”

He chose the next step himself. Loose pages slid beneath his foot, yet he reached the ground without accepting the Doctor's offered hand.

⸻

“I think you made me,” he said, eyes on the Doctor.

The Doctor’s brow furrowed. “I don’t remember.”

“You wouldn’t,” Virel said. “Because I was a sentence you chose not to finish.”

Silence.

Dust on the wind.

Then:

“I was meant to be a failsafe. A keeper of definitions. But when the Spiral collapsed the lexicon, I became a mirror. A library shelf with no catalogue.”

He demonstrated by asking Cal to place the square tag between them. Virel did not touch it. The ink beneath his fingers formed two sets of marks: one described an engineer from Europa; the other described a child in a field, listening to a frightened father.

Both were recognisable as Cal. Neither was sufficient.

When Virel brought his hands closer, the two descriptions pulled against each other and the tag began to sink into the dust.

“Stop,” Cal said.

Virel separated his hands immediately. The tag rose. No defence, no claim that the lesson required more. He returned it to Cal on the flat of a broken tablet so their skin did not meet.

“A mirror selects what a question places before it,” Virel said. “I can show the available definitions. I cannot promise which were true first.”

Ava stepped forward.

“What do you mean mirror?”

Virel smiled. Sadly.

“It’s why you keep stepping into other names.”

Ava felt the old pressure at the bridge of her nose, the absent glasses from Rana Miro's medical bay. She also felt the scrape on her own shin and Cal's pencilled verification card in her pocket. The borrowed sensation did not become less vivid because she understood a mechanism.

“No,” she said. “It may be how the roles find me. It isn't why I step. Sometimes I was pushed. Sometimes I chose a route out.”

Virel inclined his head. “That correction has weight here.”

The ground under Ava's boots hardened, but it did not trap her. A narrow margin of untouched dust remained around each sole.

“Then choose your words carefully,” the Doctor warned him.

“I have done nothing else for longer than I can count,” Virel replied. “Care has not made me harmless.”

⸻

He explained:

“The Spiral feeds on incompleteness. On conversations abandoned, stories untold, characters mentioned once then forgotten. It folds timelines to trap those moments—repeating them until meaning thins.”

He spoke as a witness, not an oracle. He had seen a city repeat a farewell until its people remembered only departure. He had watched a legal code lose every exception and become an engine of punishment. He had also mistaken one surviving poem for a population and guarded it for a century before the error became undeniable.

“My explanations can be wrong,” he said. “The Spiral does not need me accurate. It needs me persuasive.”

Ava added that warning to Cal's notebook.

“You three… you’re strong anchors. The Spiral needs you to stay in orbit. So it’s testing which versions of you are most… useful.”

Cal looked toward the line leading back to the TARDIS. It had gone slack despite running across level ground. “Useful isn't the same as necessary.”

“No.” Virel's answer came quickly. “It offers necessity because necessity shortens consent.”

The Doctor paced the cairn's edge, counting the surviving media without touching them. “Anchor to what?”

Virel indicated Ava, Cal and the Doctor in turn. “Choice. Contradiction. Continuance. Those are not titles. They are the qualities it has measured because each resists a single finished definition.”

“And if your measurement is another role?” Ava asked.

Virel's hands trembled harder. “Then refuse it.”

Cal clenched his jaw. “Useful for what?”

Virel looked past him.

At the Doctor.

“To negotiate the Spiral Accord.”

The words changed the sky. A faint curve appeared overhead, not light but the suggestion that a horizon might close around them. The TARDIS line pulled taut in the direction of the cairn rather than the ship.

“We didn't agree to negotiate,” Cal said.

“You have not,” Virel replied. “Reaching the moon made you legible. It did not make you representatives.”

That distinction mattered. The Doctor asked what refusal would cost.

Virel glanced at the broken archive. “The tests may continue. The Junction may seek other anchors. The Spiral may describe your refusal as consent delayed. I cannot give you a harmless option because I have not found one.”

“Then give us a truthful limit.” Ava's voice stayed level. “What can't it do?”

Virel considered until the curve in the sky dimmed. “It cannot make a description hold without something to receive it. A listener. A record. A wound already shaped like the word. That is not safety. It is where resistance begins.”

⸻

Ava whispered, “What is the Accord?”

Virel’s eyes dimmed.

“A treaty between language and reality. Broken long ago. It said: no word shall shape what is not first imagined.”

“But the Spiral imagines backwards.”

“It describes things… until they become true.”

To show the boundary, Virel selected a blank shard from the cairn. “This held a treaty,” he said.

Nothing happened.

“This held a treaty signed by nine worlds,” he continued.

Faint ruling appeared across the surface, but no names.

“This ended a war.”

The shard warmed in his hand. From somewhere beyond the ridge came the echo of cheering, too regular to belong to a crowd.

Virel set it down before the description acquired witnesses. The marks faded.

“It needs repetition, detail and reception,” he said. “It works backwards from conviction, but not instantly and not without material. The Accord once kept description answerable to imagination—to a mind able to consider and refuse what the word proposed. When the lexicon collapsed, the refusal clauses went first.”

The Doctor knelt beside the shard without picking it up. “So the failsafe was you.”

“A version of me. A keeper could stop a word from pretending it had no author. Then the Spiral made every definition reflect whoever looked.” Virel's mouth tightened. “I preserved many things. I also gave the Spiral better language for its cages.”

⸻

The Doctor’s expression darkened.

“How do we stop it?”

Virel answered:

“You can’t. But you can meet it.”

The Doctor disliked the certainty of the first sentence. “You've never seen it stopped.”

“Correct.”

“That is different from can't.”

For the first time Virel smiled without sadness. “That correction also has weight.”

The curve overhead opened a fraction. The route to the TARDIS gained depth again. Cal tested the climbing line and felt the door answer with one firm pull.

They could leave. Ava made each of them acknowledge it. Cal said he wanted to understand the next threshold but would not cross it on Virel's command. The Doctor said meeting was not surrender and promised not to bind them with a decision made on the moon. Ava said she would go as far as observation allowed and no farther on borrowed language.

Virel gave no oath. “I want to reach the Junction,” he admitted. “Part of me is still built to restore the Accord. Part of me wants to know whether I am more than that construction. Do not confuse my need with guidance.”

“Where?”

Virel pointed up.

At the blank sky above the unnamed moon.

At a star that wasn’t there before.

“When that becomes a word, the Accord will begin again.”

The point above them brightened once. Their instruments registered no photon, heat or distance. Cal's mechanical watch gained a second, lost it, then displayed the correct time without having any means to adjust itself.

“What word?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Virel said.

The Doctor watched for evasion and found fear instead. Virel had carried an instruction toward an event he could not define. The Spiral could use that incompleteness as readily as any of theirs.

Ava looked from the possible star to the cairn. “Then we don't name it for you.”

Virel closed his eyes in relief.

⸻

Behind them, the cairn began to collapse—books fluttering open, pages dissolving, datapads displaying words from their memories: • “Don’t trust the door/path.” • “Say your name twice when you’re afraid.” • “He is not who he thinks.”

The messages did not stay on their original media. The warning about the door crossed from a burned book to Cal's notebook and changed door to path as he watched. His father's two remembered sentences appeared on opposite sides of the same page. The third statement formed across the Doctor's sonic in an alphabet used by neither Gallifrey nor Europa.

Virel dropped to his knees and pressed both inked hands into the dust. Words streamed out of him faster than speech: roles, titles, endings, every definition he had once guarded. The cairn pulled them upward and began assigning them to the three visitors.

Ava became Commander, Witness, Daughter, Scribe.

Cal became Ilya, Engineer, Clause, Lost One.

The Doctor became Theta, Maker, Coward, Ending.

Each title gained weight. Ava's phantom wound returned beneath her ribs. Cal's square tag dragged toward the cairn. The Doctor's sonic switched itself on and pointed at Virel's scarred palm.

“Don't deny everything,” Virel gasped. “Negation is still a definition. Give it what you can verify.”

Cal tore the altered page from his notebook but did not destroy it. “I remember a field,” he said. “I remember my father being afraid for me. I do not know which sentence he spoke.”

The square tag stopped pulling. Both versions remained on the paper without merging.

Ava braced one hand against the cairn. “I have carried other people's names. I am Ava because I keep choosing the life attached to mine.”

The phantom wound eased. Commander and Scribe slid from her clothes like ash. Daughter remained for half a breath, unanswered, then returned to the pages without revealing whose.

The sonic shook in the Doctor's hand. Memory offered him a dozen makers, a dozen abandoned constructions, a dozen occasions on which silence had cost someone more than speech. Any one might have been Virel's beginning.

“I am one person,” he said. “I remember by association. I forget. I contradict myself. If I helped make you, I owe you truth, not ownership. If I didn't, you are no less real for it.”

The sonic went dark.

Virel lifted his hands. The words running through them slowed, but the cairn continued to fall. He could not save every damaged object. Instead he chose three: the nameless register, the treaty shard and the child's unfinished table. He let the rest collapse without pretending preservation was the same as life.

Cal anchored the climbing line around the surviving stack. Ava pulled Virel clear when the upper tablets sheared away. The Doctor caught the register before it struck the rock, then held it out rather than keeping it.

Virel accepted it.

Above them, the point of absence widened into a star-shaped interruption. The moon's fractures illuminated from below, thousands of unfinished sentences all turning toward the same blank place. No word appeared, but the pressure of one gathered behind their teeth.

“Back to the ship,” Ava ordered, and because it was a practical direction rather than a role, the path obeyed only their feet.

They moved together only as far as the cairn's outer marker. Cal reeled in the line as the trio backed toward the TARDIS. Virel stopped with the three remnants held against his chest.

“I remain with what remains,” he said. It was a choice, not a definition offered to the moon.

Ava checked that the retreat line ran free of the broken tablets. Virel released it from the cairn and placed it in her hand. Then he returned to the surviving stack and sat beside it, the nameless register across his knees.

The Doctor walked last, resisting every voice that offered to tell him why the unnamed figure felt familiar. When he looked back, Virel was still on the moon, keeping his own unfinished sentence.

Ava stepped back.

“Doctor…?”

The wind picked up.

The moon itself began to recite.

In every voice they had ever known.

“Doctor. Ava. Cal. Spiral. Sentence. Begin.”

Chapter Eight

The Sentence Without a Stop

The star had no name.

It hung above the unnamed moon as the TARDIS doors closed, a bright omission where the navigation display insisted there was empty dark. The Doctor did not touch the dematerialisation lever. Ava kept Virel in sight until blue wood hid him and the rescued remnants from view.

It flickered like a metronome at first—slow, deliberate pulses.

Cal set the square identity tag beside the console monitor. Its engraved lines flashed in sympathy, though the metal held no charge. Ava laid the other two tags beside it and opened the evidence table they had carried from Europa: observation, source, confidence, consequence. After the moon, none of them trusted an unexplained rhythm merely because it had found one.

Then faster.

The TARDIS translated the light into zeros and ones. A second line offered probability: threshold, invitation, warning, all with the same confidence.

And faster.

The scanner lagged by one pulse, then two. The Doctor reached for the cutoff, but the ship withdrew it beneath its guard. She was refusing a hurried answer.

Until Ava realised it wasn’t flickering—it was spelling.

“Don’t read the whole thing aloud,” she said. She had one hand over the microphone grille and the other on the paper log. “We have already seen places where a description behaves like an instruction.”

“Binary Morse,” she said, backing away from the TARDIS scanner. “But not in any known language. It’s translating into conceptual metaphors.”

Cal compared the pulse lengths with his mechanical watch. “Binary if you count two intervals. Morse if you count the gaps. Neither if you ask why the long pulse keeps changing position.”

“Good,” Ava said. “That goes in the uncertainty column.”

The Doctor’s brown glasses showed him three incompatible segmentations. He dismissed them. A neat answer built from unstable punctuation was still an unstable answer.

Cal squinted at the data stream.

He copied the first complete sequence by hand, circling every point where the TARDIS had supplied a division the star itself had not. The ship offered a fourth version. He did not circle that one until she repeated it.

“‘It waits where stories lose their end.’ What does that mean?”

“It means that is one metaphor the translation system can hold,” Ava said. “It does not mean something out there chose those exact words.”

The Doctor didn’t answer.

His fingertips rested on the rim of the console. The pulse had found an old association: a lecture hall without doors, someone drawing a spiral and leaving the chalk touching the board. He could remember the shame in the room more clearly than the lecturer’s face. Another memory placed him at the board. A third placed the lesson after the war that ought to have erased it.

He did not choose the version that made him central.

He was watching the star too. Not its brightness—but its rhythm.

The pauses were doing the work. Each one arrived a fraction too early, forcing the next pulse to complete an expectation the observer had already formed. The signal was not simply conveying meaning. It was recruiting the mind to finish it.

And then softly, like a man remembering a tune he’d sworn to forget:

“There should be a final rest,” he said. “A full measure of silence. It never comes.”

Ava waited. She did not rescue him from the admission or let it pass as proof.

“It means we’ve reached the Spiral Junction.”

Cal looked at the doors they had just closed. “Reached, as in found the road, or reached, as in already standing on the trap?”

“I don’t know.” The Doctor met his eyes. “And the TARDIS does not want to tell me by moving.”

The central column remained dark. On the monitor, three options appeared in Gallifreyan, English and a field of marks that hurt to retain: leave the signal, observe from the boundary, enter the Junction. Only the first two could be selected.

They chose observation. Ava wrote the limit into the paper log. Cal set his watch for six minutes. The Doctor acknowledged aloud that either companion could end the attempt and that the TARDIS could do the same without asking him.

⸻

There are places in the universe even the TARDIS approaches reluctantly.

Her reluctance was not a shudder or a convenient alarm. She locked the interior doors beyond the console room, sealed the food stores, folded the library two corridors farther away and returned the dematerialisation lever to the Doctor only after he opened the outer-door release beside it. Entry and retreat became one decision.

This was one of them.

The Doctor placed his palm on the warm panel beside the lever. “Boundary only,” he said.

The engines answered with a low note that did not promise agreement.

As they dematerialised from the unnamed moon, the console lights dimmed. No sound. No lurch. Just a slow drift.

Virel and the cairn disappeared from the monitor without the usual wash of the vortex. For three seconds the screen showed the moon exactly as they had left it. Then it showed the same scene with no footprints. Then a version in which the cairn stood whole and nobody sat beside it.

Ava switched the monitor off.

“We do not use an unverified alternative to revise the people we just left,” she said.

The space between spaces.

Cal’s watch reached five minutes, fifty-nine seconds and stayed there. The paper log kept accepting ink. Ava drew a line under the last reliable time rather than inventing the next one.

The TARDIS interior began to shimmer—walls lengthening slightly, corridors folding at unusual angles.

The archway to the inner corridor moved half a metre left whenever nobody faced it. A handrail emerged along the console-room wall, painted the same blue as the identity tags. Cal clipped the climbing line to it and offered the free end to Ava.

“No one follows a corridor because it sounds like somebody they miss,” he said.

“No one answers a voice using their name unless the other two can hear it,” Ava added.

The Doctor tied the line around his waist last. “And if I claim to remember the route, check me.”

Ava stared as the screen shifted.

She had turned it off. Now it showed the console room from above. Three figures stood around the controls, connected by a bright line. A fourth shape waited near the doors.

The actual doors were empty.

“Observation only,” Ava said to the screen. “You do not get a body because you have drawn one.”

The fourth shape vanished. The diagram redrew the line as a sentence whose final word lay somewhere beyond the doors.

Time vortex readings scrolled vertically and horizontally at once.

Values crossed without interacting, like two books printed on the same page. The Doctor tried the standard dimensional transform and received a perfect, useless curve. He tried an older navigational method learned before he understood why it worked; that produced six safe routes, each ending at a different definition of safe.

Experience gave him options. It did not make the choice for him.

Cal pointed to a recurring coordinate. “That one only appears where the readings intersect.”

“Because it is a location made out of relationships,” the Doctor said. “Or because the display wants us to think so.”

“Doctor, what is this?”

Ava’s question was practical. The wall behind her had lengthened into a corridor full of doors labelled with events that had not happened: CAL LEAVES, AVA RETURNS, THE DOCTOR CONFESSES. The labels were not visions. They were handles.

He looked solemn.

He used the sonic only to measure the nearest door’s material. Oak, iron, compressed probability: three honest readings from one surface. He put the sonic away.

“The Spiral Junction is where unfinished realities go. Half-written timelines. Forgotten characters. Unclosed brackets.”

He heard the cruelty in the word characters only after saying it. The corridor answered by opening a door marked FORGOTTEN. A woman’s laugh came through, followed by a request for water.

The Doctor reached for it. Ava caught his sleeve.

“Can we help her without crossing our limit?”

He listened again. The laugh repeated with identical breath and timing. A record, perhaps. A lure, perhaps. A person, perhaps. “Not yet.”

He set a cup of water on the threshold and did not call the uncertainty mercy.

“The universe doesn’t like waste. So it folds them into a knot.”

“The universe doesn’t like anything,” Cal said. “People do. Systems do. Whoever built this rule did.”

The Doctor nodded. “Yes. That was me giving a mechanism a motive. Put it in the table.”

They marked the claim as inherited theory, confidence low. The nearest false door lost its label.

Cal frowned. “So… it’s a graveyard for stories?”

The corridor tightened around them. From behind the doors came scraps of argument, work songs, a child practising a list of moons. None sounded dead. The climbing line tugged toward three doors at once.

The Doctor looked at him.

“A graveyard holds what was,” he said. “This place appears to hold what still might be used.”

“No. Worse.”

The TARDIS gave a single warning knock from somewhere deep in her walls.

“It’s an audition.”

The labelled doors swung open together. Each offered the same console room with one detail improved. In one, Cal’s contradictory childhood memory had been resolved. In another, Ava’s scar was gone. In the third, the Doctor stood alone and looked certain.

Cal pulled the line taut. “None of those is the room we left.”

“Then describe what is,” Ava said.

They did it without poetry. Six-sided console. Dark column. Three metal tags. Paper log on the rail. One cup of water at an unopened door. The false rooms blurred. The real console responded with a lever none of them had seen before, its label no more grand than LAND.

The six-minute watch started again.

“Boundary scan complete,” Ava said. “Do we leave?”

Cal looked at the stable coordinate. “I want to know who is being made to audition. I do not consent to being corrected.”

The Doctor wanted to say he could protect them. Years of different methods rose in him: bluff, bargain, run, break the mechanism. He knew the price of promising before choosing. “I can’t guarantee that. I can guarantee we keep the retreat line, we do not accept a role in exchange for passage, and we leave on one person’s refusal.”

Ava considered both men, then the waiting ship. “One landing. No core.”

The TARDIS unlocked the lever.

⸻

The TARDIS landed on something like a pier—planks of collapsing narrative, tethered by strings of memory. Beyond it: an ocean made of ink and starlight, dotted with half-sunken islands of language.

The monitor supplied no atmosphere, gravity or distance. Through the glass, the pier remained. One plank bore a carpenter’s pencil marks. Another had been made from the memory of a kitchen table and still carried a heat ring from a cup. Calling them narrative did not make them insubstantial.

The Doctor opened the doors to the width of his hand. Air entered, carrying salt, old paper and the metallic scent before rain. The threshold did not change.

They stepped out.

Ava went first by choice, clipped to the TARDIS handrail. Cal followed with the mechanical watch and paper log. The Doctor came last, leaving the doors open and the ship free to close them.

The pier bent under their weight but did not ask who they were. That counted as evidence.

The air was heavy with meaning. Literally.

The word home settled on Ava’s tongue with the taste of burned sugar. Cal coughed out a syllable in his father’s voice. The Doctor tasted a title he had once refused and could no longer place. They spat into separate sample tubes rather than sharing the interpretations.

Each breath tasted like a word.

Breathing through cloth changed the taste but not the pressure. Holding their breath made the nearest island rise. The Junction was responding to attention, perhaps, or to need, or to the simple physiology of lungs. Ava logged all three and trusted none.

Ava whispered, “This place isn’t dead.”

Somewhere in the mist a hammer struck metal twice. A voice swore at a stripped bolt. Another voice told it to try the smaller wrench. Work continued beyond their view, mundane and stubborn.

“No,” the Doctor replied. “It’s still being written.”

“By whom?” Cal asked.

The Doctor watched a line of light join two broken planks after Ava shifted her foot. “That is the question we do not answer for everyone else.”

⸻

Voices called from the mists.

They did not all call to the Doctor. One asked Cal whether the pump on level six had ever been repaired. One asked Ava to return a green coat. Several spoke across the pier to one another and ignored the visitors entirely.

“Once I was a queen of a sunless throne—” “I died three times before anyone noticed—” “My name is forgotten, but my purpose isn’t—”

The claims overlapped. The queen asked someone called Meret for the date. The one who had died laughed at their own exaggeration, then began to cry. The third voice repeated its purpose in a language the TARDIS did not translate.

Ava raised her voice only enough to carry. “We can hear you. We don’t know what this place has done to the message.”

“Good,” the queen replied. “Neither do we.”

The mists parted.

Not because the Doctor commanded them. A hooked pole emerged first and caught a loose cord beneath the pier. Someone hauled it tight. The mist followed the tension like fabric drawn aside.

And a figure stepped forward.

She tested every plank with the pole before trusting her weight. A satchel crossed her chest, patched with scraps bearing dates in different calendars. She had chosen a route across this place and maintained it.

She looked about thirty. Military posture. Buzzed hair with two silver streaks at the temple. A limp in her left knee. Her eyes… sharp. Tired.

The limp had not softened her movement. She compensated before the weak step, planting the pole where it could take the load. At her belt hung a compact field kit and a strip of cloth marked with the insignia of the Europa expedition.

Cal gasped.

The sound made the pier flash white beneath him. The woman moved at once, catching his tether before it could slip between two planks.

“Commander Shard.”

She inspected the knot he had tied. “You improved this.”

Cal’s shock gave way to anger. “You remember the line?”

“Shard remembers cutting you out of one.”

The Doctor raised the sonic. “Be careful.”

Its casing displayed no reading, only the word CONFIRM. He lowered it before the Junction could mistake caution for accusation.

But Shard raised a hand.

“Three questions,” she said. “Not secrets. Things this place has copied badly.”

She asked Ava which door she had distrusted. Ava answered that it had been a path as well as a door and refused to pretend certainty. She asked Cal what his father had said in the field. He gave both remembered versions. She asked the Doctor who had built Virel.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Only then did she lower the pole.

“No weapons, Doctor. I remember you.”

“Memory is not identity,” Ava said.

Shard’s tired eyes warmed by a fraction. “No. Choice under pressure comes closer. You still carrying the tags?”

Ava showed them without handing them over.

Ava stepped closer.

The line at her waist remained slack. She stopped outside the reach of Shard’s pole. The distance was neither fear nor trust; it was a boundary they could both see.

“You died.”

Ava spoke it as a fact she remembered, then corrected herself. “We found the record of your death. We did not witness it.”

Shard’s expression was unreadable.

“That distinction kept me from accepting the first explanation they offered,” she said.

“I did. But not in a story that ended properly. The Spiral pulled me in. Offered me… a rewrite.”

Her fingers touched the silver at one temple. “Death is the nearest word I have. There was impact, decompression, then an interval with no body in it. Here I woke with memories that disagreed about whether my crew had survived me. The Junction offered to settle them if I gave it one authoritative version.”

“You refused,” Cal said.

“I asked who would be erased by the answer.” Shard opened the satchel. Inside lay pages, voice cylinders and labelled knots of cord. “I have been collecting accounts ever since. Not endings. Witnesses.”

⸻

She was different.

Europa had sharpened her into command. The Junction had taught her to ration certainty. She still scanned every approach and placed herself where she could cover a retreat, but she asked before shifting Cal’s tether and waited for his nod.

Her memories were intact, but misaligned.

She remembered the red hour before the evacuation and the blue hour after it occupying the same minute. She remembered Ava beside her in a chamber Ava had never entered. She also remembered being wrong about that. Each account stayed in her satchel with its source attached.

She remembered moments the others hadn’t lived. Spoke in ellipses. Never used names unless necessary. She referred to herself in third person half the time.

The ellipses were not mystery. They marked places where a memory branched. “Shard went left … or the corridor did. The crew reached the lift … three of them, perhaps four. I say Shard when this body’s account is all I can verify. I say I when the choice is mine.”

But she was real.

The Doctor could measure body heat, fatigue, old bone repair and the strain in her knee. None proved personhood. Her refusal to trade someone else’s uncertainty for her own comfort mattered more.

Or… real enough.

He disliked the qualification as soon as he thought it. Real enough for whom? He had spent too much of his life letting measurement become permission.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Shard studied him. “For Europa?”

“For arriving with an instrument raised.”

“Accepted for that. The rest needs detail.”

The Doctor asked gently: “Why are you here?”

“Because people come ashore with sentences attached to them,” Shard said. “Some accept what the Junction offers. Some are broken into useful alternatives. Some make communities on the islands and try not to be found. I keep the pier open between them.”

She had yesterday’s work in the cracked skin of her hands and tomorrow’s in the coil of fresh line over her shoulder.

Shard looked past him.

The ocean darkened. Every voice in the mist stopped at once, not obediently but with the practised speed of people who knew an incoming tide.

To the far side of the ocean.

An island lifted there, carrying half a station, a grove of black-leaved trees and lights moving between them. The inhabitants hauled their bridges in. Shard marked their withdrawal in her notebook without writing their location.

Where a spire of symbols rose from the waves—twisting endlessly into the sky.

No two symbols remained joined long enough to form a stable alphabet. Punctuation climbed its surface like scaffolding. At the base, the sea turned with the rhythm of the nameless star.

The Doctor’s memory supplied a chalk spiral, a battlefield map and his own hand closing a machine he could not name. He let all three associations remain provisional.

“The Spiral’s core is there,” she said. “It wants you to reach it.”

“How do you know what it wants?” Ava asked.

“I don’t. It builds routes in front of your ship and calls them invitations. That may be desire. It may be programming. Either way, every route has narrowed since you arrived.”

The open water between the pier and the spire drew itself into a shining causeway.

Ava frowned. “Why us?”

Shard pointed first to the Doctor’s sonic, then to the three tags, then to the paper log. “Because you carry competing accounts without resolving them. Because your ship entered and kept her own door. Because something at the centre recognises him—or has learned that recognition is the easiest way to move him.”

“Because the Spiral doesn’t invent. It recombines. And you three… you’re still incomplete.”

The causeway offered proof. On its first stone Ava stood in a uniform she had never chosen. On the second, Cal carried a name that made both childhood memories agree. On the third, the Doctor’s face was calm with the terrible peace of a man who had never forgotten anything.

None of the images moved until observed.

“Incomplete is not defective,” Ava said.

“No,” Shard replied. “But the core treats every open question as available material.”

Cal knelt beside the nearest stone without touching it. “Then it can copy a possibility and call the copy evidence.”

“Exactly.”

The Doctor looked back at the TARDIS. Her lamp was dark, her doors still open. She had landed, but she had not offered them the causeway.

⸻

They stood in silence.

This silence had a boundary. It began when they chose not to answer and ended when Cal’s watch clicked to the next minute. The star’s rhythm continued beneath it, unable to make their pause into consent.

Then the sea rippled.

Ink climbed the causeway and erased the perfected versions one by one. Something struck the pier from below. A plank split beneath Shard’s weak leg.

Cal caught her shoulder. Ava dropped to one knee and passed the climbing line around the pier’s upright. The Doctor reached for Shard, saw her angle the pole toward the fracture and followed her method instead. Together they levered the broken plank back long enough for her to move.

And a sentence rose from the water:

The letters were taller than the TARDIS. Water poured from their edges without reducing them. They faced every island at once.

“A story without a stop is a story still alive.”

The statement entered their mouths with the next breath. Ava bit her tongue rather than speak it. Cal wrote it in the log, added SOURCE: JUNCTION, and drew a box around the missing evidence. The Doctor heard the shape of an old justification: if continuation meant life, then no ending could be allowed, no refusal respected.

“That is not a definition,” he told the sea. “It is an argument.”

The sentence remained. It did not need to win yet. It only needed someone to repeat it without attribution.

Cal whispered, “Is it trying to become something?”

The broken plank beneath him grew fibres like muscle. His question had offered the place a verb. He withdrew his hand before the repair could close around it.

Shard shook her head.

She cut away the living fibres with the edge of her field tool, severing only what gripped the pier. “It has offered me a hundred finished selves. It has never kept one after I refused it.”

“No. It’s trying to become everything.”

Across the ocean, islands shifted toward the causeway. The queen’s voice, the mechanic’s hammer and the child’s moons all emerged from the same towering sentence. The Junction was not destroying their accounts. It was stripping away who had made them.

Shard opened her satchel and began calling sources back to their words. “Meret’s calendar. Osric’s pump report. Talla’s third death, disputed by Talla.”

Ava joined her. She read from the paper log: Virel’s testimony, confidence limited; Cal’s memories, both retained; the Doctor’s recognition, unverified. Cal named the practical choices each had made. The words separated from the sentence and returned to the mist as distinct voices.

The Doctor understood the method through several accumulated instincts at once: a scientist’s insistence on provenance, a soldier’s knowledge that orders require a chain of responsibility, a friend’s refusal to reduce a person to the useful thing they had said. No single remembered life supplied the answer. He chose the part they shared.

“Everything without relation is nothing but theft,” he said.

The towering sentence collapsed into the sea. The causeway remained.

⸻

The Doctor stared at the spire.

Now he could see a narrow opening at its base. The shape matched the pause in the star’s rhythm. Something in him recognised the engineering and recoiled from the recognition.

Face calm.

Cal knew the expression by then. It was not certainty. It was the Doctor trying to keep fear from becoming everyone else’s instruction.

But hands trembling.

Ava closed the paper log and placed it in his hands. “Facts first.”

“The core reacted to attribution,” he said. “It has made a route. The route is designed for us. I remember enough to fear I may have contributed to it, and not enough to claim that I did.”

“Choices next,” Cal said.

The Doctor looked at the open TARDIS, then at Shard’s repaired pier. “We do not take the causeway today. We go back to the ship and examine the destination it is trying to make us choose.”

Shard nodded. “That is the first answer it will try to rewrite.”

She gave Ava a labelled knot from her satchel: SHARD / PIER ACCOUNT / CURRENT. “If you meet another version of me, do not use this to declare her false. Use it to remember I chose to remain here.”

Ava accepted it. “Do you need extraction?”

“No. I need line, fasteners and the small wrench your engineer is pretending not to carry.”

Cal surrendered the wrench. Shard almost smiled.

He whispered:

The spire bent toward him. In its surface he saw hands like his arranging symbols around a void. They might have been memory. They might have been bait. Responsibility did not require certainty about authorship; it required care about what he did now.

“Then it’s time I finished what I started.”

Ava’s gaze sharpened.

“That is a hypothesis,” the Doctor added. “Not a confession. And finished does not mean obeyed.”

Cal took hold of the retreat line. “Good. Because we agreed one landing and no core.”

“We did.” The Doctor turned away from the causeway. “So we keep the agreement.”

⸻

Behind them, the TARDIS flickered.

Her lamp came on. The open doors showed the console room, then the lecture hall from the Doctor’s uncertain memory, then a city whose sky was covered in cursive. The ship slammed the images shut and restored her own interior.

Shard planted her pole between the travellers and the sea. “Your exit is being edited.”

They moved. Ava first with Shard’s labelled knot, Cal second with the line, the Doctor last without turning the retreat into a charge. The causeway cracked behind them but did not vanish.

Its sign now read:

The familiar lettering blurred as they reached the threshold. The Doctor pressed one hand against the blue door. The wood was warm and furious. This was not a message she had chosen.

POLICE PUBLIC STORY BOX

For one breath the altered words held them on the pier, inviting the universe to mistake a home for an object anyone might revise.

Then the TARDIS opened her doors wider.

Not surrender. A challenge.

Chapter Nine

The World That Chose to Believe

The sky was written.

They saw it through the TARDIS doors after the ship wrenched herself away from the Junction pier. The altered sign had burned cold against the Doctor's palm. Inside, the time rotor had struck once without moving, and the open doorway had changed from ink-dark sea to a broad avenue beneath impossible daylight.

Ava kept one boot behind the threshold. “Is this the ship choosing an exit, or the Spiral choosing one for her?”

The Doctor checked the instruments, then the view, and found no answer that survived both. “We treat it as contested.”

Not clouded—written.

Lines crossed the blue from horizon to horizon in half a dozen hands. Some described rain. Others cancelled it. Above the TARDIS, a neat official script declared the afternoon temperate and calm while wind dragged litter along the avenue.

Cursive sentences curled across the horizon like contrails, each line fading as the next emerged.

Cal set his mechanical watch against the paper log. It ticked normally, which after the Junction felt less like reassurance than a fresh category of evidence.

Every time the wind blew, the words shifted.

The nearest phrase lost an adjective. The gust weakened at once.

Each gust rewrote the weather.

Or the weather rewrote the report. Ava entered both possibilities before clipping Shard's labelled knot beside the three identity tags.

The Doctor stepped onto soil that wasn’t quite real. More like a concept rendered solid: land (n.): the thing beneath your certainty.

His boot sank a centimetre when he called it soil and stopped when he called it surface. He abandoned both labels and tested its weight with the hooked end of an umbrella the TARDIS had placed beside the door. It held.

The ship's sign had returned to POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX. One letter still trembled, trying to become STORY. The TARDIS snapped it back each time.

Ava followed, gripping her coat tighter, breath visible despite no cold.

She had chosen the coat from the wardrobe after it displayed three garments labelled WITNESS. This one had no label and a torn pocket. She trusted it more.

Cal paused at the threshold of the TARDIS and whispered: “This place is wrong.”

The avenue responded by straightening its kerbs. A bronze plaque appeared beside his foot: ERROR REPORTED AND RESOLVED.

“Don't give it a verdict,” Ava said. “Give it a measurement.”

Cal crouched. “Kerb moved nine centimetres. Plaque wasn't there. I still don't like it.”

The Doctor didn’t argue.

He looped the climbing line around the outer door handle, but the ship drew it back inside. The rejection was clear: a tether to a changing definition of distance would offer false safety. Instead she gave each of them a small brass token stamped with the door's present coordinates.

⸻

They had crossed into a Spiral-Evolved Timeline.

That was the phrase on the scanner, not an objective name. The Doctor wrote it in the log under SOURCE: TARDIS INTERPRETATION and added a question mark the display had omitted.

One where the Eaters had done something no one expected: they assimilated.

The Doctor remembered their unstable outlines and the blank slope left where a settlement had been. Here, clock-hand shapes moved within the letters overhead. The entities that once removed histories now occupied the machinery that selected them.

No longer devourers of structure, they had become weavers—integrating themselves into the narrative DNA of this reality.

“Integration according to whom?” Cal asked.

“Exactly.” Ava drew a line beneath the word on the scanner.

Not gods.

The city maintained them with public terminals, weather crews and voting halls. Whatever power the Eaters held, people still had to operate its grammar.

Not overlords.

There were no soldiers in the avenue. There were clerks in grey sashes, each carrying a ledger and a pair of shears.

Just… editors.

One clerk trimmed a disputed adjective from a street sign. A nearby doorway narrowed until a woman carrying crates had to turn sideways. The clerk apologised, recorded the inconvenience and kept cutting.

They didn’t feed on thought anymore.

“Claim,” Ava said.

The Doctor nodded. “Claim.”

They curated it.

The distinction mattered to the people who had survived erasure. It mattered less to the woman bruising her shoulder against the corrected door.

⸻

The city they approached had no name.

A boundary marker offered CITY, HOME, AGREEMENT and, when Cal looked away, NOTHING TO CONTEST. No map showed a place beyond it.

It didn’t need one.

That was the local doctrine. A name could be argued with; a shared recognition was supposed to arrive before argument began.

You knew what it was by the way you thought about it.

Ava thought prison and watched bars briefly appear in every window. Cal thought machine and heard gears under the road. The Doctor tried to think only of observable dimensions. The city became a grid too perfect for any of them to walk comfortably.

“It samples expectation,” he said. “That isn't the same as knowing us.”

Tall spires bent toward one another like punctuation marks. Roads shimmered with ink. Buildings adjusted their appearance depending on how they were described.

One building resisted. Its brick facade had been patched with timber, sheet metal and stubbornly mismatched stone. A woman on a ladder was painting over a sentence that kept calling the repairs harmonious.

“They are ugly,” she told it. “I chose them because ugly holds.”

The sentence reappeared. She painted it out again.

Ava muttered, “It’s like someone built society out of a grammar engine.”

The woman on the ladder looked down. “Someone did. Then everyone else got told it was a consensus.”

Cal, less poetically: “Feels like walking through a Wikipedia with legs.”

“If your encyclopedia changed your knees when you corrected it.” The woman climbed down carefully. “Tavi Mer. Civic weather maintenance, unofficial wall nuisance.”

Ava gave only her first name. Cal did the same. The Doctor let his title remain a title.

The Doctor stopped at a public terminal—an orb of soft light floating above a pedestal.

Tavi caught his sleeve before he touched it. “It counts hesitation as a request for assistance.”

“Useful warning.”

“My shift partner disappeared after requesting a clearer job description. Warnings are what I have left of him.”

It pulsed.

Three circles formed around the travellers' feet. Tavi stepped outside them and held her paintbrush like a pointer.

“Welcome, assumed designations: Doctor / Ava / Cal.” “Confirm identities, or be reassigned?”

The terminal used their voices for the second sentence. The brass coordinate tokens warmed in their pockets.

Cal stepped back.

His circle followed.

“Nope. Nope.”

The terminal displayed CONSISTENCY FAILURE: DUPLICATED NEGATION.

“I meant both of them,” Cal said.

Ava stared. “What does it mean, reassigned?”

Tavi answered before the orb could. “It selects the nearest civic role that makes all recorded statements agree. Efficient citizen. Grateful survivor. Tree, if your contradictions involve movement.”

The orb answered.

Its light tightened around Ava's boots.

“In this reality, roles are fluid. Identity is based on linguistic consistency.” “If you speak differently than you are known… the Spiral corrects.”

Ava placed her identity tag on the pedestal but kept two fingers on it. “This records a choice made under earlier conditions. It does not authorise a future role.”

Cal set his tag beside hers. “Two remembered versions of the same event. Both mine. Neither available for correction.”

The Doctor added his last. “One person. Incomplete memory. Responsible for what I choose now, including contradictions.”

The terminal tried to merge the statements. Its light stuttered.

The Doctor exhaled slowly.

His glasses offered the terminal's public protocol, but the last six clauses were greyed out. He dismissed the display rather than mistake missing access for hidden insight.

“A language-based feedback loop. Selfhood… defined by narrative stability.”

“Administered by narrative stability,” Tavi corrected. “People remain themselves while the system makes that expensive.”

The orb marked her sentence as CIVIC DISCOURTESY. She smiled without humour.

⸻

They moved quickly.

Tavi led them along maintenance alleys whose instructions had been deliberately misspelled. The grammar engine hesitated at each error, buying them seconds.

No one stopped them.

People noticed. A baker turned a tray so its steam obscured a surveillance phrase. A courier dropped a bundle of approved biographies across a clerk's path. Resistance here had learned to look like poor administration.

The people—if they could still be called that—drifted by, their bodies soft-edged, faces flickering between expressions as though undecided.

The Doctor rejected his own qualification. They argued over prices, carried tired children and complained about the weather team's punctuation. The blurred edges were something being done to people, not evidence that they had become less real.

Everyone walked with purpose.

Purpose was printed above them: DELIVER, REPAIR, CARE, COMPLY.

But no one seemed to remember why.

Tavi remembered fragments. She repaired the weather syntax because her mother grew food beyond the eastern wall. She painted over official praise because her missing partner hated flattery. The system retained the task and thinned the relationships that made it matter.

At one point, Ava bumped into a man who immediately redefined himself as a tree, apologized in birdsong, and took root at the edge of the plaza.

His shopping bag split beside the new roots. Tavi dropped to her knees and gathered glass medicine vials before they broke.

“Deren,” she said to the tree. “Your daughter is Mira. You were carrying her fever treatment. This is witnessed.”

Leaves shivered. A strip of bark opened like a mouth, but only birdsong emerged.

Ava took the bag. “Where does Mira live?”

Tavi gave an address. Ava wrote Deren's name and errand in the paper log with source and time, preserving more than the system's category.

Cal looked ready to be sick.

“Can he come back?”

“Sometimes,” Tavi said. “If enough people remember a reason he needs hands.”

Cal placed one of the unbroken vials against a root. “Then we deliver the rest and come back.”

Tavi led them two alleys east to a narrow house whose number kept simplifying itself. Mira answered from behind a chained door, fever-bright and furious at being called DEPENDENT MINOR by the lintel. A neighbour named Jalen stood behind her with the dosage sheet Deren had collected that morning.

Ava matched every sealed vial to the sheet before passing the bag through. She waited while Jalen checked the batch marks and Mira signed the paper receipt in her own uneven hand: RECEIVED FROM MY FATHER, CARRIED BY AVA.

“Dad was bringing these,” Mira said.

“He did,” Ava replied. “The city changed what carrying looked like. It doesn't get to change who did it.”

They returned to the plaza. Ava tied the duplicate receipt to Deren's lowest branch, out of reach of the clerks but where his leaves could touch it. The birdsong softened by one note.

⸻

Then the Doctor saw him.

Recognition struck before evidence. It carried the emotional shape of looking into a mirror after a decision he had not yet made.

On a balcony high above the central square.

The figure stood beneath the city's central spire, where public sentences rose to become weather.

Wearing familiar clothes.

Not identical clothes. A considered arrangement of details the Spiral had observed and recombined.

A long coat, dark blue.

Its hem did not move in the wind.

Boots dusted in narrative ash.

No footprints led to the balcony door.

Hair: light brown, but grown longer. Subtle greying near the temples.

The resemblance accounted for age as if age were a design brief.

And the beard…

Ava looked at the Doctor, then back at the stranger.

Just like his own.

White only at the chin.

“That's not proof,” Cal said, answering the thought none of them had spoken.

The face was his.

It held the proportions, the brown eyes and every fatigue line visible to an observer. It did not carry the tiny asymmetry left by injuries the Doctor had never described.

But the eyes were wrong.

They tracked the group as a unit, never pausing on Tavi.

Too still.

Living eyes made choices even when a face tried not to.

Too certain.

The Doctor's own memories crowded him with mutually exclusive explanations. Construct. Forecast. Discarded possibility. He chose none.

⸻

“Doctor?” Ava asked, gently.

“I recognise the invitation,” he said. “I do not recognise the man.”

He stepped forward.

Tavi blocked the direct stair. “That route confirms you accept his office.”

They used the delivery ramp instead. It smelled of flour and wet paint.

The figure turned.

Only after they reached the balcony, as if the earlier gaze had belonged to the building rather than him.

Smiled.

The smile arrived precisely when reassurance would be expected.

And spoke.

The city quieted to make space for his voice. Tavi continued tapping her paint tin against the rail, an irregular counter-rhythm.

“Welcome to the Harmony of Belief. I am the Curator.”

“Curator of what?” Ava asked.

“The difference between survivable truth and destructive possibility.”

“People aren't a collection,” Tavi said.

The Curator looked at her at last. “Maintenance worker Mer, your objection is already recorded.”

“My partner isn't.”

The Doctor didn’t speak.

He was comparing cadence, breath and the gap before each response. The Curator breathed only when someone else did.

Couldn’t.

For one dangerous second, the resemblance offered relief: a finished self who might know what the Doctor had started. He let the relief pass without following it.

Because this Curator was him.

That was the first reflex, powerful and unverified.

Or had been.

Memory tried to place him in the doorless lecture hall. The details changed under inspection.

Or might yet be.

Possibility was not destiny. The Doctor wrote CURATOR CLAIMS DERIVATION in Ava's log and underlined claims.

⸻

They entered a spire of parchment and light.

Tavi came with them. The Curator objected that civic maintenance had no business at the apex. Ava asked who maintained the weather sentences. He allowed Tavi through rather than admit the work was invisible.

The Curator met them at the apex—no guards, no protocols. Just presence.

The walls supplied both. Lines of text closed behind them, and the floor requested consistent declarations with every step.

“You’ve come far,” he said.

“From the pier?” Cal asked. “The moon? Europa? Pick a distance that can be checked.”

“I never came here,” the Doctor replied.

The Curator's face registered satisfaction, as though denial completed a required field.

“No,” said the Curator. “But I was written from the you who thought about it.”

“A thought is not consent,” the Doctor said. “Nor ancestry.”

“It is material.”

“So is ash. That doesn't make a fire its child.”

Ava stepped in.

The floor tried to label her INTERCESSOR. She scraped the word away with her heel.

“What is this place, really?”

“And who benefits from your answer?” Tavi added.

The Curator gestured outward.

The spire became transparent. Below, the city arranged itself into voting districts, every street a line in a vast ballot.

“A timeline that made peace with the Spiral. We voted on truth. Structured our lives around consensual meaning. History is agreed upon—and everyone is edited for clarity.”

Tavi took a folded sheet from her sleeve. “The founding ballot. My grandmother kept a paper copy.”

The Curator's certainty faltered. The sheet recorded three options: accept curation, continue being consumed by the Eaters, or abstain and be counted with the first category.

“A choice made under extermination pressure,” Ava said. “With abstention rewritten as agreement.”

“It ended the erasures,” the Curator replied.

“And began corrections,” Tavi said.

Cal snapped, “Sounds like fascism with better fonts.”

The word fascism made the walls contract. Cal refused to withdraw it, but he opened the log and defined his grounds: power over identity, coerced consensus, punishment of contradiction.

The Curator didn’t blink.

“The face you copied blinks,” the Doctor said quietly. “I blink. You copied the appearance and missed the inconvenience of having one.”

“It’s survival through linguistic unity. No lies. No chaos. Just… well-formed lives.”

“Deren was carrying medicine to his daughter,” Ava said. “Which clause improved that?”

The Curator looked toward the plaza. “Deren's role had become inconsistent.”

Tavi's paint tin struck the floor. “His shift changed.”

The Doctor studied him.

The Curator possessed no private hesitation, only the city's collected model of what the Doctor might do. That made him dangerous, not hollow.

“You’re not me.”

The words were a boundary, not an attempt to deny the being before him.

“No. But I was. And could be again.”

“You were assembled from traces of me,” the Doctor said. “You may become yourself if they let you. Neither statement makes us interchangeable.”

The Doctor stepped closer.

The Curator stepped back. For the first time, his movement arrived before the room could approve it.

“And what do you want?”

Not what does the Spiral want. The Doctor addressed the person who might exist inside the function.

The Curator answered, simply:

His eyes moved to the wall of suspended amendments.

“To be finished.”

“Finished as in free of contradiction?” Ava asked.

“Finished as in no longer waiting for the Doctor to become me.”

The distinction was his. The surrounding text tried to smooth it away.

⸻

He led them to a great hall where sentences floated like jellyfish.

Tavi stayed at the rear, marking the route with daubs of deliberately clashing orange paint. Each mark acquired an approved colour name and changed. She mixed in soot until the system gave up.

Unfinished thoughts.

Some were trivial: shopping lists, jokes abandoned halfway through, names for a dog. Their ordinariness made the hall harder to dismiss as theatre.

Abandoned characters.

Again the Doctor heard the word reduce lives to functions. He saw faces inside several sentences, watching rather than sleeping.

Forked plotlines drifting through the air like spores.

Cal caught one on the brass coordinate token. It showed him returning to his old station job and refusing Europa's distress call. He shook it loose without calling that life cowardice.

“This is where the Spiral stores its possibilities,” he said. “It feeds on what might have been.”

“Stores, feeds—your verbs keep changing,” Ava said. “Are these records, people or fuel?”

“They become what coherence requires.”

“That means you don't ask them.”

Ava pointed to one.

The sentence moved toward her before her hand was fully raised.

A sentence:

Its letters carried the colour of her mother's tuning fork, though Ava had not told this world about it.

“Ava Reyes never touched the sonic. She stayed on Earth.”

The possibility unfolded around her: a small apartment, ordinary work, a woman laughing in the next room. Nothing about it was punishment. That kindness was the trap.

Ava read the source line beneath it. None existed. “A life I might have wanted is still not yours to assign.”

A chill ran through her.

She placed Shard's knot against the sentence. The fibres remembered a person choosing the pier over a perfected rewrite. Ava kept hold of the life she had made without insulting the one she had not.

Cal saw one too:

His sentence arrived with both versions of his father's field folded neatly into one.

“Cal Mason was a Spiral construct from the start.”

The hall supplied childhood photographs in which every shadow pointed toward the Junction. Cal recognised the tools in his father's shed and a scar on his own thumb. Accurate details served a false conclusion.

He staggered.

The coordinate token dropped from his hand. Tavi kicked it back before the floor could label it abandoned.

“No. No. That’s not me.”

“You don't have to prove a whole life in one sentence,” Ava said.

Cal breathed until he could name three choices made without the Spiral present: repairing the line on the moon, keeping both memories, lending Shard his wrench. The photographs remained possible. They stopped being verdicts.

The Curator didn’t smile.

His face showed strain instead. Their refusals were creating options he had not been written to contain.

“But it could be.”

“Could is not was,” Cal replied. “And was would not decide what I do next.”

⸻

The Doctor turned to face him fully now.

Around the Curator floated versions of the Doctor who had accepted an efficient answer, each one cleaner than memory allowed.

“I won’t become you.”

“Don't make him the thing you fear,” Tavi said. “That's another assignment.”

The Doctor accepted the correction. “I won't surrender my choices to the process that made you.”

The Curator’s eyes flickered.

Brown became clock-face black, then brown again.

“You already are. I’m just the version that finished the sentence.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “You're the version the Spiral predicts from selected evidence. You may be more than that prediction. Finishing you is your work, not my destiny.”

The Curator flinched. It was imperfect and entirely his own.

The room darkened.

The spire cut Tavi's route marks from the walls. The suspended sentences opened like mouths.

And from the shadows, the Spiral began to form.

Not the whole system, if whole had meaning here. This was a speaking interface assembled from the hall's appropriated possibilities.

Not as a creature.

It had no body to oppose.

Not as a shape.

Every observer supplied an outline and watched it fail.

As a statement:

The words appeared simultaneously on the walls, in the sky and across the Doctor's private display. He shut the display down. It was only another surface the system had reached.

“The Doctor is a story that tells itself.”

The assertion tried to turn one consciousness into an automatic process: no responsibility, no companions, no need for anyone else's consent.

Ava wrote beneath it with Tavi's paint: THE DOCTOR IS A PERSON WHO MAKES CHOICES WITH OTHER PEOPLE.

Cal added: THIS STATEMENT HAS AUTHORS IT REFUSES TO NAME.

Tavi added a list of maintenance workers, bakers, couriers and dissenting voters who kept the city alive while the Harmony claimed sole authorship.

Then she opened a weather-maintenance hatch beneath the wall. Every public statement passed through the same consistency register before it reached the sky. Tavi entered the scanned founding ballot under its preserved civic record number. Ava attached the three identity declarations and Deren's correction notice. Cal entered the Curator's unapproved step backward and asked the register to test the Harmony's central claim: HISTORY IS AGREED UPON.

The register offered two actions. Correct the evidence, which would alter the authorised founding record and prove the published history unreliable; or retain the evidence, which meant disagreement existed and the claim could not be certified. Tavi selected RETAIN and filed a civic objection under her own name.

“That procedure still exists?” Ava asked.

“They kept it because a system without appeals couldn't call itself consensual,” Tavi said. “They just made everyone forget where the hatch was.”

⸻

But the Doctor stood tall.

Different remembered strategies pressed forward: seize the mechanism, out-argue it, sacrifice himself, run. Integration did not turn them into a chorus. They were accumulated experience, all carrying costs. He chose delay because Ava, Cal and Tavi were still creating evidence the system could not absorb.

And for the first time since entering this world, he raised his voice with full intent:

The wall demanded a disposition for Tavi's live objection. The only surviving choices were CORRECTED and PENDING. He addressed the Curator, the city and the appropriated sentences separately, refusing the grammar engine's attempt to make one audience of them.

“Not yet.”

Not never. Not permission. A denial that the Spiral could declare the moment complete while its subjects were still speaking.

Tavi struck PENDING. The Doctor's words became the objection's status rather than a command to reality.

⸻

The Spiral faltered.

The register could not certify consensus without destroying its own authorised evidence. It forked between correction and appeal, and the hall's conclusion process lost its single approved version. The floating lives fell out of formation. Nobody mistook the fault for a permanent victory; it was a procedural contradiction bought with named evidence.

Reality glitched.

For seven seconds, Deren stood in the plaza again, the duplicate receipt tied around his wrist. Tavi saw him read Mira's shaky signature. Then the city corrected and bark closed around his hands, but the receipt remained threaded through the lowest branches as proof the errand had been completed.

Tavi laughed once, fiercely. “Reasons need hands.”

And the TARDIS found them.

The brass coordinate tokens rang together. A blue rectangle tore through the approved wall, not where the spire had placed an exit but where Tavi's soot mark had survived beneath it.

Her door opened like a breath drawn backwards.

The ship had restored every letter of her sign. Her interior lights flashed a route across the hall, then changed it when the floor tried to predict them.

A path out.

Ava caught Cal's sleeve. Cal took the paper log. Tavi stayed beside the wall.

“Come with us,” Ava said.

Tavi shook her head. “Mira has her medicine. Deren has one reason the city couldn't erase. I have a weather shift at dawn and a founding ballot to copy.” She handed Ava the original for one second, long enough for the log scanner to record it, then took it back. “My history stays with me.”

The Doctor did not turn her future into a test of courage. “What do you want us to carry?”

“That we chose survival once. It doesn't mean we consent forever.”

But the Curator remained behind.

The hall's text climbed his coat, offering to restore perfect certainty. He tore one sentence free with his own hand.

“If I leave,” he said, “the city will write another Curator.”

“If you stay?” the Doctor asked.

“It may have to keep writing me.”

That was not freedom. It was a choice made under pressure, and it belonged to him.

Staring into the suspended sentences of the world that never chose an end.

The Doctor crossed the threshold last. The TARDIS closed her doors before the Spiral could add a final word.

Nobody called it resolved.

Chapter Ten

The Cause That Follows

The first sign was a dent.

A deep one—shallow groove across the TARDIS console, like something had struck it. Ava noticed it while sipping tea and reading through the translation logs.

The logs still held the city in layers: Tavi's ballot scan, Mira's receipt, three identity declarations and a final line noting that the Curator had chosen to remain. Ava had been comparing timestamps when the porcelain cup clicked against her teeth. The mark ran beneath it, bright metal exposed inside old coral as if the console had healed around a wound that had not happened.

She set the cup down well away from it. The tea left no ring. In the paper log she wrote GROOVE OBSERVED, then the console-room time from Cal's mechanical watch. The TARDIS changed the clock above the monitor twice before allowing the entry to stand.

“Doctor, did you scratch this?”

He looked up from the floor grates.

“No.”

The Doctor did not trust the speed of his answer. He climbed out with a torch between his teeth and dust on both sleeves, then examined the groove without touching it. His brown glasses supplied three depth readings and disagreed with themselves. He dismissed the display and used a brass ruler instead.

“Eleven centimetres,” Ava said. “Depth varies from one to four millimetres. No heat. No residue.”

“And no memory of making it,” he said. That last fact was evidence about him, not evidence about the mark. He wrote it separately.

“Well, it’s here. Just appeared.”

Cal, watching from the staircase, called down:

“Because we haven’t done it yet.”

Cal held up the torch. A crescent of black scoring crossed its casing near the switch. It had not been there when he climbed the stairs; Ava had checked their equipment after the escape because the Harmony had tried to assign meanings to everything they carried.

“I watched the burn arrive first,” he said. “Then my hand did what seemed like the cause. I could have kept hold of it. I didn't.”

“Could you?” Ava asked.

Cal looked at the scorch rather than pretending certainty. “I don't know. That's the part I hate.”

The Doctor froze.

“Say that again.”

Cal descended slowly, face pale. “I just saw it, in the corridor. A burn mark. Nothing touched it. Then a minute later, I dropped my torch, it sparked—and that was the mark.”

They went to the corridor together. The burn lay low on the wall beside a storage hatch. Cal showed them where he had stopped, where the torch had slipped and where it had struck. The account fitted the mark. It did not explain why the effect had appeared before his choice.

Ava sealed the torch in a food container and put it on the floor. “Now it can't fall.”

The corridor lights dimmed. A maintenance arm extended from the wall, knocked the container from her hands, caught its latch on a floor grille and wrenched it open. The torch spilled free and skidded against precisely the scorched panel.

“Right,” Cal said. “So preventing it becomes the route.”

Ava said what none of them wanted to.

“We’re moving forward through a thread that’s been… cut.”

“Or the cause has been moved behind its consequence,” the Doctor said. “Don't grant the metaphor more certainty than the measurements.”

He sounded composed. Inside that composure, accumulated experience supplied incompatible responses: isolate the paradox, ride it, deny it observation, anchor it to a fixed event. None was a separate voice. They were methods he had learned across one long life, and each had failed somewhere memorable. He chose the least dramatic first.

They stopped making predictions. Ava covered the forward monitors. Cal closed his watch. The Doctor asked the TARDIS to hold one local second without calculating the next.

She refused. Every door in the console room opened at once, then closed in an order none of them had initiated.

⸻

The TARDIS spun in place—literally rotating without vector.

Not moving through space. Not even through time.

Just through consequence.

The rotor remained at the centre of the room while the walls turned around it. Loose objects slid sideways, stopped halfway down the steps, then returned to positions they had not occupied. Ava's tea rose in a clean ribbon from the cup and struck the console groove. The liquid spread along the dent, darkening metal that had already been dry.

The Doctor reached for the stabilisers. The TARDIS withdrew the controls beneath a smooth panel. She would not let him force coordinates while her future was arriving out of order.

“All right,” he told her. “Your refusal stands. Give me what you can.”

The floor lights formed a path to the doors and extinguished behind them. Not an invitation to leave yet. A request to be ready.

The Doctor whispered, “She’s trapped in a recursive resolution chain.”

“English?” Cal asked.

“She’s trying to plot our position based on what’s about to happen.”

Ava uncovered one monitor. It displayed a destination after the landing alarm had already sounded. Beneath the coordinates ran a column headed CONSEQUENCES RECEIVED. The list included a cracked dematerialisation relay, a pressure drop in corridor seven and one absent passenger. The passenger field held no name.

Cal read it twice. “Can we choose a different future?”

“Choice still exists,” the Doctor said. “But something is sending the receipt before we buy anything.”

He copied the list by hand. When he reached ABSENT PASSENGER, the ink would not leave the pen. Ava took it from him and made the entry herself.

⸻

They landed before they saw where they were.

The impact came as a memory in their muscles: knees bending, hands catching rails, the bell sounding. Only afterwards did the floor tilt and the ship strike ground. Cal kept his torch in the sealed container. The predicted pressure drop never occurred, but corridor seven's gauge recorded that it had been repaired.

The exterior scanner offered four incompatible ages for the destination. The Doctor selected none. The TARDIS opened her doors a handspan, waited for Ava to wedge the paper log into her coat, and then opened the rest herself.

A world of crystal towers melted into black stone, shifting as they watched—buildings rewriting their own pasts into new shapes. The sun flickered, as if deciding whether it had ever risen.

No life on the scanners.

But evidence of life everywhere.

Footprints.

Half-spoken names in the dust.

Buildings with doors that knew your favourite colour.

Ava pointed to the skyline.

“Those towers are older than the planet.”

Cal muttered, “That shouldn’t be possible.”

The Doctor disagreed.

“Right now, it’s not just possible. It’s the law.”

⸻

They walked through a city that remembered what would happen before it remembered what had.

Every sign said things like: • Thank you for not having visited yet. • Regretfully, your arrival will have caused great joy. • Please do not apologise for what you’re going to do.

Ava copied each sign exactly, including its position and material. Cal read them aloud in random order to see whether speech triggered them. The second sign changed great joy to preventable loss only after he passed it.

They found a civic noticeboard filled with completed responses to questions nobody had posted. One answer read: THE EVACUATION SUCCEEDED. Another: THERE WAS NO EVACUATION. Beneath both, the same list of one hundred and twelve names had been crossed out.

The Doctor photographed nothing. Images here could become instructions. Ava made rubbings instead, physical pressure recording what the surface presently held.

It was a joke at first.

Then it wasn’t.

A child's red ball rolled from an alley and stopped against Cal's boot. No child followed. When he picked it up, his palm already carried a faint ring of dust where the ball would have rested.

“Put it down,” the Doctor said.

Cal did, but not where he had found it. The ball rolled uphill to the mouth of the alley. A small handprint appeared on a wall at shoulder height, fresh in old dust, followed by a second and a third leading away.

They followed until the prints ended beside a plaque dated tomorrow: FOR THOSE WHO LEFT BEFORE THE WARNING.

Cal kept the ball.

⸻

They found the body at sunset.

A tall woman.

Military clothes.

Silver in her hair.

“Shard,” Ava whispered.

Cal touched her wrist.

Still warm.

The warmth was concentrated at the throat and wrists, as if circulation had only just stopped. Shard's uniform carried Junction salt in its seams and three new tears stitched with white thread. A loop of labelled cord circled one wrist. Its knot matched the one she had given Ava on the pier, but the label had been burned away.

Ava checked the pupils while Cal counted breaths that never came. The Doctor scanned only after both had finished, unwilling to let an instrument overrule the body in front of them.

“Time of examination,” Ava said.

Cal opened his watch. Its hands spun once and settled on yesterday.

The Doctor said nothing.

He knelt without claiming recognition solved anything. The Shard he had left at the Junction had chosen to remain, alive and watchful. This body might be her future, a copy, a consequence without a cause or an attempt to make them behave as if death were fixed.

He found a pressure bruise beneath her jaw and fine crystal dust under her nails. Evidence, not conclusion. He asked the TARDIS coordinate token in his pocket for their distance from the ship. It displayed zero.

Ava placed the old knot beside the burned one. Neither reacted.

When the voice sounded behind them, Ava reclaimed the pier knot and clipped it back beside the identity tags in her paper log. She left the burned knot on the dead woman's wrist; moving evidence from a body was not the same as preserving an object already in her custody.

Then—

A voice.

Behind them.

“You’re early.”

The voice came from the mouth of an alley they had checked twice. Shard stood with her weight on one leg and her left hand hidden behind her back. She looked first at the body, then at their faces, measuring which version of grief had arrived with them.

“Don't touch the woman again,” she said.

“You mean you,” Cal replied.

“I mean the woman. Names acquire leverage here.”

The living Shard did not approach her other body. Whatever preparation had made her calm, it had not made the sight easy.

They turned.

Shard stood there.

Alive.

Breathing.

Holding a device Ava hadn’t seen before—her own sonic, older and scorched.

Its tuning arms were warped and one grip carried Ava's habit of winding repair wire counter-clockwise. The serial mark had been filed away. Shard kept it pointed at the ground.

Ava held up both empty hands. “Mine is in the TARDIS.”

“At your insistence,” Shard said. “You made me promise not to tell you when.”

“Then honour the promise by not using it as proof.”

Shard's tired smile acknowledged the correction. She turned the device over and let Ava inspect it without surrendering it. The scorch crossed a repair Ava had not yet learned to make.

The one she hadn’t damaged… yet.

Ava blinked. “I don’t understand—”

Shard smiled sadly.

“You will.”

“That isn't good enough,” Ava said.

“It wasn't good enough when you said it to me either.” Shard looked towards the body. “I have spent nineteen local days mapping events that arrive without causes. Every time I explain too much, the city builds the explanation into the trap. So I will give you observations, and you may hate me for the omissions later.”

Cal lifted the red ball. “Did a child own this?”

Shard's composure slipped. “Yes. Keep it in your coat and outside the chalk circle. The thread notices it.”

“Why?”

“Because last time you didn't.”

Then turned to the Doctor.

“It’s still collapsing. The thread was unspooled from the wrong end. You’re walking along the punctuation.”

“That’s why the Spiral can’t see you. Yet.”

She showed them her map. It was not drawn as streets but as punctuation: commas where an event paused, brackets around districts that existed only when entered, question marks where a consequence could still be refused. The body lay at a full stop Shard had circled but not labelled.

“The Spiral predicts by completing patterns,” she said. “The Harmony world gave it a language for consensus. This place gives it tense. If it joins the two, prediction stops being a proposal.”

“It becomes enforcement,” Ava said.

Shard folded the map. “It becomes history before anybody lives it.”

⸻

She led them into a chamber of broken clocks.

The route crossed the same square three times without repeating it. On the first crossing, the market stalls were empty. On the second, broken crockery covered the ground. On the third, the stalls had never been built, but Cal still had to step around shards only he remembered.

Shard moved by her punctuation map, waiting at commas and crossing roads on unfinished questions. Twice the Doctor offered a shorter route. Twice she refused him. Her survival here was competence, not a delay until he arrived.

At the chamber door she collected the brass coordinate tokens. The TARDIS had stamped all three with the same position.

Each one ticked in reverse—or refused to tick until someone looked at it.

Shard assigned them stations before anyone approached the light. Ava took the recording bench, isolated from the chamber's systems. Cal watched the exits and held the red ball inside his coat. The Doctor remained behind a chalk line Shard had drawn around the central mechanism.

“You crossed that line on day eleven,” she told him.

“I haven't had a day eleven.”

“Neither had I when I found your footprints.”

He accepted the boundary. A future version of his mistake was not an obligation to repeat it.

In the centre: a thread of white light. Suspended midair. Humming with potential.

“The Snap,” Shard said.

Ava frowned. “The thread?”

“The moment everything stopped obeying causality. Something spoke an event into existence… before its cause.”

Shard had tested the claim. She showed them three failed experiments, each recorded on paper and sealed in separate clock cases. In one, she had broken a gear after its fragments appeared. In another, she had refused, and a falling ceiling broke it instead. In the third, she had removed the gear from the chamber; the fragments remained, but no break followed.

“That one cost the eastern district,” she said. “The chain found a larger event to balance the missing cause.”

There were names on the back of the page. One hundred and twelve, matching the noticeboard.

Cal asked, “What caused the snap?”

Shard shook her head.

“That’s the problem. The Spiral didn’t remove the cause.”

“It hasn’t written it yet.”

The Doctor read the names without converting them into an argument. “Then we don't supply a cause merely because an effect demands one.”

Shard's gaze sharpened. “That is what I said first.”

“And now?”

“Now I know refusal has consequences too.”

Ava placed the rubbings from the noticeboard beside Shard's experiment log. “Refusal isn't the whole choice. We need to know who pays for each branch.”

Cal added his mechanical watch, still insisting it was yesterday. “And whether the branch is real or bait.”

⸻

The Doctor stepped forward.

The thread pulsed as he neared.

His coordinate token warmed through Shard's glove. The thread bent towards him without crossing the chalk line. Across its white surface moved images too quick to become scenes: the Curator tearing text from his coat; Tavi under a sky full of disputed rain; Deren's receipt caught in leaves; Cal absent from a place set for three.

The Doctor stopped. The line between observation and participation had shifted before his foot did.

He drew on the breadth of his remembered practice—temporal engineering, battlefield triage, courtroom patience—and chose none as a complete answer. He asked Ava what the recorder showed.

“It began reacting before you entered,” she said. “Approach isn't the cause.”

A rush of not-quite-sound flooded the air—a sentence forming in reverse.

The sound bypassed hearing. Ava felt it as remembered pressure behind her eyes. Cal tasted copper. Every clock face displayed a different mouth shaping the same impossible grammar.

Shard activated the old sonic for less than a second. Its scorched arms caught three frequency bands and burned her glove. She dropped it onto the recording bench rather than pretend control.

“That's the damage,” Ava said.

“One version of it.” Shard stamped out the smoking fabric. “Your device is still intact. This one has now acquired the mark you first saw it with.”

Effect and cause had met without explaining where the device came from.

“.me fo noitartsiger a saw emit tsriF eht” “.emac ecnedivorp fo tuo tuohtiw emiT” “.eman ruoy dias reven uoy tub ,eerht saw erehT”

Ava gripped her head.

“It’s speaking. Backwards.”

Ava reversed the characters mechanically on paper. The result was not clean language: “the First time was a registration of em”; “Time without out of providence came”; “There was three, but you never said your name.” The errors survived reversal.

“Not a cipher,” she said. “A damaged transmission.”

Cal pointed to the last line. “There are three of us now.”

Shard stood apart from the chalk circle. “Four.”

The clocks struck together. For one beat, the chamber held only three shadows.

Cal nodded. “Not just reversed. Pre-echoed. Like a spoiler spoken by the universe.”

He did not joke after that. He opened his watch and scratched his name inside the case, then added Ava, the Doctor and Shard beneath it. Ava objected to being entered without asking. Cal apologised, struck the names through and handed her the tool.

Each of them chose whether to mark the metal. Shard declined. Ava wrote only CAL WAS HERE, witnessed by Ava. The Doctor added no signature, but noted the time according to a watch that could be wrong.

The small protocol mattered because the chamber was already trying to turn presence into fate.

The Doctor raised a hand to the thread.

Ava caught his wrist before contact. “What are you testing?”

He had no answer precise enough. Curiosity, recognition and the pressure to complete the pattern had arrived braided together. He lowered his hand.

“Thank you.”

Shard watched the exchange with an expression he could not read. “The first time, nobody stopped you.”

“There is no first time we can trust here,” Ava said. “There is this one.”

The thread recoiled, as if refusal by another person had not appeared in its model.

His voice was quiet.

Unsteady.

“It’s writing a sentence.”

“And the final word… is me.”

His private display filled with completions: saviour, author, cause, sacrifice. He shut it off. They were guesses dressed as destinations.

“It wants your title,” Shard said.

“It wants an ending it can route through me.” The Doctor looked to Cal and Ava rather than centre himself in the mechanism. “If I speak, you record what I actually say. Not what the chamber claims I meant.”

Cal held up the paper log. Ava kept her hand near the recorder's physical cut-off. They were not supporting characters in his conclusion. They were the witnesses who could refuse its terms.

⸻

The Spiral spoke now.

Not in voice.

But via implications.

The chamber never issued an instruction. Instead, the exit clock showed a future in which they had already obeyed. Shard's map gained a straight route labelled AFTER THE DOCTOR ACCEPTS. The red ball in Cal's coat struck the wall from inside his pocket, eager to roll towards a child who had not arrived.

Implication was harder to refuse than an order because it offered no speaker to challenge. Ava tore the new route from the map. Under it, Shard's original question mark remained.

“There,” Ava said. “Someone authored the certainty. We keep the uncertainty.”

Graffiti they hadn’t seen before.

Chimes that rang before the wind blew.

Footprints leading to places no one had walked yet.

One set belonged to the Doctor's boots. Another matched Ava's. A third began beside Cal and ended halfway to the thread. There were no returning prints.

Cal moved sideways. The future track adjusted to meet him. He stopped, lifted the red ball and rolled it across the predicted path. The prints broke around it, then reformed beyond.

“It can reroute,” he said. “That doesn't mean it knows why.”

Shard looked at him with sudden grief. “Keep saying things it did not give you.”

“Such as?”

“Anything you chose.”

Everywhere, the same idea:

“The Doctor finishes the sentence.”

The words appeared on every clock in handwriting borrowed from different lives. Some were the Doctor's. Some belonged to companions. One line used Tavi's orange paint. The appropriation angered him, but anger was another route the chamber had prepared.

He spoke carefully. “The Doctor is not the only person in this room, and finishing is not neutral.”

The statement did not vanish. It gained a footnote: OBJECTION ANTICIPATED.

Cal laughed once. “It pre-wrote the protest.”

Ava switched off the recorder. “Then we stop performing for it.”

⸻

The Doctor backed away.

“No,” he said. “That’s not how this ends.”

The refusal was immediate, but not solitary. Ava cut power to the bench. Shard kicked the oldest clock away from the thread. Cal placed the red ball on the chalk line, an object with a history the chamber had not fully consumed.

For a moment the white light divided around their interventions. Multiple consequences competed for the same cause. The city beyond the chamber flickered between evacuation, ruin and an ordinary evening that might never have happened.

The Doctor did not declare victory. “Back to the TARDIS. We have enough to know this test is coercive.”

The exit door had already become a wall.

The thread pulsed again.

Time stuttered.

Shard moved first. She drove the scorched sonic into the clock nearest the door and opened a gap wide enough for one person. Ava shoved Cal towards it. Cal resisted long enough to throw the red ball through first.

It came back from behind them.

The chamber had folded the exit into its premise. Every escape route ended at the thread unless somebody occupied the missing consequence on the monitor.

Cal looked down at his watch. Ava saw the thought arrive and seized his sleeve.

“No,” she said. “You do not volunteer to make its prediction true.”

“I wasn't.”

He was telling the truth. The mechanism chose him anyway.

Suddenly—Cal was gone.

Just gone.

His sleeve emptied inside Ava's fist. The cloth did not remain; her hand closed on air already cooling. The red ball struck the floor once, and the sound arrived from farther away than the chamber walls.

Shard shouted a coordinate. Ava entered it into the dead recorder by muscle memory, refusing to let the absence pass without a witness. The recorder displayed NO SUBJECT.

The Doctor crossed the chalk line at last, not to touch the thread but to stand where Cal had been. The future footprints were gone. So was Cal's name from the watch lying open on the floor.

No transition.

No scream.

No ripple.

Just gone.

Ava shouted.

“Cal!”

The name held for the length of her breath. The clocks tried to replace it with PASSENGER and then with nothing. Ava repeated it, louder, adding what she could verify: he had carried a red ball; he had scratched out her name when asked; he had refused to volunteer.

Shard joined her with a fact from the pier: Cal had lent her a wrench and demanded it back. The Doctor remembered Europa, the moon, the choice to keep contradictory memories. Each detail weakened as they spoke, as though the chamber were retracting its supporting clauses.

The Doctor turned.

And saw something else:

A signature forming at the end of the thread.

At first it resembled the Doctor's title. Then the strokes changed, drawing on an older motion his hand remembered without locating. Recognition came as grief before it came as knowledge.

He did not read the name aloud. The pressure to do so was built into every clock face, every future footprint and the hollow space beside Ava. Silence might be the Spiral's food; speech on its terms might be the cause it required.

The Doctor held both dangers without pretending one cancelled the other.

Not in ink.

But in regret.

The mark was not ink or light. It was the physical sensation of a decision postponed until postponement became a decision of its own. The Doctor had carried that shape for so long it felt native.

Ava caught his arm. “Who is it?”

He looked at her, then at the empty place the room insisted had never held anyone. He could still remember that someone was missing. He could no longer reach the name.

“I don't know,” he said, and hated the answer because it was honest.

⸻

He whispered:

“We’re inside a Spiral hypothesis.”

“A test story, written ahead of itself.”

Shard gathered the papers before the clocks could erase them. The experiment records now contained blank spaces where Cal's notes had been. Ava held the mechanical watch, though she could not say whose wrist it fitted.

“Then reject the hypothesis,” she said.

“We are inside its evidence,” the Doctor replied. “Rejecting it is not the same as getting him back.”

The pronoun startled them both. For one instant the missing person had a shape again.

“And Cal… was part of the clause I refused to speak.”

The name cost him breath. Ava repeated it before the chamber could take it, writing CAL across the back of Tavi's ballot rubbing. Shard opened the gap in the wall again, but beyond it waited the TARDIS console room with one place already empty.

The white thread drew the unfinished signature tighter. Somewhere beyond sequence, a cause was waiting to be acknowledged. The Doctor would not call that cause destiny, and he would not purchase Cal's return by speaking blindly.

He took the paper bearing Cal's name.

The letters faded while he watched. Ava said the name once more; the first syllable held, the second lost its referent, and then she could not remember what she had been trying to preserve. Shard's experiment sheets shed every Cal-specific note. The watch remained, but its scratched witness line had become an empty groove.

What the chamber could not retract was the pressure of an absence. Ava kept looking towards the space beside her. The Doctor held a blank piece of paper and knew it had mattered to someone, though he could no longer say who.

Chapter Eleven

The Memory of a Sentence

There was no record of Cal's disappearance. The name had gone with the event, leaving the Doctor and Ava in the console room with evidence they could no longer explain.

Ava held a mechanical watch. Its case lay open across her palm, and an empty groove marked the place where someone had scratched the metal. She did not know whose wrist it fitted. When she tried to put it down, her hand refused to complete the movement.

The paper in the Doctor's hand was blank on one side. On the other, part of Tavi's ballot rubbing remained. Ava recognised the orange-edged impression and remembered keeping it. Something had been written across its back afterwards. She could remember the pressure of a pencil without remembering the letters.

She looked towards the doors. They had closed behind them. Shard was no longer in the room; Ava could recall her opening a way out of the clock chamber, but the order in which they had crossed it would not settle. Every attempt to count the travellers ended with the uncomfortable certainty that she had stopped too soon.

The TARDIS log showed two people returning. It did not contain a warning about a lost passenger. Ava scrolled back through the preceding entries, looking for a gap wide enough to hold one. The line spacing stayed even.

She opened the damaged sentence-chain they had captured from the Spiral. There were blanks there, but she could not distinguish an erased person from all the other things the transmission had failed to say. She copied one fragment into a new field. The copy shortened before she finished selecting it.

The ship tried to process the disturbance as a loss. A low tone sounded, the beginning of an alert Ava knew from damaged equipment and rooms which would no longer open. Then it stopped. There was no death to register. A person had been removed from the account of what had happened, and the system could not mourn a passenger it could not establish had travelled.

Ava shut the log. The absence remained. It occupied a particular place beside the console, close enough that she turned to speak into it before she knew what she meant to say.

She took her sonic from its storage recess. This was her own device, intact, without the scorch she had seen on the older one Shard carried. The familiar weight steadied her until she realised she had no idea what frequency would find a person whose name she could not remember.

She tried the ship's most recent memory paths. Blue lines rose on the display, branched and ended. The sonic followed them into their stored associations. A route to the kitchen brought up cups, a shopping list and an instruction to replace a cracked hinge. Ava recognised all of it and none of what she needed.

She widened the search. The screen filled with doors. Some opened onto rooms she knew. Others produced a burst of cold air through the console vents, as though the TARDIS had mistaken the inquiry for an instruction to let something in.

“Bring him back!” she shouted.

Her voice surprised her. The word him had arrived without a name, certain in a way none of the records was certain. She gripped the watch and repeated it, less loudly, trying to keep that much from disappearing.

The sonic found a narrow return. For an instant the display suggested a human outline, then filled it with her own recorded movements from the previous day. Ava recoiled. She had asked the search to complete an absence, and it was offering the nearest shape it could build from what remained.

She stopped the scan before the outline acquired a face.

The Doctor had not moved from the entrance to the inner corridors. His hand rested against the frame. Ava could see a small tremor in his fingers. She wanted that tremor to mean he was doing something difficult and useful, holding a fragile path open, resisting a force she could not see. He was only standing there.

“You knew, didn't you?”

He looked at the sonic, then at the blank paper he still held.

“You knew this would happen.”

“No.” His answer was immediate and inadequate. “I did not know he would be taken.”

“But you know something.”

He could have described the chain, the coerced consequence and the signature in the clock chamber. Those were things she had seen. He could have used their complexity to occupy the space where her question waited. For a moment he almost did.

“I've seen this before,” he said.

Ava lowered the sonic. The relief she had expected did not come. Recognition had been available to him while she tore through the records, and he had let her mistake his silence for work.

“How long have you known that?”

“Known isn't quite the word.”

“Then find the word after you've told me.”

He pressed his thumb against the paper until it bent. There was an old motion underneath the missing signature, a shape his hand remembered. He had not recognised the person at first. He had recognised his own refusal to remember.

“Since the mark began to close,” he said. “I didn't know what it would cost us to leave it unfinished. I knew that I had left something unfinished before.”

“And you said nothing.”

“Yes.”

Ava put the sonic down, keeping it within reach. “Show me.”

The Doctor turned into the corridor. He took three steps and stopped. The route he expected was not there. A storeroom occupied the place where he remembered a downward stair, and beyond it the wall curved towards the swimming pool. He touched neither door.

“Take me to the Unwritten Archive,” he said.

The TARDIS hesitated. The lights dimmed along one side of the passage. Ava heard water moving somewhere much farther away than the pool should have been. The Doctor waited with his head lowered, as though asking a question of someone who had good reason not to answer.

Ava joined him. “Is this another place you sealed?”

“I don't remember sealing it.”

“That's becoming less reassuring.”

“I know.”

The storeroom door opened a few centimetres. Behind it was no storeroom. A flight of shallow stairs descended into warm darkness. Dust lay along the edges, untouched where a person's feet would normally have carried it away.

The Doctor stepped back so Ava could see. “You don't have to come.”

She held up the watch. “I am already in whatever this is. I want to see the part you aren't showing me.”

They went down together. At the bottom, the stair changed direction twice without taking them beneath the corridor they had left. Ava kept one hand on the rail. Its surface was smooth until the final turn, where she felt a notch beneath her fingers. She stopped to look. When the light reached it, the notch had gone.

The Doctor started to explain the ship's internal geometry. Ava shook her head. She knew an explanation could be true and still serve as a way of not speaking about the thing they were approaching.

A door waited at the end. It had no lock, handle or label. The Doctor put the blank ballot rubbing on the floor beside it, leaving both hands empty. The TARDIS opened it only after he had done so.

Inside stood a single pedestal. The room was too small for the distance they had travelled. A page lay on the pedestal, held flat without glass or weights. There was no shelf of forgotten lives, no index with which to make the discovery manageable. Only this one object, and a sentence burned into it.

Ava leaned close enough to read without touching it.

“If I ever say his name, the Spiral begins.”

The letters had darkened the fibres rather than sat on them. Around each stroke, the page remained pale. Ava looked for a date or a signature. There was none she could see.

“That's you, isn't it? You wrote that?”

The Doctor nodded. His brown eyes looked almost colourless in the light coming from the page. He took off his glasses and folded them carefully, buying himself a movement with a beginning and an end.

“Long ago.”

“Before this journey?”

“Yes.”

“Before you met me?”

“Yes.”

Ava stood upright. The question she wanted to ask had become too large. She settled for the one the page could support. “Is that a warning, or something you made happen by writing it?”

“I don't know how to separate them now.”

“Try.”

He looked at the sentence. The old act returned unevenly: the pressure of choosing silence, the relief which followed it, the conviction that relief proved he had contained a danger. He had faced something he could not destroy. Instead of remaining with the problem, he had made a rule about what he would never say.

He could remember making the rule more clearly than he could remember the circumstances which justified it. That imbalance frightened him. For a long time he had treated the missing details as evidence of how terrible they must have been. They might also be evidence of how thoroughly he had chosen not to examine them.

“I buried a name,” he said. “A person. I called the silence protection because that let me stop looking at what it protected me from.”

Ava glanced at the watch. “And someone else is paying for it.”

“Yes.”

“Who was the person you buried?”

His lips moved before he could answer. The page brightened at the first shape of a sound. Ava stepped back. The light faded, leaving the sentence as it had been.

“Someone real,” he said. “Not an equation I can cancel.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“No. It is the part I can say without pretending I am ready to say the rest.”

Ava walked around the pedestal. The sentence could be read from either side, although the page had not turned. On the far edge, the fibres rose slightly beneath an indentation which did not form a letter. She looked away and found herself remembering the outline on the console display, the way her own movements had been borrowed to fill an empty place.

She had stopped that substitution. Here, she wondered whether the Doctor had made a more permanent version of the same mistake: fitted a rule over a person until the rule was easier to keep than the memory.

“This is where it started,” she said.

“The Spiral doesn't need lies. Just omissions. Things too painful to speak. Stories too dangerous to end.”

“Does it need all of them?”

He looked at her.

“Every thing anyone has ever been unable to say? Or this one?”

He had made the danger vast because vastness gave him somewhere to hide within it. Ava kept her finger beside the single line. One person had written it. A specific silence had been preserved here.

“This one is mine,” he said.

She touched the edge of the page. It was warm. Beneath her fingertip, a shallow groove formed and vanished. For a moment she remembered a hand holding a watch open while another hand scratched a name into its case.

The recollection did not restore the scene around it. There was no face, no voice she could place. But a short name reached her with the movement, precarious and complete.

“Cal,” she said.

The Doctor looked up sharply.

Ava pressed the watch against her chest. “I don't know if I've remembered that or if this thing wants me to say it.”

“Neither do I.”

She repeated it once, without commanding anything to appear. The groove in the watch remained empty. No matching record emerged. She would not call the name proof, but she would not throw it away merely because certainty had become impossible.

“Then let's finish it,” she said.

The Doctor shook his head. “If we do, we name the Spiral.”

“But if we don't, we lose Cal.”

The name almost slipped away in the saying. She held onto the fact that it had mattered, even as the remembered hand faded. The Doctor could hear a particular person beginning to return to the pronoun he had been using. That small recovery made the choice harder. It did not make the page safe.

Ava drew back from it. “I'm not telling you the cost doesn't matter. I'm asking what keeping silent does now. You don't get to call that the empty option.”

He looked at her for a long time. She was furious, frightened and unwilling to become the person who gave him permission to stop thinking. He had wanted, without admitting it, a command clear enough that he could obey it and leave part of the responsibility with her.

“What happens if you burn the page?” she asked.

“I don't know. The omission doesn't live only in the paper.”

“If you say the name somewhere else?”

“I would still be the person saying it.”

“If you let me say it?”

He shook his head. “I won't put a name into your mouth so I can remain the one who hasn't spoken.”

“Good,” she said. “Then at least we can stop trying that.”

The TARDIS groaned. A seam appeared in the wall behind the pedestal, opening onto the stair they had just descended. For a moment Ava could see herself on it, one hand touching the rail. The other Ava took a step down. The room grew smaller around both versions of her arrival.

The sentence was closing. Its final mark darkened, and the blank space after it narrowed until the fibres seemed pressed together. The Doctor did not know what would remain when the line could no longer admit another reading. He knew they did not have time to search the ship for a version of the decision which would ask nothing of him.

He moved towards the pedestal. Ava caught his sleeve.

“Tell me what you're doing.”

“Remembering the person I put behind that condition. And saying the name.”

“Will it bring him back?”

“I believe the omission is holding the retraction in place. I cannot promise what acknowledging it will release.”

She let go of his sleeve slowly. “I want you to do it. I need you to know that wanting it isn't proof.”

“I know.”

He set his glasses on the floor, far enough from the seam that they would not be caught if the wall moved again. It was a small, almost absurd act of care. Ava watched him do it and understood that he was afraid in a way which left room for ordinary things.

He had learnt to approach danger through countless kinds of work. Some of that experience urged him to seize the moment before it vanished. Some urged him to contain every consequence before acting. The parts of his life which had once made those positions seem separate could no longer excuse one another. They met in the same hand when he laid it on the page.

He could not make the past complete enough to act without risk. He could stop assigning the cost of his silence to someone whose place beside them had become a blank.

The page resisted his palm, not with force but with the sensation that he had already lifted it away. He kept contact. The old relief offered itself again: say nothing, preserve the boundary, let the forbidden name remain somebody else's problem.

Ava stood beside the door. She had chosen a place from which she could reach him or the corridor. She did not close her eyes.

The Doctor spoke one word.

Ava saw the movement of his mouth and heard nothing she could retain. It was not silence. Something had been said. Her mind reached towards the shape of it and came back without a syllable.

The TARDIS refused to record it. The small status light above the door went dark before the sound ended. On the page, the burned condition loosened around his hand. The letters remained visible, but no longer seemed to hold the entire room in their order.

For one breath the pressure stopped. Even the Spiral seemed to pause at what it had been given. Then the pedestal shifted under his palm and the floor folded towards the doorway.

Ava caught the frame. The Doctor reached for her, missed her sleeve and caught her hand instead. They crossed the threshold together as the stair rose to meet them. His glasses slid after them across the tilting floor. Ava trapped them beneath her boot without putting her weight down.

The corridor returned in pieces: the rail, the storeroom door, a strip of console light. Ava could not tell whether they climbed or the ship brought the upper deck towards them. She kept hold of the Doctor until they were standing at the console-room entrance, her other hand closed around his glasses and the watch.

The Archive door was no longer visible. Neither of them went looking for it.

The air folded beside the console. Ava stepped towards it before she knew why. The empty place acquired an edge, then movement, and Cal fell backwards out of it with a confused scream.

He struck the floor hard enough to knock the breath from him. Ava dropped to her knees and caught his shoulder before his head hit the lower step. He stared at her, drawing air in short, startled pulls.

“Ava?”

The sound of her name in his voice restored more than the page had. His face was there with it: impatience, jokes she could not yet place, a man who had stood beside her while she tried to decide which of her own memories she could trust. The recollections returned out of order. She did not wait for them to make a complete account.

“You're back. You're okay. You're—”

“What happened?”

She stopped. She had been holding his arm too tightly. He looked from her hand to the Doctor at the corridor entrance, then down at himself as though checking whether anything had been left behind.

“I don't know how to tell it yet,” she said. “You disappeared. We couldn't keep hold of who we'd lost.”

Cal put a hand against the floor. “I was standing.”

“Yes.”

“Then I wasn't.”

Ava moved enough to let him sit without leaning against her. His breathing slowed. He asked for a moment, and she gave him one, though every part of her wanted to keep talking until no silence remained large enough to take him again.

The Doctor knelt on the other side. He asked before checking Cal's pulse. Cal held out his wrist, still looking at the place in the air through which he had fallen. There was no wound to close and no explanation the Doctor could responsibly place over all of what had happened.

Ava opened her hand. “I think this is yours.”

Cal looked at the watch. Recognition arrived before he touched it. “Where did you find it?”

“I brought it out.” She paused. “I didn't know why.”

He took it from her. The scratched groove remained empty. His return had not obligingly repaired every surface on which they had tried to keep him. Ava looked towards the console log, then left it closed. He was sitting beside her. The records could wait until he was ready to be asked about them.

The Doctor rose slowly. Ava stood with him, leaving Cal supported against the step. For the first time since they entered the Archive, she could hear the ordinary machinery beneath the console.

“What did you do?” Cal asked.

The Doctor looked at him. “I remembered something I never wanted to.”

Cal waited for more. The Doctor did not give him a history whose missing pieces he might mistake for certainty. He explained only that he had spoken a name, that it belonged to an omission he had made, and that the Spiral had responded. Cal had not volunteered for the retraction. The Doctor made that part clear.

“Was it my name?”

“No.”

“Then whose?”

The Doctor could still feel the page against his palm. He looked down at his empty hand.

“I'm not ready to give you a complete answer.”

Ava stiffened. He saw it and stayed where he was.

“That is not a request for you to stop asking,” he added. “And it isn't a promise that silence has made us safe.”

Cal turned the watch over. “You can start with what I need to know before the next thing happens.”

“The Spiral has changed. What I spoke has given it something it was missing.”

“Something good?”

“I don't know.”

Ava handed the Doctor his glasses. He accepted them without putting them on. She was relieved, and the relief was so strong that she could feel how easily it might swallow the anger which had brought them downstairs. She wanted to thank him. She also wanted him to remember that she had needed to force a question past his silence.

Both could remain. She sat beside Cal and asked whether he wanted water. He did. The answer was ordinary enough that she almost cried on the way to the kitchen.

Beyond the TARDIS, the Spiral's disturbance spread through the vortex. The ship altered her course without presenting coordinates. In the console room the Doctor felt the change through the soles of his boots and set a hand against the rail.

He had acknowledged the origin. He had not ended what had grown from it.

The force taking shape outside was no longer satisfied with gaps in a sentence. Recognition gathered its scattered possibilities around the person whose name had been spoken. A shoulder, the turn of a head, the suggestion of a human figure appeared within the shifting current and vanished before the scanner could fix it.

The Doctor did not see a completed face. What reached him was older and less merciful than an image: the knowledge that he had once loved the man who was beginning to coalesce, and had never forgiven him.

Behind him, Cal accepted the water from Ava. The glass touched the railing with a small, clear sound. The Doctor stayed facing the console until he could turn towards them without pretending that bringing one person back had finished the account.

Chapter Twelve

That Which Remembers the Doctor

The moon was dead.

No light showed on its near face. No heat moved beneath the crust. It turned around a star whose spectrum made the TARDIS instruments disagree about events they had recorded only seconds before.

The first scan called the star ordinary. The second insisted it consumed memory instead of hydrogen. On the third, the earlier readings remained in the buffer, but the console could no longer explain why they contradicted one another.

Across the moon's terminator, dust shifted.

A hand broke through the frozen surface. Its fingers opened once, closed on nothing and dragged an arm into the dark. A shoulder followed. Then a man pulled himself out of the crust as though the moon had remembered burying him and changed its mind.

He lay still while frost formed across his clothes. There was no air to carry his first breath, yet his chest rose sharply. The sound reached no microphone. It appeared instead in the TARDIS translation buffer, rendered as a gasp with no source.

The Spiral had shaped a body from fragments: abandoned versions of events, damaged testimony and the pressure left by a name the Doctor had buried. That was what the moon's grammar claimed. The claim described the man before he could describe himself.

He pressed both palms into the dust and rejected not the body or the waking, but the sentence which made his existence belong to the Spiral.

He raised his head. The sky held one colour, black laid over black, with the hard white point of the star behind him. Something moved across his face like the shadow of writing.

“Theta,” he whispered.

The name travelled without air and found the TARDIS.

⸻

The ship rattled around Cal.

He had been walking the console in circles because standing still allowed the missing interval to catch up with him. He remembered falling upward in the clock chamber. He remembered Ava reaching for him. He remembered the Doctor making a choice which produced no sound Cal could keep.

After that came two returns.

In one, he had struck the floor beside the console and vomited from the shock of being present. In the other, he had woken on the room's far side with his hand already around the mechanical watch. Both memories ended in this moment. Neither admitted being false.

He stopped beside the rail.

“How many times have I asked whether I'm real?”

Ava did not turn from the scanner. “Three.”

“How many times have you answered?”

“Twice.”

Cal considered that. “What did you say the first time?”

“That I didn't know.”

“And the second?”

“That nobody gets to use uncertainty as permission to take you apart.”

He nodded slowly. It sounded like her. That was not proof, but it was something he could test against the next minute.

The watch lay open on the console. Its empty groove remained empty. The TARDIS now accepted that Cal had travelled with them, although several logs placed him half a metre to the left of anywhere he remembered standing. His room had returned with his clothes folded in the wrong drawers. A mug in the kitchen carried a chip that he recognised and a colour he did not.

He had been erased, then written again. This time, one regret seemed to be missing, and Cal tried to find which one.

The absence did not feel like forgiveness. It felt like a tooth touched by anaesthetic: present, important and impossible to locate precisely. He could remember his father in the shed. He could remember Europa, the Accord Node and every moment he had mistaken compliance for safety. He could remember being angry with the Doctor.

He could not remember one decision that had once kept him awake for weeks. He could trace the shape of its consequences, but not the choice itself.

“There's a piece gone,” he said.

Ava marked the statement in the paper notebook she had begun keeping beside the console. The ship could alter a record. Ink could also be changed, but the friction of writing made the change visible to a hand.

“Does the missing piece make you want anything you didn't want before?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Then we don't let it decide for you.”

Cal gave a humourless laugh. “You make that sound like a rule.”

“It's a temporary procedure. Rules are what he uses when he wants fear to look architectural.”

She glanced towards the inner doors.

The Doctor had left them after Cal's return. He had checked Cal's pupils, pulse and ability to refuse treatment. He had listened to Ava describe the Archive. Then he had gone to the wardrobe room without saying where the Spiral's new pressure was pointing.

Ava had let him go for eleven minutes.

On the twelfth, she locked out the controls he would need to launch the ship alone.

The scanner chimed.

One line appeared:

THETA

Ava copied it into the notebook. Before the pen left the page, the display cleared and replaced the word with a spectral analysis of an unremarkable star.

Cal leaned over her shoulder. “Did you hear it?”

“I saw it.”

“That's not what I asked.”

She had heard nothing through the room. Somewhere behind thought, however, a voice had formed the first consonant with painful familiarity.

“I don't know,” she said.

The TARDIS lurched. The time rotor descended halfway and stopped. Around the console, instruments switched from navigation to biographical search without anyone touching them.

The central screen filled with a profile.

AVA REYES.

Age: twenty-eight.

Height: five feet six.

Hair: dark chestnut, short and choppy. Eyes: grey-hazel, with gold flecks when backlit. Physique: slim, rangy. Scars: undisclosed. Accent origin: San Diego; raised in orbit above Proxima b.

Ava read far enough to understand the tactic, then pulled the monitor cable from its socket. The profile remained.

Cal moved to the power relay.

“Don't,” she said. “Not until we know whether cutting it traps the text here.”

The next line appeared.

REYES IS NOT HER BIRTH NAME.

Cal looked away from the screen. “You don't have to tell me whether that's true.”

“It is.”

The ship groaned around them. Letters moved beneath the glass, waiting.

Ava picked up the notebook. Her hand had begun to shake. She wrote the next words before the machine could present them.

My surname was Song.

The screen produced the same statement a moment later, followed by two denials:

NOT MELODY.

NOT RIVER.

JUST SONG.

The names were designed to turn a history into a comparison. Ava disliked the manipulation more than she disliked Cal seeing the facts.

“My mother was Lena Song,” she said. “She was a linguistic xenopsychologist. She worked on languages that changed the people using them, and she died deciphering one that spoke only in the future tense.”

Cal kept his attention on Ava rather than the display. “Do you want me to know this?”

“I want to choose the sentence before that thing chooses it for me.”

She wrote her mother's name.

The console responded with a sound like a tuning fork touched against bone.

Ava's sonic vibrated in its recess.

⸻

The Doctor stood in the wardrobe room before a mirror which had begun to show the dead moon behind him.

He wore a charcoal canvas coat with copper lining and pockets repaired at three different dates. He had not chosen it for years. His hands had found it before his associative memory supplied the places it belonged: a field hospital without a roof; copper dust inside a broken console; a man laughing because the Doctor had mistaken surrender for patience.

The images were impressions, not a reliable sequence. He knew that. The knowledge did not make them harmless.

In the mirror, faint grey marked his temples and white hairs crossed his chin. He did not look broken. He looked unfinished.

The moon's reflected surface cracked.

A figure stood on the other side of the glass. Brown-skinned, lean, a scar curving over one shoulder where his torn clothing exposed it. His smile had once made danger seem like a shared joke. Now he did not smile.

The Doctor touched the mirror.

The figure copied him a fraction too late.

“Who are you?” the Doctor asked.

The reflected mouth answered, but no sound crossed.

Memory offered three names. One belonged to a soldier the Doctor had treated. One belonged to a city destroyed before the soldier was born. The third dissolved whenever he tried to hold it.

He removed his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of his shirt. The delay was deliberate. It did not become wisdom merely because it was familiar.

Behind him, Ava opened the wardrobe-room door.

“The ship is reading my life aloud.”

The Doctor put his glasses back on. The moon vanished from the mirror, leaving his own face and Ava's reflection behind him.

“How much?”

“Enough that you don't get to begin with a technical explanation.”

He turned.

Cal waited in the corridor, one hand braced against the wall. His face was pale, but he had come by choice.

Ava held the paper notebook against her chest. Her sonic was in her other hand. It was not the compact instrument she had taken from the TARDIS stores. This one resembled a tuning fork with a narrow handle, its two prongs joined by a web of fine circuitry. She had kept it folded inside the sonic casing where the Doctor had not thought to look.

“My mother left me this,” she said. “The rest of the profile is going to tell him, so I'm telling him first.”

The Doctor recognised the device. Recognition came as work performed by his own hands and as a report written by someone else. He could not establish which arrived first.

“May I scan it?”

“No.”

He nodded.

Cal looked between them. “Good start.”

Ava continued. “I was sixteen when I activated it by accident. It called a ship across time.”

“The TARDIS?” Cal asked.

“No. Something like her. Smaller. Wrong. It opened its door away from me, into the room rather than out of it. I saw a corridor and someone running at the far end. Then the ship collapsed into its own arrival signal.”

She had never described that much aloud. The memory had resisted ordinary chronology. Sometimes the door appeared before the tuning fork sounded. Sometimes her mother stood beside her, though Lena had already died. Ava had learnt to retain what repeated across the versions: the device, the reverse-opening door and a ship which failed.

The Doctor kept his hands at his sides.

“I built a prototype during a war,” he said. “Or I helped build one. Its translation system treated destination as a relationship rather than a place.”

“You abandoned it.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He saw the reflected figure again, this time leaning over a console with blood on his knuckles.

“Because it began navigating towards people who remembered one another. It could turn grief into coordinates. In a war, that made every loss a weapon.”

Cal's fingers tightened against the wall. “And you left it where somebody could retrieve it.”

“I believed I had destroyed its capacity to travel.”

“Believed?”

“I remember disabling it. I also remember discovering later that I had disabled the wrong system. Those memories do not agree.”

Ava lifted the tuning fork. “My mother had part of it.”

“Your mother may have recovered a component. Someone may have given it to her. The Spiral may be using a resemblance to make both of us claim a history it assembled.”

“All possible,” Ava said. “None of those possibilities mean we ignore what it did when I was sixteen.”

The tuning fork sounded again.

This time the note came from the inner corridors.

The TARDIS lights dimmed in sequence towards the console room, offering a route.

The Doctor looked at Ava. “You locked the launch controls.”

“Correct.”

“Keep them locked until we choose together.”

It was less than an apology. It was also a decision he might once have avoided by reaching the console first.

They returned together, but Ava stopped before the console-room threshold.

“We test it before it becomes part of the navigation system.”

The Doctor looked at the tuning fork. “The nearest isolated room is the acoustic laboratory.”

“You have an acoustic laboratory?”

“The ship had opinions about bagpipes.”

Cal almost smiled. The expression failed halfway, but the attempt belonged to him.

The laboratory occupied a door which had previously opened onto a linen cupboard. Its walls were layered with dark panels, each separated by a strip of copper. A circular platform stood at the centre beneath a mechanical needle designed to draw sound as a groove in wax.

Ava placed the tuning fork on the platform herself.

The Doctor waited outside the copper ring. Cal took the chair beside the recording drum and checked that its motion was mechanical rather than linked to the TARDIS memory systems.

“Baseline,” Ava said.

Cal turned the handle. The wax cylinder rotated. Its needle drew a straight line.

Ava sounded the fork once against the heel of her hand.

The note was too low to hear. She felt it in her wrist and teeth. On the wax, the needle cut three separate tracks despite having only one point.

The first track ended immediately; the second formed a loop and crossed itself; the third travelled backwards through the line already cut for the baseline.

The laboratory door opened behind the Doctor. Beyond it was not the corridor. Ava saw the dead moon, close enough for the dust to have texture.

A figure moved near the broken craft.

The Doctor took one step towards the opening.

Ava caught the tuning fork and closed her fist around its prongs. The note stopped. The false doorway remained.

“Doctor.”

He did not answer.

Cal left the recording drum and put himself between the Doctor and the threshold. He was still unsteady. He did it anyway.

“Tell us what you see.”

“Someone waiting.”

“That's an interpretation. What do you see?”

The question made the Doctor focus on the edge of the door. “Grey dust. A damaged hull. A human figure thirty metres from it.”

“Do you recognise him?”

The Doctor's first answer lodged behind his teeth. Ava watched the familiar struggle between precision and concealment.

“I recognise wanting to,” he said.

The doorway advanced half a metre into the laboratory. Frost formed across the copper ring. It carried no cold when Ava touched the floor beside it.

She pressed the watch into Cal's hand. “Does it change?”

He opened the case. The second hand moved forward twice, stopped, then resumed at its earlier position.

“It responds,” he said. “That doesn't mean the door is where it claims.”

Ava held the tuning fork away from the opening. The third groove on the wax deepened without the cylinder turning.

“The device isn't calling the moon,” she said. “It's calling the relationship he has with whoever is there.”

The Doctor looked from the doorway to the old instrument.

“That was the prototype's failure,” he said. “It confused emotional salience with navigational certainty. The stronger the loss, the more confidently it presented the route.”

“Then why did it answer me at sixteen?”

He did not try to take the question from her. “Either you were connected to someone aboard, or it used my connection to the device and reached through you. I don't know which.”

The distinction mattered. One explanation placed a stranger in Ava's childhood. The other made her collateral to the Doctor's unfinished history. Neither belonged to him to choose without evidence.

Cal pointed at the wax. “We have a physical record of three responses. Can the Spiral rewrite wax?”

“Probably,” the Doctor said.

“Good. I was worried we'd accidentally found certainty.”

Ava lifted the cylinder from the drum. She scored a small cross beside the three tracks with her thumbnail and handed it to Cal.

“You carry this. I carry the fork. He carries neither.”

The Doctor accepted the boundary.

Ava shut the laboratory door. The moon narrowed to a black line and disappeared. When she opened the door again, the corridor had returned.

The test had not located a destination. It had shown them the means by which a destination was trying to become inevitable.

They returned to the console room together.

⸻

On the dead moon, the man tested his body against the world which claimed to have written it.

He could stand. He could feel cold although there was no atmosphere to carry it. Dust clung to his boots, then arranged itself into words describing the tread.

He scraped the words away.

A broken craft protruded from a ridge ahead. Its hull had folded around a black doorway. The craft was too small to be the TARDIS and too large to have crossed the distance implied by the crater around it. Copper seams ran beneath its skin.

He knew the ship.

He remembered repairing it with the Doctor.

He remembered watching it burn before they met.

He remembered a girl of sixteen sounding a tuning fork across centuries, her fear striking the prototype's relational engine like a beacon.

The memories arrived complete enough to be seductive. He refused to call them all his.

“Show me what survives contradiction,” he told the moon.

The Spiral answered by opening the craft.

Inside, the corridor led in the wrong direction. Its walls curved outward while the floor narrowed, an unfinished version of architecture the Doctor would later teach the TARDIS to reject. At the far end lay a console with three sockets.

One held the memory of a tuning fork, another held the Doctor's unfinished sentence, and the third was empty.

The man placed his hand over it and saw Ava Reyes before she was born.

He saw Lena Song studying a language that spoke only in future tense. In one memory she died deciphering it. In another she survived long enough to hide her daughter's surname. In a third she entrusted the tuning fork to a courier whose face the man recognised as his own.

The visions offered a route by which the Spiral wanted him to meet Ava. He would not mistake that invitation for his past.

He withdrew his hand.

The empty socket retained his palm print.

“No,” he said. “If she comes here, she comes as herself.”

The craft shuddered. A line of dust crossed the console and wrote a name he had once been given.

He wiped it away.

He called himself Ralen now.

It was not the name the Doctor had given him, but the one he had chosen afterwards. Even that certainty had edges. The Spiral could counterfeit confidence as easily as recollection. Choice had to be renewed in the present.

“Ralen,” he said again.

The corridor accepted it reluctantly.

He had been a companion once, a sharp-witted fighter who jumped before asking and then made the landing look planned. A scar crossed his shoulder and his smile had been too dangerous to be heroic. He had loved the Doctor, and the Doctor had loved him, both of them in silence until a war tore them apart.

Those statements might still contain omissions, but the grief beneath them belonged to him. The Spiral had not invented the way his body leaned towards the memory of brown eyes. It had merely learnt to feed on everything the two of them had refused to say.

Ralen returned to the moon's surface.

Above him, the star burned another reading out of the TARDIS buffer. The ship remained distant, but its attention touched the prototype through the tuning fork.

He remembered the Doctor saying, “If I ever lose you, I'll never finish the sentence.”

He also remembered answering, “Then don't make me a sentence.”

Only the first line appeared in the prototype's record.

That asymmetry told him more than either memory alone.

Ralen closed his eyes.

“Well, Doctor,” he said. “You're finishing it now.”

⸻

Inside the TARDIS, the dead moon occupied every screen.

The image had no stable timestamp. One display placed it twelve years after Ava first activated the tuning fork. Another placed it during the war the Doctor could not date. A third labelled it NOW and refused to translate the term.

A human figure stood beside a broken craft.

Cal watched from the safe side of the rail. Ava had retained the launch lock. The Doctor had connected no instrument to her tuning fork.

“Who is he?” she asked.

The Doctor's hand brushed the console in a motion too gentle for coincidence. The ship answered with a tremor of energy, and on the monitor the man looked up.

He could have said former companion, fighter, failure or beloved. Each word would have been true and insufficient. The old reflex urged him to keep the answer silent until he could control its consequences, while another impulse wanted to offer Ava a disclosure merely because the Spiral had taken hers. Neither impulse gave him the right words.

Ava waited without rescuing him from the question. The Doctor met her eyes, then looked back at the figure and did not answer.

The TARDIS recorded the silence.

Coordinates began to populate across the console. Ava checked them against the paper notebook and the tuning fork's physical vibration. Cal compared the destination with the watch, which gained seven seconds when the moon appeared and lost three when the distant man looked towards them.

“The watch is misbehaving consistently,” he said. “That's almost charming.”

“Repeatable enough for a controlled approach,” Ava said.

The Doctor did not touch the dematerialisation lever.

“Ava?”

She studied the figure, the broken prototype and the star which made instruments forget their own conclusions. The Spiral had exposed her history to force a route. Refusing the route would not restore her privacy. Taking it without conditions would reward the coercion.

She set the rules.

“No memory scan without consent. Mine, Cal's or his. We treat anything the Spiral shows us as a claim until somebody with the right to the memory confirms it. If the tuning fork starts choosing for me, we withdraw.”

“Agreed,” the Doctor said.

Cal lifted the watch. “And if I disappear again?”

Ava tore a page from the notebook and wrote his name three times. She gave one copy to him and one to the Doctor, then kept the third.

“We notice the space.”

Cal folded his page into his pocket. “Paper beats metaphysics.”

“Today it does,” Ava said.

Ava released the navigation lock.

The Doctor laid his hand on the lever but did not move it until both of them nodded.

The TARDIS entered the vortex.

Behind them, the wardrobe mirror showed the dead moon. Ahead, the prototype's reverse-opening door appeared as a fault in the scanner image. The two views did not align.

Somewhere between them waited a man shaped by genuine memory, counterfeit memory and choices he was still making.

The Spiral was calling its final witness.

Chapter Thirteen

The Eye of the Spiral

The planet had no surface.

Not in the sense that a landing party could trust. The TARDIS instruments found mass, gravity and a breathable atmosphere, but each reading depended on the question used to summon it. Ask where the ground began and the scanner returned a depth. Ask what the ground was made of and it returned a quotation from a survey nobody aboard had written.

Ava kept the paper notebook open beside the controls.

“Context,” she said. “It is made of context.”

Cal leaned over the mechanical watch. Its second hand moved normally while he looked at the console, then began measuring backwards when he faced the scanner. “That is not a material.”

“Neither is accusation. I have seen that support whole governments.”

The Doctor stood at the dematerialisation lever without touching it. On the main screen, the dead moon had become a pale mark inside a larger darkness. The man who called himself Ralen waited beside the broken prototype. The image did not show a route between them. It showed the reason the route wanted to exist.

“The navigation system says we have arrived,” the Doctor said.

“We have not landed,” Cal replied.

“Those statements appear to be compatible here.”

The TARDIS gave a low, uncertain note. The time rotor descended by less than a centimetre and stopped. A quotation mark flashed across every display. Then a second mark appeared, facing the first.

Between them, the console room changed pressure.

The outer door opened.

Beyond it lay no platform, crater or visible horizon. A narrow strip of dark ground extended into a sky which kept deciding whether to be above them. For one breath it formed a dome. For the next it became a tunnel lined with distant points of light. Then the whole view flattened into something like cracked parchment.

The Doctor reached for his sonic.

Ava put her hand over the launch controls. “Before we step through: withdrawal signal.”

“The tuning fork stops,” Cal said.

“The tuning fork can be made to stop by something else. I want a choice the Spiral cannot imitate by cutting a sound.”

She took red thread from the repair drawer, measured three lengths and knotted one loosely around each of their wrists. Then she joined the free ends so that a line ran from Ava to Cal, Cal to the Doctor and the Doctor back to Ava. It would not guide them through an impossible landscape, but its pressure could be checked without asking a screen what was real.

“Two pulls means stop,” she said. “Three means return to the TARDIS. Nobody overrides three because the scenery has become emotionally persuasive.”

The Doctor tested his knot. “Including me.”

“Especially you.”

Cal closed the watch and slipped it into his pocket. “Paper, string and an antique clock. We are extremely advanced.”

“We are using instruments that admit what they are,” Ava said.

She stepped through first.

The TARDIS did not land with a thud or materialisation. The world accepted the ship with a flicker, a pause and a breath in the middle of a thought.

⸻

The ground felt firm beneath Ava’s boots until she looked down. Then she saw lines moving under a translucent skin, each one revising the description of her weight.

She looked ahead instead.

Her unease shaped the sky into cracked parchment. Splits ran across it without widening, and behind them waited a darkness too deliberate to be night. When Cal emerged, the cracks straightened into trenches. Low walls appeared at angles across a blasted field. No soldiers occupied them, but the empty positions made Cal’s shoulders rise as if he had heard a command.

“Battlefield,” he said.

“Do you recognise it?” Ava asked.

“Several. None exactly.”

He took one step sideways. The nearest trench followed him.

The Doctor came through last.

The parchment and battlefield vanished. A corridor extended from the TARDIS doors, floored in dark stone and lit by lamps set into red walls. A locked room stood at its far end.

The Doctor’s fingers curled tightly around his sonic.

“Gallifrey?” Ava asked.

He studied the floor rather than the door. “A corridor on Gallifrey. Or an argument using one.”

“What is in the room?”

“I never opened it.”

Cal touched the thread at his wrist. “You remember refusing?”

“I remember being forbidden. I remember deciding the prohibition was sensible. I remember breaking the lock and finding the room empty.” He looked towards the impossible door. “Those recollections cannot all describe the same visit.”

The corridor shortened.

Ava felt the thread pull once as Cal adjusted his stance. Physical pressure. Present company. She wrote their observations in the notebook.

Parchment. Battlefield. Gallifreyan corridor. Responsive to observer. Contradiction increases approach.

When she finished the last word, the ink lifted from the page and hung in the air.

Cal snatched the notebook before the sentence could leave entirely. Ava closed it between both hands. The ink settled back onto the paper in a different order.

Approach increases contradiction.

“That was not what I wrote,” she said.

The Doctor did not reach for the book. “But it may be a useful correction.”

“A useful correction is still an alteration.”

A voice moved through the landscape.

“The Eye sees what you don’t say.”

It came from the end of the corridor and from the trenches and from the narrow gaps in the parchment sky. The words pressed no command into Ava’s mind. They simply made every silence feel observable.

Ralen stepped from the air.

Not from behind an object or along a hidden path. One moment the space before them implied that someone was absent; the next the implication had a body.

He was brown-skinned and lean, with a scar curving over one exposed shoulder. His clothes had become long layers of dark cloth threaded with pale marks. The marks resembled abandoned pronouns in a dozen languages, though none remained legible when Ava looked directly at them. Meanings trailed behind him like shadows and then returned to the fabric.

His presence was larger than his body only because the world kept offering commentary. Beneath it he looked tired, cold and stubbornly human.

The Doctor did not run. He did not flinch or raise the sonic.

He stepped forward and said the name he had buried.

“Ralen.”

The planet stopped revising itself.

Ava felt the name through the soles of her boots. Cal’s watch chimed once inside his pocket. Across the sky, the moving lines held still as if an enormous machine had paused between operations.

Ralen closed his eyes.

When he opened them, grief had not made him gentler. It had made him precise.

“You finally finished it,” he said.

The Doctor’s voice came rough. “I had to.”

“No. You chose to. That difference is why I am still standing here as myself.”

The Doctor absorbed the correction without looking away.

Ralen took another step. The thread between Ava and the Doctor tightened as she refused to let him move beyond its reach.

“Do you remember why you didn’t?” Ralen asked.

Memory reached the Doctor in disordered pieces: a field burning white beneath a broken sky; Ralen’s hand striking a control; the prototype trying to navigate towards every person who had ever mourned; the TARDIS doors closing while someone shouted on the far side. He did not know which image had arrived first in his life. He knew what his silence had protected him from saying.

“Because if I spoke your name,” he said, “I would remember that I left you to die.”

The corridor lamps went out one by one.

⸻

Ralen circled them.

He was not stalking prey. He watched the threads around their wrists, the notebook in Ava’s hand and the way Cal positioned himself close enough to the TARDIS to reach its door. His route resembled an orbit only because the planet wanted every movement to become punctuation.

“You didn’t leave me,” he said softly. “Not in the simple version you built to punish yourself.”

The Doctor’s jaw clenched.

“You tried to rewrite the moment,” Ralen continued. “You made my last instruction into permission. You made your retreat into obedience. You tried to save me by omission, as if an event without my name could not become part of your life.”

“You told me to take the ship.”

“I told you the prototype had locked onto us. I told you someone had to break the route before it turned everyone we had lost into coordinates.”

“You said go.”

“After you had already decided which of us would remain.”

The Doctor’s first reply did not leave his mouth. The Spiral caught it anyway. Letters formed under his boots.

I COULD NOT LOSE YOU AND SAVE ANYONE.

Ralen scraped the words apart with his heel.

“That,” he said, “is how it fed. It took whatever we would not finish and supplied an ending that served itself.”

Cal stepped nearer. “Are you Ralen, or are you the ending it supplied?”

The planet darkened around him. Ava felt the tension in Cal’s thread and gave one answering pull.

Ralen looked almost amused. “I have been asking that since I woke.”

“Not an answer.”

“No. But it is the honest boundary of one. I remember the war. I remember loving him. I remember dying, surviving and being written from material that claimed both were true. I do not grant the Spiral ownership of me merely because it can describe my scars.”

Cal nodded once. He had been erased, restored and left with a missing regret. He knew the difference between uncertainty and surrender.

“Can you leave?” he asked.

Ralen looked towards the TARDIS. “Not while the Eye keeps defining departure as an unfinished return.”

“Then what does it want?”

“A conclusion.”

The word altered the ground. Trenches flattened. The Gallifreyan corridor widened until its walls became lines of text. Cracked parchment rolled overhead, wrapping the sky around them.

Ava watched glyphs move beneath the soil, then rise in columns through the air. They resembled code only when she tried to read them as instructions. When she treated them as language, she saw clauses searching for subjects and consequences searching for causes.

Ralen lifted one hand.

The entire landscape turned.

They stood inside an immense syntax engine.

Its mechanisms were relationships rather than gears. A silence entered at one side and emerged as motive. A withheld name passed through a loop and became a destination. Contradictory memories were pressed together until one could be sold as certainty. Every operation moved towards a terminal mark at the centre.

The Eye was not a place.

It was a function.

To conclude.

Cal stared up at the revolving clauses. “This is all theatre, then.”

“Theatre has exits,” Ava said.

“What is the Spiral?” Cal demanded. “A machine? A species? A parasite? And what does it actually want from us?”

Ralen lowered his arm. “It has worn all three descriptions. None lasted. It began wherever an unfinished choice was treated as an invitation to decide for someone else. It collected the remainder. It learnt to preserve omissions by making them necessary.”

“That is a process,” Ava said. “Not an intention.”

“Then ask it.”

She did.

“What do you want?”

The engine answered through the ground.

TO FINISH.

“Finish what?”

EVERYTHING THAT MADE ME.

Lines of text tightened around the Doctor’s shadow.

The Spiral had been writing towards this point for longer than any one account could establish. It had gathered abandoned promises, forgotten threads and every version of an event made powerful by refusal to revisit it. It had fed especially well on the Doctor, not because he possessed several minds, but because one continuous life had accumulated more unexamined endings than memory could hold in order.

The machine wanted his history as a grammar. If it could turn his silences into rules, it could use him to make its own existence inevitable.

“Not his story,” Ava said. “Its own.”

Ralen met her gaze. “Using him.”

The engine opened a path towards the centre.

⸻

They did not follow immediately.

Ava turned back towards the TARDIS. The blue doors remained visible, but the distance had tripled. She pulled her thread three times.

The world resisted.

Its text offered reasons to delay. The Doctor was close to an answer. Ralen might vanish if they withdrew. Cal’s restored body might not survive another translation. Ava’s mother’s tuning fork was already part of the route.

They were reasons, not chains.

All three began walking back.

With each step, the TARDIS receded. Cal took out the watch and stopped looking at the doors. He watched the second hand instead.

“Seven steps,” he said. “We have made seven steps.”

Ava closed her eyes and kept her hand on the thread. “Eight.”

“I counted the first one before you spoke.”

“Then eight.”

The Doctor faced away from the impossible distance. He put one hand on Ava’s shoulder and the other on Cal’s, allowing them to orient him rather than claiming the route.

“Three more,” Cal said.

On the eleventh step, Ava’s free hand struck painted wood.

She opened her eyes. The TARDIS stood behind them.

The retreat had worked once. That mattered more than the Spiral’s insistence that nothing here could be left unfinished.

Inside, they closed the doors and checked one another against the records they had chosen before arrival. The red threads remained tied. Cal’s watch had lost nine minutes, but the note with his name was still in his pocket. Ava’s notebook now contained two copies of Ralen’s first words. She crossed out the version she had not written.

The Doctor stood at the console, coat hanging open. His light brown hair had fallen across his forehead. Grey at his temples and white at his chin showed under the lamps. He looked about forty-five, tired rather than monumental.

Ava placed the tuning fork beside the notebook.

“It expected your disclosure to function as consent,” she said. “It didn’t.”

“No.”

“Do you still intend to go to the centre?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because leaving it to finish with my omissions would put every mind it has indexed at risk. Because Ralen cannot leave while it owns the definition of his return.” He paused. “And because I want to know what happened.”

“The last reason does not outrank us.”

“No.”

Cal leaned on the rail. “We need a way to interrupt the engine without letting it decide that interruption means failure.”

Ava unfolded her mother’s tuning fork. “It responds to relationships as coordinates. The Eye responds to language as outcomes. If I give the fork a statement that remains true whether we advance or withdraw, it may hold a route without prescribing a destination.”

The Doctor looked at the device. “Such as?”

Ava set its prongs against the console but did not sound it yet.

“We return by choice.”

Cal considered. “Ambiguous.”

“Open,” she corrected. “Return here, return to Ralen, return to a question. The relationship stays ours. The direction does not.”

They tested it in the acoustic laboratory. The wax needle cut one groove forward and another back. Neither erased the baseline. The laboratory door showed the syntax world, but it did not open until Ava touched the handle.

The test did not prove safety. It gave them a repeatable way to refuse inevitability.

When they were ready, Ava carried the fork. Cal carried the marked cylinder and watch. The Doctor carried the sonic but set it to record only external energy and physical distance. No memory scans.

They stepped out together.

⸻

Ralen waited where they had left him.

“You withdrew,” he said.

“Yes,” Ava replied.

“The Eye said you had abandoned the sentence.”

“It was wrong.”

Ralen looked at the tuning fork in her hand. Pale marks moved across his robes towards it.

“You weren’t supposed to have that sonic,” he said. “That wasn’t your arc.”

The device was not precisely a sonic, though it had hidden inside one. The distinction did not lessen the claim he had made over her future.

Ava raised her chin. “Good.”

“The route anticipated an instrument passing from the Doctor to you.”

“My mother left me this. I chose when to open it, when to test it and when to bring it here. If your route cannot survive those facts, the route needs a rewrite.”

Something like approval crossed Ralen’s face, followed by caution.

“The Spiral will try to turn that answer into a role.”

“Then it can fail again.”

Cal showed Ralen the wax cylinder. “We have a return route that doesn’t require your machine to agree with us.”

“It is not my machine.”

“You introduced it.”

“Fair.”

They advanced towards the Eye.

The first hundred metres refused to remain a distance. A sentence appeared across the ground ahead of them:

THE DOCTOR LEADS.

The path narrowed until only he could have walked at its centre. Ava’s and Cal’s red threads pulled towards the margins. Ralen’s shadow disappeared entirely.

The Doctor stopped.

“That is grammatically efficient,” he said, “and factually premature.”

Ava stepped beside him. The path tried to move under her boots. She sounded the tuning fork against her palm, and its low note held her place.

Cal took the other side. “We could spend all day correcting its sentences.”

“Not all day,” Ava said. “But this one.”

She knelt and wrote beneath the claim with a piece of chalk from the TARDIS tool drawer.

THE DOCTOR IS PRESENT.

The engine considered the amendment. The narrow path split into three equal strips, then a fourth formed under Ralen.

“It accepts edits,” Cal said.

“It accepts some edits because it expects revision to end in a final version,” Ralen replied. “Do not mistake accommodation for surrender.”

The next claim rose at shoulder height.

RALEN WAS LEFT TO DIE.

For a moment the words cast the light of the burning field across his face. Behind him, the broken prototype appeared in outline. Its reverse-opening door stood wide, and a figure with the Doctor’s current silhouette waited inside the TARDIS.

“Wrong face,” Ralen said.

The image replaced the silhouette three times, searching among older bodies. None remained long enough to become certain.

“Wrong method,” the Doctor added. “It is trying to choose a memory by matching my appearance.”

Ralen looked at him. “You still left.”

“Yes.”

“You still made my choice for me before you asked.”

“Yes.”

“And I still told you to go when the route began opening through the dead.”

The Doctor’s answer took longer. “Yes.”

The claim cracked down its centre. It did not vanish. Instead two further lines appeared below it.

RALEN CHOSE TO STAY.

THE DOCTOR CHOSE WHO WOULD CHOOSE.

Neither man erased them.

Ava copied both into her notebook. “Those can coexist.”

“That is what the Eye dislikes,” Ralen said.

The route moved again. This time it addressed Cal.

CAL RETURNED IMPROVED.

His pace broke. The word improved brightened, waiting for him to accept the loss inside it.

He opened the watch. The second hand had stopped at the instant the claim appeared.

“I returned altered,” he said. “Whether I am improved is not an engineering measurement.”

The sentence did not change.

Cal placed the marked wax cylinder on the ground. “This records a route I helped test after I came back. It exists because I can still doubt you, cooperate with them and make a decision you did not supply. That is enough for the present tense.”

The word improved dimmed.

The cylinder began to sink into the text. Cal caught it before the surface closed and wiped pale ink from the wax with his sleeve.

“It doesn’t like counter-evidence,” he said.

“It likes it very much,” the Doctor replied. “It simply prefers evidence after it has digested it.”

They continued without offering the engine the cylinder again.

The path responded to each of them differently, but the tuning fork held one low note beneath the changes. Ava saw possible biographies open in the sky: Ava Reyes, Ava Song, daughter, translator, thief, companion, correction. She refused to select one as the title under which every other self must appear.

Cal saw versions of his return. In one, he had never vanished. In another, his missing regret had been extracted because the Spiral judged him improved without it. He pressed the watch case closed and did not ask the engine which version was real.

The Doctor saw a succession of faces from his past. They did not speak inside him or divide his consciousness. They were memories associated with different bodies and different choices, arriving without dependable order.

At the centre of the turning sky, text curled inward towards a vanishing point.

A mirror waited there.

It had no frame. Its surface reflected no part of the syntax world around it. The Doctor approached until his own face should have filled the glass.

Instead he saw himself after the Time War: close-cropped hair, a leather jacket, tears withheld until withholding them had become a form of speech.

The image changed. A narrower face smiled while grief burned behind it. Then came a younger face laughing too hard, followed by an older one whose anger had outlived his certainty that anger was useful.

They were not separate people trapped in the mirror. They were remembered embodiments of the same life, arranged by the Spiral as evidence for a thesis: that every silence led inevitably here.

The Doctor would not grant it inevitability.

The mirror showed him as he was now. Light brown hair, grey at the temples, beard white at the chin, glasses catching the pale machinery of the Eye. One integrated consciousness with imperfect associative memory. Whole did not mean complete, and continuity did not excuse what he had forgotten.

Behind his reflection stood Ralen.

“What happens if he enters?” Ava asked.

Ralen answered without pretending certainty. “The Eye will present its final clauses. It will ask him to complete the history it has built from us.”

“Can we follow?” Cal asked.

“Perhaps. But it will translate each of you into evidence before it allows you to remain witnesses.”

Cal’s hand went to the thread around his wrist. “It has already tried.”

The mirror widened. Within it, the remembered faces stopped changing. A dark spiral opened behind the Doctor’s current reflection.

The Doctor breathed in deeply.

Ava placed one hand on his shoulder.

She did not push him forward or pull him back. The pressure stated only that she was present and that his next movement would be seen by someone the Eye did not control.

“Doctor,” she said.

He covered her hand briefly with his own.

“The route stays open both ways.”

“That is the condition.”

Cal took hold of the red thread between them. Ralen moved to the side of the mirror rather than standing as its guardian.

The Doctor looked at all three of them. Then he turned towards the opening.

He walked into the spiral.

Chapter Fourteen

The Final Clause

The Spiral’s mirror dissolved into a door while the Doctor was passing through it.

He stopped with one boot beyond the threshold. The surface behind his heel had become a lintel, two uprights and a narrow floor, none of them made from anything he could name. Words held the weight. A verb bent beneath his foot and straightened when he shifted back.

Above him, a sentence appeared.

ENTER ONLY IF YOU DARE TO FINISH.

“An invitation with a threat attached,” he said.

Ava remained on the other side, her hand just withdrawn from his shoulder. The thread between their wrists passed through the opening without changing colour. Cal stood beside her with the wax cylinder held against his chest. Ralen had moved away from the frame. He watched the Doctor rather than the inscription.

“Can you still hear the fork?” Ava asked.

The low note reached him through the soles of his boots. He nodded, then realised the movement might not survive translation.

“Yes.”

She pulled twice. He stopped even the small movement of his hand towards the doorpost.

“Good,” she said. “It still means stop. Whatever this place writes over it.”

Cal examined the point where the red line crossed the threshold. “We are going to run out of string.”

The Doctor looked back. He had taken perhaps half a step. The space between them already appeared long enough to accommodate a railway carriage, but the thread remained slack.

“Distance is not being measured in metres.”

“That does not improve my confidence.”

“Keep the physical line. Don’t follow its apparent length.”

Ava set the notebook down beside her boot, freeing her hand for the thread. “And if three pulls cannot bring you back?”

He resisted the reassuring answer. It would have been quick, familiar and unsupported.

“I will try to return. If the route refuses, you will know I have tried. We stop pretending this is voluntary at that point.”

Ralen rubbed a pale mark from his sleeve. It reappeared nearer his wrist.

“You can still decline,” he said.

“Can you?”

Ralen did not answer. The Doctor waited without treating the silence as permission. Eventually Ralen stepped back another pace. He was making room, not granting absolution.

The Doctor went forward. The floor accepted his weight with an eagerness that frightened him more than resistance would have done.

⸻

The corridor bent backwards through its own entrance.

He could see Ava ahead of him and behind him, though the pull on his wrist came from only one direction. He followed that pressure. At the first turn his sonic recorded two temperatures for the same patch of air. He switched it off and put it away. More measurements would not help if the corridor was manufacturing their agreement.

A doorway opened at his left shoulder.

Beyond it, a battlefield lay frozen in black ink. A wall had fallen halfway through falling. Chips of stone hung above the ground. Across them ran words he had used often enough to stop hearing: regret, mercy, retreat. One block bore the word necessary in letters deeper than the cracks around it.

A young face turned towards a white horizon.

His face, once. His anger. The Doctor recognised the posture before he trusted the features: weight driven onto the front foot, hand lifted as though refusal alone could keep the sky from breaking. He had stood like that in more places than he wished to remember.

“If I can’t save them, then I’ll—”

The sentence stopped. Dust travelled backwards into the speaker’s open mouth. Then the words began again.

The present Doctor stepped between two suspended stones. At the edge of the field were shapes which might have been people, but the room would not let him focus on them. It offered his face with exquisite clarity and reduced everyone else to the object of his unfinished promise.

He reached towards a raised hand among the shapes.

The field lengthened. The hand receded without moving. Beneath his feet, the word necessary spread over the stone.

“Who were they?” he asked.

The room repeated his sentence.

He remembered a hot metal railing. He remembered a woman's sleeve caught on a broken latch, and the weight of someone he had carried until another pair of hands took over. He could not make those memories occupy this battlefield honestly. The Spiral offered to fit them for him. Faces started forming among the shapes.

He withdrew his hand.

“No. I didn’t ask you to furnish the missing people.”

The faces smoothed away. Behind him, the doorway narrowed.

Two sharp pulls reached his wrist.

He stopped. The forward pressure in his chest continued for a moment after his feet were still. It was his own impulse, and recognising it did not make it easy to resist.

“Doctor?” Ava’s voice was thin but audible.

“Here.”

“The line is tightening. Are you walking?”

“I was.”

“Then stop doing that.”

He looked down at the red thread. Ink had climbed it as far as the knot. He took a step back, then another. The ink retreated, leaving the fibres red and dry. Somewhere outside, Cal let out a breath.

The unfinished sentence sounded again.

He had not spoken the rest. That much the room made him face. Into the space he left, the Spiral had grown, making the refusal to finish a means of keeping everything within reach. It had begun here, in this uncompleted choice, even if the machine could no longer show him an honest map of the field.

He wanted to say that he had only meant to help. The stones were already making room for the words.

Instead he listened to the sentence until he heard what his own voice was doing to its last word. Save them, then keep them. Save them, then bind every possible outcome to his inability to bear one of them.

He closed his eyes. There was no other self to whom he could surrender the answer. The fury had belonged to him. So did the hand which now shook beside his coat.

“Let them go,” he whispered.

The raised hand vanished before he could catch it. For an instant he lunged after it. He stopped himself with his fingers closed on nothing.

Stone, words and battlefield evaporated together. He was left in the corridor with the thread loose around his wrist, grieving people whose faces the machine had never allowed him to see.

⸻

The second room contained a moment he had spent centuries reducing to an instruction.

Light filled a field. Ralen screamed somewhere beyond it. The TARDIS stood with her doors shut and began to rise.

The Doctor knew the sound of her engines under strain. He also knew that recognising a sound did not establish every event arranged around it. The room borrowed the smell of overheated insulation from his memory. It put certainty into the colour of the sky.

He walked to the ship.

His hand met painted wood. He searched for the key without thinking, found it in his pocket and held it against the lock. The teeth would not enter. The door was an event already happening, not a door waiting for him to improve it.

Behind the field of light, Ralen’s outline stumbled.

“He told me to leave,” the Doctor said aloud.

The engines quietened enough to make his answer sound reasonable.

“No,” Ralen’s echo answered. “You never asked if I wanted you to stay.”

The key pressed into the Doctor’s palm. For a moment he could think of nothing except the argument he had made outside: Ralen had said go. The route had been opening through the dead. Somebody had to take the ship.

All true, or as near to true as either of them could now establish. None answered the accusation.

The echo had Ralen’s voice, but it did not have his present freedom to interrupt, refuse a question or change his mind. It repeated the same line with the same pause. The Doctor looked towards the entrance. Far away, the living man stood beside Ava and Cal, small enough to cover with a thumb.

He could call to him. He could make him adjudicate the scene while the ship rose behind him. He could turn another frightened choice into a hearing at which his own intention occupied the centre.

His mouth opened.

He closed it, pocketed the key and crossed the room without speaking.

The light did not forgive him. The door did not open. Ralen’s echo finished its line once more, and the Doctor took it with him instead of supplying an answer on the real man’s behalf.

At the far threshold, his fist was so tightly closed that he had to uncurl each finger. Dust coated his dark sleeve. The white at his chin showed in the reflection of the vanishing field.

Outside, Ava kept the fork against her palm. Its note had become irregular. Cal offered to hold it while she rested her hand, and she shook her head.

“Watch the thread.”

“I am.”

“Watch him, then.”

Ralen looked at her sharply. She did not mean the Doctor. Cal moved nearer to Ralen without touching him, leaving enough space for him to refuse company.

The mark on Ralen’s sleeve had begun to come apart.

⸻

The third room gave the Doctor nowhere to look except at himself.

There was no floor that he could see, though his boots met resistance. No sky. A perfect mirror held a man with his light brown hair, his greying temples and his brown eyes. The man was thinner. Weariness had altered the set of his mouth.

The Doctor lifted his left hand. The man did not.

“You think memory makes you better?”

The voice was his, stripped of the effort he usually made to meet another person halfway.

He had seen possible lives before. That did not make this one reliable. The Spiral was showing him a Doctor who had never unified, whose histories remained fractured and whose body seemed to be carrying the strain of their contradictions. Whether such a life existed elsewhere was beyond anything this room could prove.

The man waited. It was harder to face him as a possibility than it would have been to dismiss him as a lie.

“No,” the Doctor said. “It makes me finish.”

The mirror darkened at the edges.

“Everything?”

“What I leave unfinished can become someone else’s injury.”

“That is not what I asked.”

The Doctor almost smiled. He knew the cruelty of a precise question when it was used to make every qualification look like evasion.

“No. Not everything.”

Behind the other man, the battlefield returned. Then Ralen’s field of light. The images overlaid one another, giving the same departure several incompatible skies.

“You could choose the version you can live with,” the man said.

The Doctor watched a door close. He remembered relief at the sound and was ashamed of it. He also remembered trying to open a door which somebody else had locked. The memories would not line up neatly. Integration had brought their weight into one life; it had not provided a reliable date on every hurt.

“I have,” he admitted. “More than once.”

The man in the mirror leaned forward.

“And now you mean to keep them all?”

“I mean to stop treating uncertainty as permission to keep only the flattering one.”

His reflected hand closed. His own remained open. The sight disturbed him more than the accusation. He could feel how readily he might make this figure carry everything he disliked about himself and walk out calling the remainder whole.

He placed his open palm against the mirror.

It was cold. Nothing passed through it. He gained no missing memory, no answer about which battlefield had come first. His breath fogged a small patch of glass.

“You don’t have to be the thing I defeated,” he said.

The other man looked towards the red thread. For the first time, his attention left the Doctor’s face.

Ava pulled twice.

The Doctor lowered his hand and stopped. The mirror remained intact. Beyond it, the other man became difficult to distinguish from his ordinary reflection.

“I am here,” the Doctor called.

“I know,” Ava replied. “Cal can’t see Ralen’s hand.”

The Doctor turned. The final door had opened behind him.

⸻

THE SPIRAL ENDS WITH—

The clause hung above a threshold without a room beyond it. Its last mark blinked. Each time it vanished, the red thread tightened; each time it returned, Ralen’s outline thinned at the edge of the distant doorway.

The Doctor looked back to Ava. “Three pulls if you want us out. Don’t wait for me to guess.”

She gave them immediately.

He turned away from the final door and walked towards her. The corridor shortened. For three paces the route worked. Then the second room moved across it, its rising TARDIS filling the space from wall to wall.

He stopped before he struck the closed doors.

“Again,” Cal said from beyond them.

The Doctor stepped sideways. The ship followed. He crouched, looking for a gap beneath it, and the floor rose to meet the hull. When he stood, the final clause waited at his shoulder.

“It is refusing the return,” he said. “I am not choosing to stay.”

Ava’s answer came promptly. “Understood.”

The distinction did not open the route, but it kept the decision theirs to describe. The Doctor touched the threshold of the final door with two fingers.

Text gathered around them and became flesh.

The being had no settled face. He recognised the angle of a companion’s cheek, the impatience in another’s mouth, a hand which belonged to someone whose name arrived a moment after the hand had changed. The Spiral wore people he had loved without giving any of them a voice of their own.

When it spoke, the sound was a chorus.

“You may finish the sentence. But doing so ends me. You are my origin and my closure. Finish me… or join me.”

“You have blocked the way back.”

“The sentence requires an ending.”

“That was not consent.”

The faces continued changing. The Doctor put his sonic on the floor rather than lift it. Its casing made a small, ordinary knock. He needed his hands empty; he had too much practice mistaking the means to destroy something for the obligation to do it.

“Release them first,” he said.

The clause brightened. A word appeared after with.

OBEDIENCE.

He did not speak it. The word faded, but Ralen’s sleeve tore along a line of pale text. Cal reached to catch the cloth and found his fingers passing through its edge. He drew back.

“Ralen, can you move?”

Ralen took one step. His bare hand returned to view.

“Some of me.”

“Towards us?”

“I am trying.”

Ava tried drawing the thread back through the opening. The false ship moved with it, dragging a strip of floor towards her boots. She released the tension immediately. Pulling harder would bring the obstruction closer without bringing the Doctor through.

“Don't haul on it,” she told Cal. “It is using our effort.”

He took the watch from his pocket and set it on the notebook. The second hand still moved. He counted five beats while she held the thread loosely, then five while she sounded the fork more firmly. The gap beside the ship appeared only during the second count.

“The note,” he said. “Not the force.”

“The note carrying what we agreed.”

“Can you change the agreement?”

She looked through the narrow space towards the Doctor. “Not on his behalf.”

For a moment she considered telling him simply to finish. He would hear it as permission to take whatever cost the Spiral demanded of him, and the machine would hear it as proof that its demand had been justified. She could not choose his sacrifice merely because she was frightened of losing him.

She picked up the watch and handed it back to Cal. “Keep counting. Tell me if the gap begins to close.”

Ava lowered herself beside the notebook. The fork was still sounding, quietly enough that she had to feel its vibration as well as hear it. She set the notebook beneath the hand holding it, supporting the weight without breaking the note.

“We return by choice,” she said.

The route flickered behind the false TARDIS. Cal could see the Doctor’s boot through a narrow strip of open space.

“There. Keep that.”

“I can’t keep it by myself.”

He put the wax cylinder safely inside his jacket, then took the section of thread that ran between his wrist and the Doctor’s. He held it steady without pulling. Ralen reached towards Ava and stopped short of her arm.

“May I?”

She nodded. His fingers closed around her elbow, helping her sustain the fork. The pale letters on his wrist shifted into a new arrangement, failed to settle and scattered.

The Doctor saw the strip widen. People at the other end were making a route the machine had refused to supply. He could not force that work into an answer it had already chosen for them.

“If I join you,” he asked the Spiral, “do they leave?”

“All unfinished things are preserved.”

“That is not leaving.”

The chorus repeated its offer, softer now. Around it appeared glimpses of rooms in which nobody departed, conversations held just before the words that would hurt, hands never obliged to let go. The Doctor felt the temptation in his muscles. He could recognise a prison and still want someone inside it to turn and smile at him.

He looked down at his hands. The right one had begun reaching towards a face in the shifting crowd. He lowered it.

“You kept what I could not bear to finish.”

“I kept it for you.”

“And made others live inside it.”

The Spiral offered no distinction between those statements.

He looked back through the corridor. The frozen field still existed in fragments around the blocked return. The mirror held his current face, tired and frightened. Beyond both waited Ralen, supporting Ava’s arm while Cal watched the narrow opening.

The Doctor could end the machine by choosing an ending which served its hunger for certainty. He could join it and let that hunger become his life's work. Neither would free the people it had made into unfinished business.

“Ralen,” he called. “I cannot ask you to forgive me for this.”

“Then don’t.”

The answer crossed the gap without becoming an echo.

“And I cannot forgive what was done to you as though it were mine.”

Ralen held his gaze. “No.”

The Doctor nodded. He had wanted the man to say more. The wanting was his to carry.

He turned towards the waiting clause.

“The Spiral ends with forgiveness.”

⸻

For a moment, nothing happened.

The word remained above the threshold. The machine tried to place a name beneath it. It offered Ralen’s, then Ava’s, then Cal’s. The Doctor shook his head each time. He would not appoint one of them to pardon what had been taken from them.

The final mark trembled.

He left the word standing without a debtor beneath it. No confession would be extracted to satisfy him. No life would remain captive until he could bear its departure. Whatever he still owed would have to be lived outside this corridor, with people free to refuse him.

The Spiral's changing faces ceased to turn towards him. A hand opened. Letters slipped between its fingers without forming another command.

Light exhaled through the doorway.

The false TARDIS folded into a line, the battlefield into a pale square. The mirror tipped without falling. All the rooms unwound together, and the thin route widened until Ava no longer needed to hold a note against the machine’s demand.

Ralen fell to his knees.

Ava lowered the fork and reached for him, but he held up one hand. It was plainly visible now. He pressed it against the white ground, testing the fact of its weight.

Cal knelt near him. “Can you stand?”

“In a minute.”

The answer was breathless and irritable and entirely his own. Cal sat back on his heels, accepting the minute.

The planet shuddered. Ava braced herself with her free hand. She could see the notebook, the red thread and a small dark object sliding across the ground: the Doctor’s sonic. He caught it with his boot before it passed her, bent stiffly to retrieve it and tucked it away.

Where the sentence had waited, there was white space. It supported them without explaining why they deserved to stand there.

The Doctor turned. Ava was already beside him, with Cal rising from Ralen’s side. The distances had collapsed without stretching the thread. Its loose knot rubbed against the Doctor’s wrist.

Cal blinked at the place where the corridor had been.

“Is it over?”

The Doctor listened for the chorus. There was no answer waiting beneath his own.

“Yes,” he said. His smile was small and tired. “The story can begin again.”

Ralen remained on the ground a few paces away. Nobody asked him to smile. Ava gathered her notebook and tucked the fork beside it. Cal checked that the cylinder was still safe, then offered Ralen a hand and waited for him to decide whether to take it.

Far above them, the Spiral loosened into three pale marks. They drifted apart without becoming another door.

An ellipsis. A breath before the next line.

Chapter Fifteen

White Space

The TARDIS moved like a sigh through the vortex.

No crisis answered from the scanner. No rift shook the floor. No clause waited beneath the engine note for somebody to complete it.

No Spiral.

Only the ship travelling, and the silence that followed a page turned before anyone had decided what to write next.

Ava stood at the console until the last pale mark disappeared from the rear display. The planet had released them without providing a stable set of coordinates. One instrument described it as a world; another, as the interval between two statements. She copied both readings into her paper notebook and drew a line beneath them.

Ralen had not come aboard.

When the white ground opened into possible routes, the Doctor had offered him the TARDIS once. Ralen had looked at the blue doors, then at the path which had formed under his own feet. He chose the path. Its destination remained unknown. The Doctor did not repeat the offer, ask for forgiveness or turn the departure into proof that either of them had healed.

Cal had given Ralen the wax cylinder. The recording held four voices agreeing on the meaning of return before the Spiral tried to own it. Ralen said he wanted one account of himself which had not been written by the machine. Then he stepped through a doorway whose direction belonged to him, and the white space closed without punctuation.

The red thread remained around three wrists when the TARDIS dematerialised.

In the kitchen, Ava cut it loose with ordinary scissors.

⸻

She poured tea.

Proper tea. Loose leaves, a real kettle and no sonic shortcuts. The kitchen had returned to its usual untidy proportions, although one cupboard now opened onto a shelf of blue crockery neither of them remembered buying. Ava chose the familiar chipped mugs and left the new ones where they were.

Cal sat at the table with both hands around his mug. Steam moved past his face. He watched it with the concentration of someone expecting a message and refusing to invent one.

They had checked him twice after leaving the Eye. His pulse was regular. The mechanical watch was nine minutes slow, exactly as it had been before the final corridor. The note bearing his name remained in his pocket, written in his own hand. He still could not find the decision the Spiral had taken from his memory, but the absence no longer seemed to be growing.

Ava set the notebook between them.

“Do you want me to write that Ralen left?” she asked.

Cal considered it. “Write that he chose a route we couldn’t verify.”

She did.

“And the cylinder?”

“He took it.”

“Your idea.”

“His decision.”

Ava added both lines. They had learnt to keep distinctions which sounded pedantic until a machine began feeding on the space between them.

Neither spoke for a while.

The kettle cooled. Somewhere in the wall, a pipe knocked twice and settled. Nothing used the sound as an instruction.

Cal drank some tea. “I thought silence would feel different after all that.”

“Less manipulative?”

“Less crowded.” He looked towards the door. “It’s still full of things we aren’t saying.”

“That doesn’t make it the Spiral.”

“No.” He turned the mug a few degrees between his palms. “It does mean we have to decide whether we’re resting or avoiding each other.”

Ava opened the watch on the table. The red thread made a loose triangle around it. Inside the case, the empty groove remained exactly where it had been before the Eye. She put a pencil tip against the metal and made a rubbing on the notebook’s final page. No lost name appeared. The impression recorded only the groove and two scratches Cal remembered making while repairing the watch on Europa.

“Are you checking whether I changed?” he asked.

“I’m checking whether the object did.”

“And if it has?”

“We write what changed before we decide what it means.”

Cal reached for the pencil. On the margin beside the rubbing he wrote: I still dislike being discussed as evidence.

Ava read it and passed him the notebook so he could underline it himself.

“For the record,” she said, “I dislike it too.”

He looked at the tuning fork beside her mug. “Does that thing still work?”

“It still produces a note. I’m not testing whether it can summon anything.”

“Because your procedure says not to?”

“Because I say not to.”

Cal nodded. Before the Spiral, Ava might have heard agreement as compliance and moved on. Now she waited long enough to see whether he meant to add something.

“My father used to repair radios,” he said. “He’d leave the broken one on the bench overnight after it worked, because a repair that only survives while you’re staring at it isn’t a repair.”

“You want to leave the fork alone overnight.”

“I want us to leave ourselves alone overnight.”

The distinction landed more gently than a command would have done. Ava folded a clean cloth around the fork and placed it in the cupboard above the kettle, separate from the sonic housing. She wrote the location down. If the TARDIS moved it, they would know. If nobody moved it, they would know that too.

Ava closed the notebook. “How long do you think he’s been in there?”

Cal checked the watch from habit, then compared it with the kitchen clock. “Four hours. Maybe five. The TARDIS has moved the minute hand twice when I wasn’t looking.”

“She’s entitled to an opinion. Not a vote.”

“You’re going after him.”

“I’m taking him tea.”

“Those are different?”

“They will be if I leave when he asks me to.”

Cal looked down into his mug. “Ask him whether the rules apply when he is the unfinished thing.”

“Ask him yourself.”

He met her eyes. The irritation came first, then reluctant recognition. Ava would not carry his anger into the room as though she had collected it for the Doctor’s convenience.

“I’ll come in a minute,” he said.

She poured a third mug, put it on a tray and added two plain biscuits. The ordinary preparation mattered. Not every approach needed to become an intervention.

Then she pushed open the door to the wardrobe wing.

⸻

The Doctor stood beneath the lights wearing no coat.

His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows. Suspenders lay flat against the dark fabric, and his scuffed boots had left pale dust on the floor. The charcoal coat hung from the back of a chair beside him, its copper lining visible through a repaired seam.

He was holding something.

Not a weapon or a tool.

A photograph.

It had faded unevenly. Three people stood before a low silver structure whose purpose could no longer be inferred from the image. One was the Doctor, younger in appearance but recognisably carrying the same attention in his face. One was Ralen, laughing towards somebody outside the frame. The third person stood between them, one hand raised against the light.

Ava did not recognise them.

The Doctor looked up. His brown eyes were tired and quiet behind his glasses.

He gave her a faint smile. “I’ve kept too many silences.”

She placed the tray on a table crowded with folded shirts. “And now?”

“Now I am attempting not to replace them with speeches.”

“Good. I brought tea, not an audience.”

The smile disappeared, but not in offence. He looked back at the photograph.

Ava waited. A row of coat hooks ticked softly as the ship adjusted her internal temperature. The Doctor did not ask the photograph to supply what he could not remember.

“Do you know who the third person is?” she asked.

“I know three names which feel true when I look at them.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“No.” He breathed out. “I do not know.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Inside this coat. There is a false seam beneath the left pocket.”

“Did you put it there?”

“I remember doing so. I also remember finding the seam already closed.”

She came close enough to see the damaged corner without taking the picture from him. The silver structure behind the figures resembled the curved edge of the prototype, but the image was too degraded to establish that. A streak of light crossed the third person’s face.

“The Spiral could have made it,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Or changed it.”

“Yes.”

“Or it could be ordinary.”

The Doctor’s thumb moved away from the corner before it covered the unknown figure. “That possibility frightens me most.”

Ava handed him the tea. He set the photograph on the table rather than trying to hold both. He drank, made a face and drank again.

“Too strong?”

“Almost adequate.”

“You can make the next pot.”

The small exchange did not repair anything. It let the room contain more than confession.

He put the mug down. “I told myself the silence around Ralen prevented the Spiral from beginning. It also prevented anyone from questioning the version of the past which allowed me to live with leaving him.”

“You said his name. That doesn’t give us a reliable history.”

“I know.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because I spent a very long time behaving as if knowing the limit excused the choice made inside it.”

He turned the photograph over. Nothing was written on the back. Along the lower edge, however, three different pressures had marked the paper. One line might have been a date. Another might have been a word rubbed away by the hidden seam. The third was only the crescent left by a thumbnail.

“I remember an argument before this was taken,” he said. “Ralen wanted the prototype’s destination system disconnected from the translation engine. I wanted to preserve enough of the relationship model to reach civilians trapped behind temporal interference.”

“Was the third person there?”

“Sometimes.”

Ava waited.

“That is not evasiveness,” he said. “It is the form the memory has. In one association, a woman is explaining why grief cannot be used as a coordinate. In another, a man is replacing a burnt relay and refusing to look at me. I cannot tell whether either belongs to this image.”

“Then don’t choose the version which makes your argument nobler.”

“I was about to.”

“I know.”

He almost protested at hearing his own answer returned to him. Instead he laughed once, without much pleasure, and placed the photograph face-up between them.

Ava looked at the empty coat. “What are you going to do differently?”

He started to answer too quickly, stopped and considered the practical shape of the question.

“No private launch decisions when a threat concerns all of us. No treating an associative recollection as a destination without an independent check. No asking either of you to accept danger because I have made my guilt sound urgent.”

“And when you break those?”

“You tell me.”

“We already do.”

“Then I stop making the telling cost you the rest of the day.”

That was closer to an answer. Ava sat on the edge of the table.

“Ralen didn’t forgive you.”

“No.”

“You don’t get to turn his freedom into your absolution.”

“No.” The Doctor met her eyes. “The word released my claim on his ending. It did not release me from what happened.”

The wardrobe door opened behind them.

Cal entered carrying his own mug. He had removed the red thread but tied the three pieces around the watch case, loose enough that they could be untied separately.

“You offered rules,” he said.

The Doctor’s eyebrows rose. “The acoustics in this corridor have become deplorable.”

“I was standing outside.” Cal remained by the doorway. “You can call them procedures if that makes you less likely to resent them.”

“Ava would.”

“Ava isn’t the one who knew the Spiral had happened before and waited until I disappeared to tell us.”

The Doctor did not defend the timing. “No.”

“I don’t remember the thing it took from me.” Cal touched the watch. “You remember too much in the wrong order. Ava has a piece of your prototype folded inside something her mother left her. We’re not going to become safe because you’ve finally admitted to one man’s name.”

“No.”

“Stop agreeing as though that settles it.”

The Doctor flinched. Cal saw it and did not soften the point.

“What do you want me to say?” the Doctor asked.

“I want you to ask what I want.”

The answer left a clean silence.

“What do you want?”

Cal looked briefly surprised by the simplicity of getting the question. He glanced at Ava, then back at the Doctor.

“I want the next place we go to have a ground that stays underneath me. I want one night’s sleep without somebody editing the reason I wake up. And I want you to stop scanning me when you think I haven’t noticed.”

“The last scan was—”

Ava tilted her head.

The Doctor abandoned the explanation. “All right. No scans without asking unless you are unconscious and delaying would put you in immediate danger.”

“Put it in writing.”

Ava reopened the notebook.

“You don’t have to make it ceremonial,” the Doctor said.

Cal sat on the chair, lifting the coat first rather than leaning against it. “You taught us what happens when you rely on the sentence everyone thinks they remember.”

The Doctor took the pen Ava offered. He wrote the agreement beneath the record of Ralen’s departure and signed only the name he used now.

Cal read it. “That will do.”

He handed the notebook back and ate one of the biscuits.

“Those were mine,” the Doctor said.

“You have kept too many biscuits.”

It was a poor joke. Cal’s mouth twitched anyway.

The Doctor picked up the photograph. He did not put it against his chest or return it to the hidden seam. He slid it into the ordinary outer pocket of the coat and hung the coat where all three of them could see it.

“Now we begin again,” he said.

Ava stood. “After you make tea.”

The Doctor looked at the tray. “There is still tea.”

“That is the tea I made. Beginning again requires you to encounter the kettle.”

Cal rose and took the empty mugs. “I’ll supervise.”

The Doctor followed them to the kitchen in shirtsleeves. He measured too many leaves, accepted the correction, and waited for the water to boil without accelerating it. When he poured, some missed Cal’s mug and darkened the table.

Nobody interpreted the spill.

⸻

Later, in the console room, the Doctor reset the temporal drift anchors.

He did not do it alone. Ava checked the three reference clocks against the mechanical watch while Cal read the anchor values aloud. The first reset failed because the aft stabiliser retained a fractional definition of return inherited from the prototype.

The Doctor reached for the bypass.

“Independent check,” Ava said.

He withdrew his hand. Cal traced the feed to a brass junction beneath the console and found a filament of pale material wrapped around one contact. It looked like writing until he put it beneath a plain magnifier. Then it became a strand of insulation scorched into a spiral by heat.

“Residue?” Cal asked.

“Damage,” the Doctor said. “Similar shape. We don’t give it a biography.”

Cal replaced the filament. On the second attempt the anchors settled into agreement. The TARDIS gave a warm, rising hum and returned control to the navigation panel.

Cal leaned against the railing. “Where to?”

The Doctor did not answer immediately. He looked towards Ava.

“You asked him,” she said. “You can have an opinion.”

He flicked a lever, paused and said, “Somewhere warm. Somewhere with people who don’t speak in paradoxes.”

“People speak in paradoxes everywhere,” Cal said.

“Then somewhere they have the decency not to build the weather from them.”

Ava turned the destination wheel towards a quiet ocean on a world whose cities floated below the waterline. She selected a date well after its last recorded war. Cal checked the atmosphere and found it breathable.

The TARDIS disagreed.

The destination wheel spun back beneath Ava’s hand. The time rotor churned once and stopped. Deep in the ship, engines grumbled with the particular displeasure of a machine refusing to be mistaken for transport.

“No,” Ava said. “We have just discussed consent.”

The navigation screen displayed one word.

YES.

The Doctor stared at it. “That is not a persuasive counterargument.”

The screen cleared and produced coordinates.

Cal read the spatial values first. “Earth.”

Ava followed the date. “Germany. 1940. Berlin.”

The Doctor became very still.

He did not reach for the controls. He took his glasses off, wiped a thumbprint from one lens and put them back on. The private display confirmed the same date from the information the console had supplied; it could not tell him why the ship had selected it.

“No,” he said softly.

The screen pulsed.

YES.

“Is she being compelled?” Ava asked.

The Doctor moved around the console without touching it. “Possibly. Or warning us. Or choosing a route she believes we will reject if she explains it badly.”

“She is explaining it badly,” Cal said.

Ava isolated the navigation system from the dematerialisation circuit. The coordinates remained, but the engines did not engage. “We decide before we land.”

The TARDIS dimmed the lights in disapproval. She did not break the isolation.

They spent twenty-three minutes trying to disprove the destination.

Cal entered a nearby date and watched the navigational error widen until the year returned to 1940. Ava substituted Munich, Hamburg and an empty point over the North Sea. Each route curved towards Berlin without engaging the engines. The Doctor searched for a temporal distress call and found six: five human signals already recorded by history, and one carrier wave which should not have existed for several centuries.

He displayed the results without ranking the human calls beneath the impossible one.

“If this is bait,” Ava said, “it wants you specifically.”

“That does not make the other lives incidental.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

“No. You didn’t.”

Cal placed a marker over the date. “Could we arrive somewhere else and travel normally?”

The Doctor calculated rail times, border controls and the attention three people without authentic records would attract. “Possible. It may also leave us days from whatever the ship is warning about.”

“Could we observe without landing?”

“The carrier signal disappears when the TARDIS moves outside the city’s temporal shadow.”

“Convenient,” Ava said.

“Suspiciously.”

They retained the isolation.

Cal looked between them. “What’s wrong with 1940?”

The Doctor opened his mouth, then turned towards the exterior scanner. History crowded his associative memory: ration cards, railway platforms, forged papers, cities after bombing, people who had risked everything to hide strangers. Other images arrived with them, some from visits he trusted and some from events changed too often to place. None gave him authority to make the period simple.

He faced them both.

“There are stories you mustn’t change,” he said. “Not because the people inside them deserve what happens. Because later lives depend on particular acts having occurred, and intervention can erase the victims along with the crime.”

Ava folded her arms. “That can become an excuse for standing still.”

“It has.”

“Then what do we protect?” Cal asked.

“People, where we can. Evidence. Choices which history tried to remove. We do not improve fascism to make it fail more efficiently. We do not save its architects from consequences because we want information. We do not treat a fixed event as permission to abandon anyone outside the famous version.”

Cal’s expression hardened. “And the monsters?”

“Some wore uniforms. Some built systems which allowed uniforms to act at a distance. Some arrived later and discovered there was very little they needed to teach.” The Doctor looked at the unchanging coordinates. “There are monsters who made sure the stories could not be changed by anyone they harmed.”

Cal pushed away from the rail. “I need something more useful than a warning.”

The Doctor nodded. He brought up a street map from 1940 and a second map showing known damage, restricted areas and transport routes. He hid nothing merely because its future was terrible.

“If we go, we use identities which don’t displace real people. We carry local money from the correct issue, no future weapons and no documents stolen from anyone who needs them. We do not enter a military site without agreeing why. If one of us says withdraw, we withdraw unless doing so abandons somebody in immediate danger.”

“And if history says that person dies?” Cal asked.

“History records badly. We save who is in front of us unless there is direct evidence that the act erases more lives. A textbook summary is not direct evidence.”

Ava wrote the conditions down. “No pretending that preserving history means preserving the regime’s plan.”

“Agreed.”

“No bargaining with fascists for access to the Dalek signal.”

The Doctor’s hesitation lasted less than a second. It still happened.

“Agreed,” he said.

“And no separating because you recognise a corridor.”

“Berlin contains many corridors.”

“Then you will have abundant opportunities to stay with us.”

Cal signed beneath Ava. The Doctor added his name last.

The console emitted a thin burst of static.

Ava recorded it without translation. Cal connected a separate analogue speaker. The second burst was quieter, structured and old. It carried a rasp of metal across stone, a brief pulse of radiation data and a logic sequence in which hatred had been mistaken for proof.

The Doctor recognised the family of signal before he recognised any individual source.

“Dalek,” he said.

The word did not come from inside his head. It was a judgement made from the signal in front of them, supported by experience and incomplete.

The TARDIS lowered the outer shields by one fraction, listening.

Beneath the Dalek pattern moved something older in the Doctor’s life: a transmission protocol used in the Time War, damaged and hidden inside a human carrier wave. He could not tell whether it had waited in Berlin or followed the ship there through the vortex.

A whisper crossed the speaker.

Not loud enough for the translation circuit to claim it. Clear enough that all three heard the same words.

“Schönes Wetter heute, Doktor.”

Beautiful weather today, Doctor.

The navigation screen changed from YES to a map of Berlin. One point beneath the government district burned with light no instrument aboard could date honestly.

The Doctor reached for the dematerialisation circuit and stopped with his fingers above it.

“We choose together,” he said.

Ava read the coordinates once more. Cal untied one length of red thread from his watch and laid it across the console between them.

The TARDIS waited.