The blast did not impede the shadow's progress. The Doctor was curled up in a ball, still chanting to himself when the shadow fell upon him and then into him.

Mali blinked and the shadow was gone. When she blinked again, the Doctor was back on his feet.

'We need a plan,' he said abruptly.

Vozarti stared at him. 'What are you -'

The Doctor waved his protest away and started pacing the floor. 'I didn't get to see much of this place when last I was here. We need to know more about it. Its function. Its limits.'

The Doctor flashed a smile at Mali that presumably was meant to be reassuring, acting for all the world as if nothing had happened. Klenchron lay on the broken floor still sleeping, but Nivet now yawned noisily and opened his eyes. Mali wished she'd been unconscious for just a few minutes longer herself before finding she'd been poured into this new, alien world.

Only her fear remained liquid now, sloshing around her stomach as she watched the Doctor continue his pacing. He was like a deranged marionette, his strings being twitched by something high up in the shadows.

Mother Mathara still stood on the flight deck of her ancient warcraft.With the gears and pulleys in her feeble legs still defiantly temperamental after centuries of maintenance, it was more trouble than it was worth to attempt to sit down.

'Was the scoop successful?' Mathara asked.

'It picked up all organics near any kind of temporal probe,' Kristeva confirmed.

While his words pleased her, the thin reed of his voice put her on edge as always. 'Will the Doctor be among them?'

'We'll know soon.'

The bone bloom hanging improbably in space was still depicted on the main screen. Mathara found her head tilting gently to one side to consider the image not, for once, from faulty servos failing to balance her large, crusty head, but because it was a sight she found pleased her. The Faction had no real explanation for the Edifice as yet, but they understood its significance as a symbol: a certain sign that things were to change, and to their advantage.

The great white flower's petals quivered and pulsated as strange energies played across them, and she thought about the prophecy the Edifice had brought with its appearance here. Ever since Dust, since the Faction virus had wormed its way into the Doctor's dying body, the timelines stretching across the universe had grown more and more twisted, malleable, uncertain. Whole regions of spacetime had degenerated into chaos, warping and changing to the point where they threatened to become rival universes themselves, linked by an enclave of time corridors; an obverse, the powerless onlookers had termed it, a temporal boil on the poisoned flesh of the cosmos. And the destabilising effects of the infection were spreading.

It was a long time since Mathara had felt anything like excitement, and she recognised it tickling her senses with a deep pleasure. Important things were happening. Things that could make millennia of events unhappen in just a few sweet moments.

'The Edifice is reacting,' one of her technicians called out. 'Energy levels up already.'

'We have our confirmation, then.' Mathara smiled under her mask. "The Doctor's there. He is the catalyst, just as predicted. The Edifice is responding to him.'

The white light of the flower was so brilliant that Mathara's eyes began to ache. The plastic flaps of her eyelids lowered. She remembered a lover proving himself by going back into her own past and hacking out every terrible thing that had happened to her. He hadn't left a good deal behind. When they'd separated and the pain became too much for a soul that had never known distress, she'd arranged for the man's mother to die, with him, in childbirth. Only a few stubborn traces of him in her mind reminded her he'd ever existed. Mathara felt oblivion as being white, like the flower.

Her long life within the Faction had left her many memories to cherish, but she'd periodically insisted they be destroyed also. Such acts renewed her. They reminded her that nothing in the past was sacred. There was only the future.

The bone flower held a feeling of anticipation, like a heady scent.

The Doctor sauntered forward a short distance and flung open his arms as if welcoming a sunbeam. 'Do you know, I feel alarmingly at home here.'

Mali frowned. 'You can't be serious.'

'Can't I?' the Doctor asked airily, rocking on his heels. His shadow did the same, but it seemed to Mali a fraction of a second out of sync. 'You know, that's always been my trouble.

Frivolous. Frivolous to the point of -'

' getting your head blown off if you don't shut up and get over here,' Vozarti interrupted, getting your head blown off if you don't shut up and get over here,' Vozarti interrupted, pointing his gun at the Doctor. 'By me. Now.'

The Doctor seemed to trot over quite obediently, but then breezed past Vozarti and Mali to stand with Klenchron and Nivet.

'Whatever that shadow thing was, Doctor, it went straight for you,' Vozarti said.

'Shadow thing?' the Doctor echoed.

'Don't try to act clever.'

The Doctor almost smiled. 'I don't have to.'

Vozarti was clearly unnerved by the Doctor's change of mood. 'What you do have to do is exactly what I tell you to.' As if seeking to prove his authority here, Vozarti signalled with his hand and the five Chancellery Guards formed a defensive ring around them, guns trained on the silent corners of the room.

'Well,' Nivet began, hugging himself to keep warm in the chill air. 'Now that we're here, we need reinforcements. Help from outside.'

'A war TARDIS, fully armed,' said Klenchron with feeling.

'Same problem applies as before,' Vozarti said wearily. 'No Doctor, no way into the Edifice.'

'No easy way in,' Nivet corrected him, casually. His selfassurance made Mali want to spit.

'If we'd made a concerted effort to breach this place's defences -'

Vozarti scoffed. 'Without knowing what was inside first?'

'Well, we're inside, aren't we?' Nivet winked at the Castellan.

Klenchron nodded earnestly. 'We can tell them everything they need to know. Everything.'

'I doubt that,' said the Doctor. 'I doubt that very much.' He was glancing about furtively as if afraid of discovery, his show of confidence apparently forgotten. Mali shivered. Was the Faction virus influencing these mood swings, or something more insidious, here in the Edifice?

'What do you mean?' Vozarti asked impatiently.

'Just a feeling.' The Doctor waved a hand in the air as if attempting to conjure something from the ether. 'I mean, how come we're all here?'

Nivet shrugged. 'Your name's on the door.'

The Doctor smiled tightly. 'If slightly misspelled.'

'Obviously, when this thing responded to our probes, the presence of the Doctor confused it,'

offered Klenchron. 'It made a grab for anyone close by.'

'That might explain the how, but not the why,' the Doctor snapped, a chestnut curl falling over one eye. 'Not the why,' he repeated morosely.

Mali crossed over to join him. 'What's really bothering you, Doctor? More invisible spiders?'

The Doctor looked at her curiously. 'I have the feeling I should be rather afraid of spiders.'

He started nodding to himself, lost in thought.

'All right, here's what we do,' Vozarti announced, pulling out his communicator. 'Nivet, contact the President. Let her know our position.'

Nivet took the communicator and tried it. Static filled the chamber with echoing background chatter. 'Not a chance with this,' he concluded. 'Perhaps if I had another ...'

Mali handed him her own without hesitation. 'Here.'

Nivet took it without thanks and started scrutinising it closely. Vozarti turned to the Doctor.

'And you, Doctor -'

'Me Doctor. You're spot on.'

Vozarti wasn't fazed. 'You will take me to the Type 102.'

The Doctor's face fell. 'Will I?'

'Immediately.'

'I'm desperately disappointed in myself.'

Mali pushed between them. 'I thought the doors wouldn't open?'

The Doctor clicked his fingers as if something brilliant had occurred to him. 'She's absolutely right.'

Vozarti shook his head, his red hair glinting in the dull light. 'We'll force them open.'

'What's with the "we"?' the Doctor asked, feet crunching on debris as he skipped over to the massive doors. 'Have you felt how heavy these doors are?' As if to prove his point, the Doctor gripped the thick, ornately carved handles on the door and pulled.

The doors practically flew off their hinges in their haste to open for him, sending him reeling.

For a second, everyone seemed frozen while the noise of the doors slamming into the bone walls chased itself round the room. The Doctor himself was teetering on one leg, as if he were an ornament disturbed and about to fall.

Mali anticipated the Doctor's next move before he could make it. She was already running by the time the Doctor had begun his own sprint, through the doors and into whatever lay beyond. She heard Vozarti yell at her as she reached the threshold of the room, glimpsed a darkgreen coat tail flapping crazily like a bat into the darkness. As she moved to follow it, she realised Vozarti's shout had been a warning.

Silently, the doors to the vaulted chamber had swung closed again behind her she was cut off from the others. Mali gripped the heavy handles in the dark. She felt no surprise but a fraction colder when the doors, once more, refused to budge.

Chapter Sixteen.

Possessed

Vozarti cursed and kicked the doors. 'It's impossible,' he complained.

'Isomorphic?' Nivet hazarded, apparently more interested in taking the back off Mali's communicator.

'They didn't open for him earlier ...' Vozarti began to smile with realisation, until he remembered how this body's grin could make him appear slightly pathetic. 'But that was before the shadow got back inside him, wasn't it? His Faction inheritance.'

'Faction agents don't have shadows,' Klenchron pointed out, peering over Nivet's shoulder.

'It's in all the nursery rhymes.'

Vozarti strode over. 'Has it occurred to you this place might be where they keep their shadows?'

Nivet looked up at him in mild surprise. 'Bit mystical for you, isn't it?'

'Truth is we know nothing about this place except that the Doctor feels right at home, and that he can open doors here while we can't.' Vozarti looked for the hundredth time around the bare bone walls of their cell. "That's an advantage I don't like him possessing.'

'Possessing,' Nivet murmured. The communicator beeped encouragingly to him as he inserted a tiny needle into its circuitry.

'Perhaps he's possessed,' Klenchron suggested miserably. Everyone stared at him.

Nivet looked back at Vozarti and smiled. 'Well, I guess if we are getting mystical about things, we might as well go the whole way.'

Vozarti glared at the two technicians, then turned to his guards. 'All right, get firing at those doors. We're going to blast our way through.'

Mali pressed on along the tunnels of the Edifice. She paused every few steps, pointing her staser into the gloom as though it might help her see, straining to catch the slightest sound that might give away her quarry.

Now, at last, her efforts were rewarded with a slow scuffing noise. She tensed, held her breath, tried to work out the direction of the sound. It was behind her. No, in front. It sounded not like one man walking, but many.

Getting closer.

She turned three hundred and sixty degrees, caught a glimpse of something moving far behind her, felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

'Phased temporal image,' said a voice in her ear.

She jumped so hard the staser jerked from her hand. When she turned, the Doctor was smiling sorrowfully at her. Studying the gun as if familiarising himself with its purpose, he held its snout against her chest.

Oddly, she found herself more concerned by what he'd said than by the weapon. She made a point of speaking loudly, attempting to prove he wasn't intimidating her. 'Explain.'

'That's you, that is,' he said, pointing behind her at the shadowy form. 'By the light at the end of the tunnel. I do hope that's symbolic.'

Mali shuddered. 'Symbolic? What are you suggesting, that I've turned my back on myself?'

'Perhaps shambolic might be a better word,' the Doctor mused. 'You followed me without a communicator, and now I've got your gun.'

Mali decided to gloss over that. 'How can that be me over there?'