Held in Trust: Chapter 16
Title: Held in Trust (16/?)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Most chapters Teen (Adult chapters noted as such)
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life
. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 |
Rose made a mental note to ask the Doctor whether he felt this same impending sense of dread when he engaged in high-stakes improvisation, and if so, how he managed to hide it so well. Walking in to the darkened cinder block shed, she saw scorch marks along one wall and morosely appended an if/then statement to her previous thought.
"Laxmi," she said quietly, not wanting to startle the woman kneeling next to the silently ominous device on the floor.
Laxmi Chaudhry looked up from staring intently at it and moved to stand until Rose gestured for her to stay put.
"Rose Tyler. I didn't know they were going to let you on site."
"Yeah, well, I'm sure 'they' would if 'they' knew I was actually here." Rose attempted to form a reassuring yet conspiratorial smile.
"I see," Laxmi said soberly, clearly doubting the wisdom of participating in this breech of protocol.
"It's nice to see you though. How's everything back at the lab? Good?"
Laxmi stared at Rose mutely, cottoning on to the trivial nature of this small talk and its intended purpose (which had nothing to do with Rose genuinely caring whether or not everything at the lab was good or horrid).
"Right," Rose drawled, seeing her niceties falling flat. "We can catch up later. I'll just get right to the point, shall I? You need me."
"Oh? How do you figure?" Laxmi replied temperamentally. She had not gotten to her position in Torchwood's science division by relying on others--least of all former field operatives with barely five years experience under their belts and the constant whiff of nepotism swirling about them.
"You've got no clue how this thing works, or how to stop it. Do you?" Rose knelt down and joined the other woman on the cold packed-earth floor of the shed.
"The detainees are, as of this time, being uncooperative."
Rose gave a derisive little snort. "Which, translated from the original Torchwood in to English, means that you've got bugger-all."
Laxmi looked offended and opened her mouth to speak, but Rose didn't give her the chance to raise objections or make excuses. Time was too critical to waste on playing verbal rock-paper-scissors.
"I'm sure that man--if he is a man--that is doubtless being flown in to London right this very moment, has been only too happy to tell you all about how he's going to destroy the Earth. They always do that, the bad guys. That is one aspect of my job that I do not miss in the slightest, listening to all these nutters rant on and on about how we're all doomed. Boring. So, let's take stock of what we know, yeah? According to him, we've got just a few hours until it all goes boom, and if we try to tamper with the device, it'll go boom anyway, just a different sort of boom."
Rose paused in her monologue to take stock of Laxmi's reactions. She looked rather stunned and Rose counted that as at least a partial success. She'd seen the Doctor pull this off enough times, some of the talent had to have rubbed off on her at some point.
Laxmi brushed a lock of hair that had gone stray from her long plait and cleared her throat. "You're not saying anything I don't already know. Do you know how to stop it without any...adverse effects? Because if not...."
Rose swallowed hard. That was certainly the question, wasn't it?
"No. I'll be honest, no I don't. But I am a witness to the events here last night, and no slouch myself when it comes to a bit of off-world tech." She took a moment to push back the outlines of doubt from her words and allowed herself to speak her greatest hope as if it were fact. "And I've got a man in the field, as it were. He just needs a little...."
Laxmi pursed her lips and glared suspiciously as Rose's mouth continued to move though no words came out until:
"Time!"
"Pardon me?"
Rose began to gibber rapidly, her improbable hope mixing with the fear of this gambit failing, to create a stomach-churning exhilaration. "The Doctor said that a temporal failsafe is something in the future that ensures that things in the past happen as they ought. Well, the way someone reckons that they ought. Now he's gone--the Doctor that is--he's gone to the future to disable that and he just needs time. Relative time. Or is that absolute time? That's the bit that's doing my head in but we'll just leave that for now. But if he needs time, that's what we'll give him."
Laxmi waved her arms signalling for Rose to slow down, or more preferably, stop. "Temporal failsafe, what? The interrogation transcript I was given didn't mention any such thing. And the Doctor--I presume the same man we've all heard so much about before--you yourself said in your debrief that he vanished after having been shot with some sort of energy weapon." She trailed her words off at the end, realising from the pained look on Rose's face that going over the details of the Doctor's likely death with her was probably not the best of ideas.Laxmi added "delusional" to her already lengthy list of Rose's undesirable character traits.
"I said the weapon was fired and when I looked again the Doctor was gone. I never said he was shot or that that had anything to do with his...disappearance."
Laxmi heaved a long-suffering sigh. She had work to do and this was going nowhere. "So he's gone to the future, is it? To save us? And how do you know that?"
"I know because he's the Doctor and it's what he does." As the words left Rose's mouth, she felt like she actually believed them for the first time since being left on that beach again. She stood and moved over to where she'd last seen him standing the night before. "He was right here, yeah? Standing in front of this...this thing, it sort of looked like a capsule. Like a coffin with the lid open. And after the weapon was fired, both it and the Doctor were gone. It was a time machine, I'm sure of it now. And I know the Doctor went to the future because that's where he's got to go to disable the temporal failsafe."
Rose looked at Laxmi like all of this was completely obvious, and Laxmi looked back at Rose like she was utterly mental. But mental in the sort of way that makes you want to pity the person. The trauma of witnessing her lover's probable death, on top of the impending end of all life on Earth had clearly sent the girl around the bend.
At this point there was some shouting outside, though not of the sort that would indicate some sort of military operation or breach of security. More like what one might hear outside a pub at one in the morning. The words arsehole, twat, and two-timing bastard floated in through one of the windows.
Rose winked at Laxmi and gave a little chuckle. "I see S-Division hasn't changed in the slightest during my absence. Now, where were we? I was saying a bunch of stuff that you think is rubbish and you were looking at me like I'm a complete lunatic. But it's not rubbish and I'm not a lunatic and this is the part where I demonstrate that. Tell me about the current status of Project Ochre."
Laxmi knew intellectually that Rose was now a civilian and had no power to demand classified information in this way, but she nonetheless felt compelled and was talking before she had even thought about it.
"On hold indefinitely. We were never able to make it work. It's like no matter what energy source we used, it was the wrong frequency. Theoretically it should be fully functional, but we finally gave up and shelved it a couple of months ago."
Rose's lips broadened in to a genuine smile that was redolent with compassion and hope. "That's because you didn't have me around. Can you call in a jumper to bring it here? We're running short on time."
"A jumper? That project was deauthorised after--"
"We don't have time for this Torchwood run-around bollocks!" Rose snapped. "Bring a unit out of mothballs and call for a bloody jumper to bring Ochre."
Laxmi did not act fast enough and Rose barked, "Now!" before moving to the window and taking a long look around the rest of the compound. Again, before she even knew what she was doing, Laxmi was dialling her secure mobile and having a heated and increasingly frantic conversation with her lab assistant back in London.
"There's no time for you to get authorisation--just pull one of the damn things out of the storage cabinet and put in the coordinates! Yes, you're going to have to be the one to do it! Bring Ochre and my little toolkit, the one next to my in-box. Stand by for the coords ." She looked back up at Rose after she rung off. "Maybe we could take this thing back to the lab instead? I won't have all my tools--"
"Too risky," Rose replied, chewing on a corner of her lip, hands on her hips. "We don't know what sort of tampering will set it off and the energy put out by a jump might be what does it."
Donna flung the door to the shack open breathlessly and at that same moment a baby-faced man in a white lab coat materialised in the centre of the room and then crumpled to the floor. Rose looked back and forth between them as Laxmi knelt beside her assistant and relieved him of a small tool box and metal briefcase.
"What the hell was that?" Donna said with a certain amount of alarm, pointing at the man in the lab coat.
"Paul Wilshire, my assistant." Laxmi did not look up from where she was unpacking a number of objects from the metal briefcase, and the man in the lab coat smiled sheepishly for a moment before taking each item and readying it for use.
"But how did he--"
"I'll explain later," Rose said as she took Donna by the arm and led her to a corner, out of the way of the scientists. "Everything go all right out there?"
Donna smirked, "Yeah, I should say. That bloke you pointed out, he's a randy one, eh? I made like my car had broken down and I was a damsel in distress and you should have seen him get interested. 'Til half the rest of that lot came over too and saw how he was looking at me. Blimey, do they get anything done or do they just have lovers' quarrels all day?"
"Occupational hazard," Rose muttered.
"So what's all this then, with the amazing un-invisible man? Are we going to do it? Save the world and not look like useless knobs when the Doctor comes back?"
"That's a time lock. We're going to create a time bubble around the device so that it remains in stasis until we can figure out how to disable it safely. Torchwhood calls it Project Ochre, and I reckon I've got just what they need to make it work." Rose began to unzip her jacket and fumble with something at her neck.
Looking over to where Laxmi and Paul were setting up what appeared to be miniature tripods all around the singularity generator, Donna hissed, "Wait, you mean, it doesn't work?"
"It doesn't work yet," Rose clarified. "But it will. I'm certain it will. Pretty sure. There's a chance. A fair chance. Fair to middling."
"Oh, brilliant." Donna said under her breath as Rose reached under her shirt and pulled out a small key on a simple metal chain.
"All right people, let's do this," Rose announced as if she were addressing an entire auditorium full of employees.
"What's that?" Paul had looked over when Rose spoke to see that she was holding out the key triumphantly.
"What do we need with a footlocker key?" Laxmi asked distractedly, setting up the final tripod and connecting a number of wires to a central power source.
"This may look like just a key, but I assure you it has some very special properties. Wire it in and we'll see just how special."
Paul transported the key from Rose to Laxmi who knitted her brow as she turned it over and over in her hand. "I'm going to do this, Rose Tyler, and if you're just having me on, there are going to be some serious consequences. You're not untouchable any more now that your father is out of the picture."
Rose said nothing as Laxmi began to work and Donna looked anxiously between the two of them as the collection of strange-looking technology on the ground continued to grow.
"All right, we're ready to go here. I think we should all stand well back. I've had to adjust some of the wiring to accommodate Miss Tyler's little contribution and I'm not sure what effect that will have."
Paul, a veteran of many laboratory disasters, and Donna, a very sensible woman, both immediately moved off to the farthest corner of the room. Rose didn't move a muscle and stood stock-still with her hands on her hips and a completely inscrutable expression on her face.
Laxmi crouched down next to the power source, like a cat getting ready to flee at a moment's notice, and began a count-down. "Time lock activating in five...four...three--"
"Wait!" It was Donna, rushing forward with something in her hand. "How will we know it's working unless we...." She tossed something on to the ground next to the singularity generator, in the middle of the circle of tripods: her watch. "There now," she said, sounding pleased with herself and moving back to huddle with Paul in the corner.
"Time lock activating in three...two...one...mark!" Laxmi pushed a button on the power source and jumped back.
At first it seemed like the same thing was going to happen as every other time she'd tried to power up the time lock: nothing. Not a whir, not a clang, not a thud. Nothing at all. But then, just as she was about to move in to fiddle with the wiring, one of the tripods began to emit a bluish light, almost liquid-looking in nature. It seemed to reach out from its source, searching for the next tripod in the circle and when one was found, it grew in power and moved on, all around the circuit with a faint crackling sound.
Rose raised an eyebrow at Laxmi who nodded silently, hopefully.
"Did we do it?" Donna finally asked, and then realising she had been clinging to the sleeve of the young scientist's lab coat, let go with an embarrassed apology.
The four of them moved closer, huddled around the crackling, humming circle of blue light, straining to see the watch, being careful not to touch anything.
"That ever happened before?" Rose asked Laxmi.
"Never."
"Good," Rose muttered. "That's good. I guess we'll find out how good in about three hours time."
Paul turned to look at her quizzically. "What happens then?"
Rose answered without looking away from the humming blue circle: "Either nothing, or we're all going to die."
(To Chapter 17: Jump)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Most chapters Teen (Adult chapters noted as such)
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life
. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 |
Rose made a mental note to ask the Doctor whether he felt this same impending sense of dread when he engaged in high-stakes improvisation, and if so, how he managed to hide it so well. Walking in to the darkened cinder block shed, she saw scorch marks along one wall and morosely appended an if/then statement to her previous thought.
"Laxmi," she said quietly, not wanting to startle the woman kneeling next to the silently ominous device on the floor.
Laxmi Chaudhry looked up from staring intently at it and moved to stand until Rose gestured for her to stay put.
"Rose Tyler. I didn't know they were going to let you on site."
"Yeah, well, I'm sure 'they' would if 'they' knew I was actually here." Rose attempted to form a reassuring yet conspiratorial smile.
"I see," Laxmi said soberly, clearly doubting the wisdom of participating in this breech of protocol.
"It's nice to see you though. How's everything back at the lab? Good?"
Laxmi stared at Rose mutely, cottoning on to the trivial nature of this small talk and its intended purpose (which had nothing to do with Rose genuinely caring whether or not everything at the lab was good or horrid).
"Right," Rose drawled, seeing her niceties falling flat. "We can catch up later. I'll just get right to the point, shall I? You need me."
"Oh? How do you figure?" Laxmi replied temperamentally. She had not gotten to her position in Torchwood's science division by relying on others--least of all former field operatives with barely five years experience under their belts and the constant whiff of nepotism swirling about them.
"You've got no clue how this thing works, or how to stop it. Do you?" Rose knelt down and joined the other woman on the cold packed-earth floor of the shed.
"The detainees are, as of this time, being uncooperative."
Rose gave a derisive little snort. "Which, translated from the original Torchwood in to English, means that you've got bugger-all."
Laxmi looked offended and opened her mouth to speak, but Rose didn't give her the chance to raise objections or make excuses. Time was too critical to waste on playing verbal rock-paper-scissors.
"I'm sure that man--if he is a man--that is doubtless being flown in to London right this very moment, has been only too happy to tell you all about how he's going to destroy the Earth. They always do that, the bad guys. That is one aspect of my job that I do not miss in the slightest, listening to all these nutters rant on and on about how we're all doomed. Boring. So, let's take stock of what we know, yeah? According to him, we've got just a few hours until it all goes boom, and if we try to tamper with the device, it'll go boom anyway, just a different sort of boom."
Rose paused in her monologue to take stock of Laxmi's reactions. She looked rather stunned and Rose counted that as at least a partial success. She'd seen the Doctor pull this off enough times, some of the talent had to have rubbed off on her at some point.
Laxmi brushed a lock of hair that had gone stray from her long plait and cleared her throat. "You're not saying anything I don't already know. Do you know how to stop it without any...adverse effects? Because if not...."
Rose swallowed hard. That was certainly the question, wasn't it?
"No. I'll be honest, no I don't. But I am a witness to the events here last night, and no slouch myself when it comes to a bit of off-world tech." She took a moment to push back the outlines of doubt from her words and allowed herself to speak her greatest hope as if it were fact. "And I've got a man in the field, as it were. He just needs a little...."
Laxmi pursed her lips and glared suspiciously as Rose's mouth continued to move though no words came out until:
"Time!"
"Pardon me?"
Rose began to gibber rapidly, her improbable hope mixing with the fear of this gambit failing, to create a stomach-churning exhilaration. "The Doctor said that a temporal failsafe is something in the future that ensures that things in the past happen as they ought. Well, the way someone reckons that they ought. Now he's gone--the Doctor that is--he's gone to the future to disable that and he just needs time. Relative time. Or is that absolute time? That's the bit that's doing my head in but we'll just leave that for now. But if he needs time, that's what we'll give him."
Laxmi waved her arms signalling for Rose to slow down, or more preferably, stop. "Temporal failsafe, what? The interrogation transcript I was given didn't mention any such thing. And the Doctor--I presume the same man we've all heard so much about before--you yourself said in your debrief that he vanished after having been shot with some sort of energy weapon." She trailed her words off at the end, realising from the pained look on Rose's face that going over the details of the Doctor's likely death with her was probably not the best of ideas.Laxmi added "delusional" to her already lengthy list of Rose's undesirable character traits.
"I said the weapon was fired and when I looked again the Doctor was gone. I never said he was shot or that that had anything to do with his...disappearance."
Laxmi heaved a long-suffering sigh. She had work to do and this was going nowhere. "So he's gone to the future, is it? To save us? And how do you know that?"
"I know because he's the Doctor and it's what he does." As the words left Rose's mouth, she felt like she actually believed them for the first time since being left on that beach again. She stood and moved over to where she'd last seen him standing the night before. "He was right here, yeah? Standing in front of this...this thing, it sort of looked like a capsule. Like a coffin with the lid open. And after the weapon was fired, both it and the Doctor were gone. It was a time machine, I'm sure of it now. And I know the Doctor went to the future because that's where he's got to go to disable the temporal failsafe."
Rose looked at Laxmi like all of this was completely obvious, and Laxmi looked back at Rose like she was utterly mental. But mental in the sort of way that makes you want to pity the person. The trauma of witnessing her lover's probable death, on top of the impending end of all life on Earth had clearly sent the girl around the bend.
At this point there was some shouting outside, though not of the sort that would indicate some sort of military operation or breach of security. More like what one might hear outside a pub at one in the morning. The words arsehole, twat, and two-timing bastard floated in through one of the windows.
Rose winked at Laxmi and gave a little chuckle. "I see S-Division hasn't changed in the slightest during my absence. Now, where were we? I was saying a bunch of stuff that you think is rubbish and you were looking at me like I'm a complete lunatic. But it's not rubbish and I'm not a lunatic and this is the part where I demonstrate that. Tell me about the current status of Project Ochre."
Laxmi knew intellectually that Rose was now a civilian and had no power to demand classified information in this way, but she nonetheless felt compelled and was talking before she had even thought about it.
"On hold indefinitely. We were never able to make it work. It's like no matter what energy source we used, it was the wrong frequency. Theoretically it should be fully functional, but we finally gave up and shelved it a couple of months ago."
Rose's lips broadened in to a genuine smile that was redolent with compassion and hope. "That's because you didn't have me around. Can you call in a jumper to bring it here? We're running short on time."
"A jumper? That project was deauthorised after--"
"We don't have time for this Torchwood run-around bollocks!" Rose snapped. "Bring a unit out of mothballs and call for a bloody jumper to bring Ochre."
Laxmi did not act fast enough and Rose barked, "Now!" before moving to the window and taking a long look around the rest of the compound. Again, before she even knew what she was doing, Laxmi was dialling her secure mobile and having a heated and increasingly frantic conversation with her lab assistant back in London.
"There's no time for you to get authorisation--just pull one of the damn things out of the storage cabinet and put in the coordinates! Yes, you're going to have to be the one to do it! Bring Ochre and my little toolkit, the one next to my in-box. Stand by for the coords ." She looked back up at Rose after she rung off. "Maybe we could take this thing back to the lab instead? I won't have all my tools--"
"Too risky," Rose replied, chewing on a corner of her lip, hands on her hips. "We don't know what sort of tampering will set it off and the energy put out by a jump might be what does it."
Donna flung the door to the shack open breathlessly and at that same moment a baby-faced man in a white lab coat materialised in the centre of the room and then crumpled to the floor. Rose looked back and forth between them as Laxmi knelt beside her assistant and relieved him of a small tool box and metal briefcase.
"What the hell was that?" Donna said with a certain amount of alarm, pointing at the man in the lab coat.
"Paul Wilshire, my assistant." Laxmi did not look up from where she was unpacking a number of objects from the metal briefcase, and the man in the lab coat smiled sheepishly for a moment before taking each item and readying it for use.
"But how did he--"
"I'll explain later," Rose said as she took Donna by the arm and led her to a corner, out of the way of the scientists. "Everything go all right out there?"
Donna smirked, "Yeah, I should say. That bloke you pointed out, he's a randy one, eh? I made like my car had broken down and I was a damsel in distress and you should have seen him get interested. 'Til half the rest of that lot came over too and saw how he was looking at me. Blimey, do they get anything done or do they just have lovers' quarrels all day?"
"Occupational hazard," Rose muttered.
"So what's all this then, with the amazing un-invisible man? Are we going to do it? Save the world and not look like useless knobs when the Doctor comes back?"
"That's a time lock. We're going to create a time bubble around the device so that it remains in stasis until we can figure out how to disable it safely. Torchwhood calls it Project Ochre, and I reckon I've got just what they need to make it work." Rose began to unzip her jacket and fumble with something at her neck.
Looking over to where Laxmi and Paul were setting up what appeared to be miniature tripods all around the singularity generator, Donna hissed, "Wait, you mean, it doesn't work?"
"It doesn't work yet," Rose clarified. "But it will. I'm certain it will. Pretty sure. There's a chance. A fair chance. Fair to middling."
"Oh, brilliant." Donna said under her breath as Rose reached under her shirt and pulled out a small key on a simple metal chain.
"All right people, let's do this," Rose announced as if she were addressing an entire auditorium full of employees.
"What's that?" Paul had looked over when Rose spoke to see that she was holding out the key triumphantly.
"What do we need with a footlocker key?" Laxmi asked distractedly, setting up the final tripod and connecting a number of wires to a central power source.
"This may look like just a key, but I assure you it has some very special properties. Wire it in and we'll see just how special."
Paul transported the key from Rose to Laxmi who knitted her brow as she turned it over and over in her hand. "I'm going to do this, Rose Tyler, and if you're just having me on, there are going to be some serious consequences. You're not untouchable any more now that your father is out of the picture."
Rose said nothing as Laxmi began to work and Donna looked anxiously between the two of them as the collection of strange-looking technology on the ground continued to grow.
"All right, we're ready to go here. I think we should all stand well back. I've had to adjust some of the wiring to accommodate Miss Tyler's little contribution and I'm not sure what effect that will have."
Paul, a veteran of many laboratory disasters, and Donna, a very sensible woman, both immediately moved off to the farthest corner of the room. Rose didn't move a muscle and stood stock-still with her hands on her hips and a completely inscrutable expression on her face.
Laxmi crouched down next to the power source, like a cat getting ready to flee at a moment's notice, and began a count-down. "Time lock activating in five...four...three--"
"Wait!" It was Donna, rushing forward with something in her hand. "How will we know it's working unless we...." She tossed something on to the ground next to the singularity generator, in the middle of the circle of tripods: her watch. "There now," she said, sounding pleased with herself and moving back to huddle with Paul in the corner.
"Time lock activating in three...two...one...mark!" Laxmi pushed a button on the power source and jumped back.
At first it seemed like the same thing was going to happen as every other time she'd tried to power up the time lock: nothing. Not a whir, not a clang, not a thud. Nothing at all. But then, just as she was about to move in to fiddle with the wiring, one of the tripods began to emit a bluish light, almost liquid-looking in nature. It seemed to reach out from its source, searching for the next tripod in the circle and when one was found, it grew in power and moved on, all around the circuit with a faint crackling sound.
Rose raised an eyebrow at Laxmi who nodded silently, hopefully.
"Did we do it?" Donna finally asked, and then realising she had been clinging to the sleeve of the young scientist's lab coat, let go with an embarrassed apology.
The four of them moved closer, huddled around the crackling, humming circle of blue light, straining to see the watch, being careful not to touch anything.
"That ever happened before?" Rose asked Laxmi.
"Never."
"Good," Rose muttered. "That's good. I guess we'll find out how good in about three hours time."
Paul turned to look at her quizzically. "What happens then?"
Rose answered without looking away from the humming blue circle: "Either nothing, or we're all going to die."
(To Chapter 17: Jump)