‘Ace told me how you lied to her.’ Yaz wiped crossly at a tear that was trying to jump down her cheek. ‘How you thought you knew what was best for her and you did it without telling her, and you did it over and over again.’

‘Yaz, it wasn’t like that …’

‘Or maybe it was. I’m sure you had reasons for doing it – the less she knew the better, the greater good and all that, but … it was still your choice.’ Yaz crossed to her, a sad smile on her face. ‘Maybe you need to own that choice a bit more, Doctor … you know? If you want to find the right things to say to the likes of us.’

The Doctor put her hands in her coat pockets and looked down at the floor. ‘Yaz. I’m sorry that I manipulated you into going back to the TARDIS. I was afraid you would die, because you’re brave and you’re loyal and you’re willing to risk your life for others, and it would be my fault. But I also know that you are you – Yasmin Khan, who’s brilliant – and you don’t need me to make choices for you.’ She looked up and smiled a little. ‘Not even if it would mean you got to see an unexpectedly cool holographic message delivery service.’

‘Those,’ said Yaz, taking the Doctor’s hand, ‘were good words.’

The Doctor’s smile slowly spread across her face. ‘Yeah?’

Squidget chimed, jolting them back to the moment. The overhead scanner display showed more space and stars, and a dotted line was pitter-pattering across the darkness.

‘That’s it, he’s found it,’ the Doctor murmured. ‘The next collector station in the chain. Three hundred years in the future, somewhere in Galaxy Four. Or, if you’re standing on Hastus Major, Galaxy Six Billion, Twenty-Two Million—’

‘It’s there,’ Yaz interrupted. ‘Thank God. And if we go there, we can find the location of the next station …’

The Doctor punched in the coordinates, Squidget gave a ring of approval, and again they were shifting at speed through time and space.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Some ten years ago now, Chantelle had been sent business class to New Zealand on a calendar shoot in the Coromandel. She’d just broken up with yet another idiot, taken too many pills for heartache and jet lag and woken on the first day of the shoot feeling like death. She’d posed on a beach with steam blowing across dramatically from the fresh-dug hot water pools welling up from the sand. Some of the pools had been merely tepid, others scalding hot; the sand itself had been too hot to walk on in places.