Touch The Sky: Doctor Who/Studio C [Book 3]

Turn Left and Have a Dazzling End

Turn Left and Have a Dazzling End

(Turn Left: Part 9)

This was not at all what he'd expected time travel to be like, Matt thought to himself as he shrugged into a jacket full of wires.

"The TARDIS has tracked down the moment of intervention," the blonde woman explained, having already worked out the date. "One minute past ten in the morning." She rattled off street names he hadn't heard in years but still remembered, the images coming to his mind like he'd driven them yesterday. "You need to turn left. That's the most important thing. You've got to go back, turn left. Have you got that? One minute past ten, make yourself turn left."

"Keep the jacket on at all times," Magambo put in. "It's insulation against temporal feedback." She slapped a high tech watch into his hand. "This will correspond to local time wherever you land." When she finished, she held out a glass of water. "This is to combat dehydration."

Was that a joke? Matt searched the captain's eyes for a moment and saw the tiniest of half-smiles come to her face. Without another word, he was being ushered back to the circle of mirrors. He shot an anxious glance toward where Donna had disappeared.

"This is where we leave you," the blonde said.

"I don't want to see that thing again," he told her.

"No, the mirrors are just incidental," she assured him, gesturing to them. "They bounce chronon energy back into the center, which we control and decide the destination."

He spent a moment trying to puzzle through the technical terms before finally saying, "It's a time machine."

"It's a time machine," she confirmed with a grin.

"If you could," Magambo interjected. The blonde put a hand on Matt's shoulder and nudged him into the circle. "Powering up."

"So... how do you know this works?" Matt ventured.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah, we... we don't. We're just... we're just guessing."

"Oh," he said with a half-hysterical laugh. "Wonderful."

"Just remember, when you get to the junction, change the car's direction by one minute past ten."

"But...how?"

"It's up to you," the blonde told him.

"Well, everyone always says it can't be that bad of a decision if your future self doesn't come running up to you to tell you not to, so I suppose I'll do just that," he said with another disbelieving laugh.

"I'd like to see that!" the woman said with a smile.

"Matt?"

He spun toward Donna, heart dropping, but he only had time to mouth Sorry before Magambo spoke again. "Activate loadstone."

"Good luck," the woman said, casting a glance at the still-frozen Donna.

"I'm ready," Matt said quietly.

"One minute past ten," the woman reminded him.

"I get it now, though," with the tiniest edge of cheerfulness. "You said that I would die, but you meant that... this whole world, this timeline, is going to blink out of existence. But that's not dying, because the Doctor's world takes its place. The Doctor and Mal and I are still alive."

She didn't answer him.

Matt had the sudden, sinking feeling that if his life had a soundtrack the music would have hung in that single moment. "Right? You said she's still alive, 'cause we travel with the Doctor, we've got a future, so we can't... I can't..."