Unable to sleep, Jamie often spent the nights on the armoured, netted roof of the Town Hall, looking out over the dingy ruin London had become.  To the east he saw tower blocks, slabs of black light, long abandoned.  And the Westwall, a twenty-foot-high slab of concrete stretching north to south, bisecting Hyde Park down to the river.  A wall bristling with guns and wire.  Their guns and wire.  Them.  The other side.  It was called the City and was a total no-go.

However, it was to the west where Jamie most often turned.  Past the terraced houses and parks he had pledged to protect.  Beyond, in the direction of that unseen monstrous cylindrical building from which he had escaped but the Doctor had not.

As he stared, trying to envisage the TV Centre with its blank glass eyes, he found himself instead summoning up the image of the Safe Spot.  The place he'd retreated to during those terrible weeks in the hospital.  Instead of the blighted sprawl of buildings, he saw the glade.  Instead of a city, Scotland.  Up on the mountain near his village.  He saw the cold sparkling loch in the summer light, the wide trees bending over it as if dipping for a drink.  A fresh morning mist and the smell of village cooking in his nostrils.  Himself as a boy, senses brighter, feelings simpler.  The place he could go to block out the noise.  To forget.

Jamie is frozen, immobilised by sheer disbelief.  The Doctor's head, shoved inside the stolen flight helmet, has burst.  He looks up at Jamie.  There is a cracking sound and plastic shards shatter and fall.  Blood floods the orange-tinted goggles and the Doctor lets go of the gantry ladder.

He seems to hang suspended, leaning back from the rungs, arms outstretched.

Jamie cannot see the dark, gentle eyes through the plastic lenses and blood.

Then Time returns and the Doctor drops.  His limp body falls falls, with much slack-muscled crunching, on to a metal platform.

'Jamie!' screams Zoe, over his head.  They wear flight uniforms.  Uniforms of those who had captured them and they had outwitted.  Helmets and oxygen masks for disguise.

'Shot,' says Jamie.  'They've shot the Doctor.'

He sees the men down on the ground by the plane, pointing up at him with their sticks and blooms of fire.

And then his own arm shatters in a spray of blood and bone.

Before the pain kicks in he rolls away from the ladder, on to the meted gantry with its window of daylight seeping through.  He will not fall.  His instinct for survival is too strong.

Then fire burns his right side, cauterising all reasoned thoughts.

He vaguely understands that Zoe is hauling him along the walkway, pressing a button, opening a hatch, but it is all a dream, not real at all.  Because they've shot the Doctor.


He came down at dawn for Morning Prayer, aware that yet again he had been awake all night.  This was dangerous to the organisation, inefficient.  Further along the line, someone might have to rely on his alertness and Jamie could let them down through self-inflicted exhaustion.

So, prior to shoving open the fire door that led back into the corridors of the Town Hall, Jamie slid his blade from his belt sheath and carefully sliced a nick into his left forearm, just above the wrist.  Blood dropped in cherry blobs on to the concrete floor.  Jamie concentrated on the pain.  Its numbing white fire was bliss.

Later, bandage applied, he reported for duty.  Uniformed officers and staff hurried about their business, even at this early hour.  The air was tight with the din of work and the day's orders over the loudspeakers.  The industry was welcome.  It brought Jamie back to the land of the living.  He yearned to be given the chance to lose himself in the bustle.