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everything about the House of Lungbarrow. Then he might have listened.'
    'The House of Lungbarrow is missing,' said K9. 'Wiped, erased, destroyed.'
    23
     
    'Yes,' she said sadly.
    'And it was the home of the Doctor.'
    24
     
    C
    hapter Three
    Talking to Yourself
    The harpy shrieked and spread her tattered black wings above her. She ran at Chris, taking to the air, beating the stench of carrion over him in fetid gusts. He flung his arms up in defence as her claws snatched at him. Her filthy hair jangled with jewels and amulets. She had an eyepatch.
    Chris stumbled backward, but she caught him in her talons, dragging him under her dead weight. She perched on his chest and tore out his heart with her beak.

    ***
Chris Cwej yel ed himself awake and fell off his lilo with a splash. He lay trembling on the surface of the bathwater, bobbing on the little effervescent waves, clutching at the right-hand side of his chest.
    Even in the super-buoyant water of the TARDIS's bathroom, he knew he was sweating. Bad dreams again. 'It's OK,' he kept repeating to himself in between deep calming breaths.
    The Doctor had said, 'It's fine if you drop off in the bath. Just don't do it face down.' Hence the lilo.
    Normally Chris didn't let that sort of thing worry him, but he'd had more than a headful of stress lately. Still working through it. Could be years before it all came out. He'd better not let on to Roz, though. He realized he had clutched the wrong side of his chest for his heart and felt a lot better.
    Something bobbed against him. The Doctor's plastic duck with a goofy grin on its beak. For a moment, he thought it had been laughing.
    He rolled over on the water and stuck his head under the surface. How did the loofah always sink to the bottom when everything else floated? He couldn't even dive for it. The density of the water just bounced him back up to the surface again. Giving up, he struck out for the tap end and hauled himself out of the bath.
    They must have reached Extans Superior by now. An idyl ic backwater world off the main space lanes (said the brochure) with breathtaking beaches and exotic nightlife. The Doctor muttered something about mosquitoes, but promised to get them there fifty years earlier, before the place got ruined by tourist development. Which wasn't exactly what Chris had in mind.
    Chris reached for a towel and shook out his yel ow hair. Then he remembered what had happened to Roz. He was using her towel. It stil smelt of her. It was stil here after all this time. Still fresh - that was the TARDIS for you. He stood for minutes on end, his face buried in the towel, grateful she hadn't been total y cleared away, listening to the slap of the water reverberate in the huge tiled bathroom.
    Damnation. How could he forget that? Lose the rest, but don't forget that. That was unforgivable.
    He had a dull ache in the smal of his back. Even the familiar thrum of the TARDIS was niggling him. He was so tired, but if he was still getting dreams like he'd just had, he didn't want to go back to sleep ever again.
    You've been through al this already, he reminded himself. It's just working through. First of all you have to forgive yourself.
    OK. He was forgiven. Easy. Too damn easy. He stil wanted to go out and get smashed.
    Failing that, he could go and take it out on the Doctor.
    Dorothée McShane opened her eyes and looked at the white ceiling overhead. She had a pain in her chest where someone... someone who had climbed out of her mirror when she'd dropped her guard, had shot her.
    The weapon had been a high-impulse carbine - the sort of heavy-duty gun carried by anti-Dalek squads in the Flova trenches during her time with the Irregulars. One raser lozenge could slice the legs off a Marsh-Dalek at sixty metres.
    25
     
    It wasn't something she'd had to think about much lately.
    A face slid into view. It was the girl cal ed Ace again.
    She sat on the side of the bed like a hospital visitor. She'd pulled her hair back into a