Border Princes

THIRTY-ONE

Jack Harkness sat at his desk. His fingers played with the black tile on the glass desktop in front of him.

‘The Lord of the Border had friends here once,’ Jack said, ‘friends he trusted. He gave them a way to look after his son, something that would warn them if the son was at risk.’

Jack tapped the tile. It was no longer flashing, no longer lit up. It was just a dead black square.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Gwen softly. She rubbed her nose with a screwed-up tissue.

‘Do?’

‘How are we going to cope?’ she asked.

Jack shrugged. ‘The way we usually cope. There’s a chance that everything will gradually fade out. All the artifice, all the make-believe.’

‘All the lies,’ she said.

‘It’ll all go, I think,’ said Jack. ‘It’ll all melt away and we won’t remember a thing.’

‘How long will that take?’ she asked, ‘A day? A week? A year? My God, Jack, how many times might this have happened to us before?’

‘I have no idea.’

She sniffed, and blinked tears. ‘I don’t know what scares me more — the fact that it might take a year, or the fact that we might forget him completely.’

Jack didn’t answer. He got up. ‘Come on, let’s go and find Tosh and Owen. We need to be in one place for a while and just talk.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there in a moment. I’ve got to phone Rhys first.’

‘Sure. I understand.’

He rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘It will be OK, Gwen. Trust me. It will be OK.’

She shook her head. ‘No, Jack. It’s the End of the World,’ she said.