Skypoint

THREE

Toshiko Sato loved equations the way that other people loved poetry.

Those people, the poetry lovers – the people that most others probably thought of as normal – found truth and emotional support in the structure of words, the rhythm and the cadence of their sounds. Toshiko had never fully trusted words. They were so easy to misinterpret, or to be misused. A lot of people could be very clever with words. And they used them to break your heart. Not so many were quite that clever with numbers, few really understood them beyond their significance on a bank statement, and fewer still appreciated their simple, truthful beauty in the way that Toshiko Sato did. Because, at the end of the day, everything came down to numbers, from the physics of an atomic bomb to the shape of an autumn leaf swept away on the wind. Everything came down to mathematics. It was that kind of vision that made Toshiko special. It was also, she knew, what made her a freak.

The fact that she was in love with a dead man who wouldn’t quit walking and talking was par for the course.

Superfreak!

She looked up from the figures on her computer screen – calculations on Rift energy fluctuations – and watched Owen bound up the steel staircase to tend his collection of alien plants. He didn’t move badly for a man who had had his heart smashed to a pulp by a .44 calibre bullet just a couple of months earlier. He still had the hole in his chest; like the finger that he had purposefully broken before her one night in a vicious black mood, it would never heal. One morning, he had turned up in the Hub with flowers poking out of the wound and told everyone he thought Torchwood’s subterranean base needed cheering up. Being dead hadn’t killed Owen’s sense of humour. Or perhaps, like her numbers, it was just a way to cope.

Toshiko had been in love with Owen Harper for two years, since he had joined Torchwood. Then he had been a man scarred by the loss of his fiancée to an alien brain parasite who had tried to lose himself in booze and a nightly succession of anonymous club-shags. But a part of her believed that she had come to love him even more since the bullet from that automatic had ripped his chest apart.

Superfreak!

And the big circular airlock door rolled aside. And Toshiko was grateful for the interruption to her thoughts.

Gwen was back.

‘I thought you’d gone home,’ Toshiko called.

Gwen was unique within Torchwood – she had a home and a life to go to. Which was why Toshiko and Owen were still at the Hub. And Jack and Ianto were still around, somewhere, doing something – albeit probably more recreational.

Gwen was closing on Toshiko, urgent. ‘I need you to look for Rift activity in the Bay area.’

Owen stuck his head over the railings above, a faintly luminous blue-green plant in one hand, and a small plastic watering can in the other. ‘Something cracking off?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

Gwen got Toshiko to check the coordinates for the SkyPoint location. She drew a blank.

‘Nothing,’ Toshiko said. ‘No records of Rift activity. Nothing at all.’

Gwen frowned.

‘Hey, watch that. You’ll get lines.’

The voice sounded American. Whether or not Jack Harkness was American was something else. They all knew that wasn’t his name. The real Jack Harkness had died in an aeroplane over England in 1941. Their Jack – this Jack – had never felt any compulsion to tell them his real name; he said it didn’t matter. The man that went by the name he once used belonged to another time, and no longer existed.

The mysteries that surrounded Jack Harkness were impenetrable but, as they had come to learn, unimportant. What mattered was that Jack – wherever he was from, whoever he really was – would always be there for them.

Until he disappeared again. And even then, he would be back.

But Jack wasn’t going anywhere right now. He wanted to know what had broken Gwen away from her new husband so quickly and brought her back to the Hub. He was buttoning the last couple of buttons on his blue service shirt as he asked and, as Gwen quickly ran through events at SkyPoint, she saw Ianto Jones appear. He was as discreet as the tailored suit on his back, and the only hint of any connection between Jack’s buttons and Ianto Jones was the latter’s momentary adjustment of his tie as he glanced into the reflective surface of an inactive monitor.

Jack heard Gwen out without a word, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Just vanished?’

‘All but in front of my eyes,’ Gwen confirmed.

‘But according to my instruments, there’s no indication of Rift activity in that area,’ Toshiko said.

‘But estate agents don’t just vanish into thin air,’ Ianto observed. ‘We’re just not that lucky.’

Owen was sitting on the steel steps that led to his alien hydroponics. ‘But if there’s no sign of Rift activity…?’

‘I know,’ Jack smiled. ‘Intriguing, isn’t it?’ He glanced at his watch, then at Toshiko. ‘You want to go flat-hunting?’

‘I’ll get my gear,’ she said.

And Ianto was already holding Jack’s old RAF greatcoat for him as he shrugged it on.

‘I’m coming, too,’ said Gwen.

But Jack shook his head. ‘No you’re not. First day back to work after your honeymoon? You’re going back home to Rhys, cook him dinner or go buy fish and chips. Watch TV. Make-believe life is ordinary just once more. For his sake.’

Gwen thought about arguing, and then thought about Rhys. Life was never going to be ordinary, but Jack was right, she owed it to Rhys to pretend it was. If only tonight.

‘You ready?’ Jack asked Toshiko as she pulled a messenger bag of Rift and alien-hunting tech in place over her shoulder.

‘Ready.’

‘It’s apartment thirty-two,’ Gwen called after Jack and Toshiko as they headed towards the airlock. ‘Tenth floor.’

‘Thirty-two. Tenth floor,’ Jack called back without looking, and the huge circular door rolled back into place.

It was only then that she wondered whether she should have mentioned the border-line psychopath that lived on the top floor. But she decided that Jack had handled worse things than Besnik Lucca.