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Boardroom? I’ll pipe the results up there in a few minutes.’
    Gwen nodded. ‘OK.’ Better leave Toshiko to it, she thought. She made her way down the short flight of steps that led to the walkway across the shallow basin. She was still amazed by the way the Hub was aligned with the surrounding area above ground. A clue was the tall stainless-steel pillar that reached from the basin up to the distant ceiling, where it continued up another seventy feet beyond the pavement of Roald Dahl Plass opposite the Millennium Centre. Constantly flowing water cascaded like a shimmering curtain on all sides of the pillar. The base had started to turn green with algae, yet the Hub neither felt nor smelled damp. The basin itself seemed to rise and fall with the tide. Once they had found a bream flapping about in there, lost and forlorn until Owen had caught it, analysed it, pronounced it fit to eat, and cooked it in the Hub’s kitchen on the upper level. This had briefly earned him the nickname ‘Harry Ramsden’.
    Gwen met Jack at the top of the spiral staircase that led up to the Boardroom. He was still wearing his greatcoat. Rainbow spots of rain stood out on the collar and shoulders, strangely illuminated in the irregular light of the Hub. He stared out over the main area, evidently enjoying the sight of his team busy at work.
    ‘Saw you talking back there with the policeman…’
    ‘Andy?’
    ‘Yeah. He giving you a hard time?’
    ‘No, not at all.’ Gwen considered how she’d felt talking to Andy in the alleyway. Or not talking to him, more like. ‘Sometimes I just hate keeping secrets. Sometimes I wish people wouldn’t tell me them, then there’s no pressure. Know what I mean?’
    ‘Part of the job,’ he told her.
    ‘My mum used to say you shouldn’t keep secrets from your friends. If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust?’
    ‘No point wrapping your birthday presents then!’
    Gwen laughed. ‘Ah, that wouldn’t be a secret. She’d say that counted as a “surprise”.’
    ‘And the difference would be…?’
    ‘A surprise is something you tell everyone about. In the end. You can’t have a surprise party if no one turns up.’
    Jack laughed too. ‘And a secret is something that you tell people about one friend at a time?’ He watched her thoughtfully. He scratched his forehead with his forefinger, and his pale eyes never left hers. ‘Do you share your secrets?’
    Gwen knew what he meant. She’d seen him shot through the head and survive it. Heard him talk about some unexplained incident that meant that he could not die. He could feel pain, that was for sure – he’d had one hell of a headache for days after that shooting incident, even though there wasn’t a mark on him now. She didn’t know how safe he was; whether a disease or a catastrophic accident or being consumed by fire would be enough to carry him off for good. But more than that, only she knew about this. Ianto, Toshiko and Owen had no idea. Jack hadn’t explicitly asked her to keep his secret – he simply seemed to know that she would. An unspoken understanding.
    Jack was still studying her reaction. ‘And what about Rhys?’
    What about him, she thought. Every day she was keeping things from her boyfriend. She couldn’t tell him the truth about Torchwood. He didn’t understand why she was always on call, day and night. And he never asked her about it. Another unspoken understanding. Or was it? By not talking, how could she be sure?
    ‘Don’t lose track of your own life,’ Jack told her. ‘You mustn’t let it drift away. Torchwood can consume everything. Everyone…’
    His voice trailed off. He’d seen Ianto, their receptionist, walking up the spiral staircase. Ianto was about her age, maybe a few years younger, and not bad-looking, she decided. She hadn’t worked him out yet. He seemed happy to do the more mundane work in Torchwood – the fetch-and-carry stuff, whether that was a Tesco bag full of shopping or