‘Doctor,’ said Benny, and swung his umbrella into the line of his bloody vision, offering it to him. The question mark framed the two men down below.

Smith stared at it for a moment, a terrible pain creasing his face. He had to drop his gaze from the question the umbrella asked. Looking down, he found that he was looking at the poppy in his buttonhole, a lighter shade amongst the red all around.

A single flower.

Unsteadily, he let one hand drop from the gun and grabbed at the poppy, held it gently in his fist as if it contained the answer.

‘I’m not him, not the Doctor,’ he told Benny. ‘But he’s real. I know he’s real. He wouldn’t kill them, would he?’

‘No,’ Benny told him. ‘He wouldn’t.’

‘Even though they took first blood. Even though the war had already started?’

‘No,’ Joan told him, with a glance at Benny. ‘You wouldn’t.’

Smith nodded. He let go of the gun and grabbed the poppy with both hands, staring at it like it was the most important thing in the world. ‘So what would the Doctor do?’ he asked Benny.

‘He’d find a way to turn this around,’ Bernice told him, the words spilling out of her like this was the most certain thing she’d ever said in her life. ‘He’d make the villains fall into their own traps, and trick the monsters, and outwit the men with guns. He’d save everybody’s life and find a way to win.’

Smith made a decision. His hands enfolded the flower.

He snatched for his umbrella, spun round, and stood up, a frown of terrible concentration on his face. ‘There’s another way,’ he told the boys. He dropped his hat and let the cape fall to the floor. ‘Throw away your guns.’

Chapter Ten

What’s Bigger on the Inside than on the Outside?

Major Wrightson was sitting in the front of the van, trying to compose a cable to HQ as the rain lashed down, visibly bouncing off the dome over the town. His own feeling about the barrier was that it was somehow divine rather than the work of the enemy, but he couldn’t put that down. He had already called for reinforcements, without much idea of what they were to reinforce. All he really wanted was a general to come down here, see the barrier and make it into his problem. His men had been turning away civilians all day, and now it was approaching dusk.