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  She strode past them until she reached the wood-panelled confessional further down the aisle. A soft glow suffused the area beyond it, a fluctuating rhythm of light that rippled across the dark space.

  Missy turned to look at the grubby kids. ‘Your prayers have been answered. Gerald’s not the religious type. I’d wait here until he gets fed up. Maybe consider your sins.’

  They scowled back at her.

  ‘I’m just popping in here.’ Missy tugged at the carved door of the confessional. ‘May be a while. I’ve been a very naughty girl.’

  And with a kick of her heel, she stepped through the door into her TARDIS.

  Its landing in the basilica had been abrupt, and certainly unexpected, when …

  Yesterday …

  … she’d been escaping from a Gryphon combat unit.

  That hadn’t been the intention. Her fiendishly clever plan to elude the Daleks had incorporated a teleport, a flight of stairs, three bald lies, and a classical ballet routine. The subsequent leap into the Time Vortex should have been simply dazzling, but her grand jeté had ended up as more of a pas de chat.

  How was she to know the Gryphon timeship was going to be there? Honestly, it had come out of nowhere. She hadn’t seen a thing.

  The TARDIS and the Gryphon ship shimmered and shuddered together in a ghastly temporal embrace. Well, that’s what you’d expect if you tried to occupy the same physical space simultaneously at every point throughout eternity.

  An incoming transmission sparkled into life as a holographic Gryphon made the introductions. They weren’t polite. The creature had the body of a lioness, but with the wings of an eagle neatly folded across her back.

  ‘Release this Gryphon vessel at once!’

  It amused Missy to adjust the hologram so that it moved under her control across the TARDIS. She manipulated the image until the creature had a vase balanced on her head. It was the ugly green urn that Missy hated but still displayed, because she’d stolen it on the day that Versailles opened, after Louis XIV had offended her with some now-forgotten slight.

  ‘Do you have a name? I can’t simply call you “Gryphon”, now can I?’

  The creature made a gruff sound low in her throat.

  ‘I mean, it’s like saying “Time Lord” or “human” or “Sontaran” or “mongoose” when you’re talking to someone. And let me tell you, mongooses are dull company – always giggling away at their own private jokes.’

  ‘Silence! I am the captain of this Gryphon ship—’

  ‘Shall I call you Hermione?’ Missy smiled as the vase seemed to wobble angrily. ‘I’m more of a Slytherin girl myself. Always attracted to the bad boys. I can see a lot of Severus Snape in me.’

  The Gryphon raised her paw to signal to someone out of shot. ‘Charge the laser cannon.’

  Missy wagged her finger, alarmed at this turn of events. ‘Not such a smart move! We’re in the Time Vortex. We need to back out of this with great care, not use firepower in the forever.’

  The Gryphon ignored her, too busy acknowledging some response from her left. ‘Very well. Fire at will.’

  ‘You don’t want to mess with me.’ Missy scuttled around the TARDIS, flicking switches and checking gauges. ‘I beat the Daleks.’

  ‘I have no knowledge of these Daleks.’

  Missy boggled. ‘How can you not know about the Daleks? They’re the most …’ She considered the rising indicators across her controls. ‘Oh, never mind.’

  The first shot shuddered the whole room. Missy gasped at the force of it. ‘I did warn you!’

  The Gryphon captain gave a howl of surprise and rage. The ugly vase toppled off the hologram’s head and smashed on the floor.

  The second strike severed the communications channel. The hologram Gryphon fizzed out of existence.

  The final blast scalded a hot trail of destruction that jounced and ricocheted down the timelines until it wrenched the two vessels out of their clumsy temporal grip.

  Missy clasped her controls helplessly. They sizzled and sparked. Greasy smoke curled into the air and began to fill the room.

  The TARDIS wheeled and whirled, and gouged a chaotic path out of the Vortex to crash-land in the basilica of St Mark’s, Venice, where …

  Now …

  … Missy surveyed the damaged equipment across her control panels. The choking smoke had long dissipated, so it was safe to return. A slight fug still permeated the room, and there was an acrid aftertaste at the back of her throat.

  She hitched up her skirt so she could crouch down below the control panels – inspecting, tweaking, disconnecting. A little heap of charred components piled up on the floor beside her. This could take some time …

  All the lights went out.

  Missy groaned. She knew what had caused that. The primary power had leached out into the Vortex. The TARDIS couldn’t dematerialise now – the pilot light had gone out, leaving no way to ignite the main energy source.

  She scooped up the charred components from beside her, made a careful pile of them in her hat, and crawled on all fours through the dark to the exit.

  Outside, the air was clearer, with the aromatic background note of incense. Light glimmered from the other side of the confessional box.

  Missy straightened, and carried her hat full of components through to a side chapel. She propped her parasol by the altar, plonked the hat on its linen cloth, and began to examine the damaged items. A statue of Saint Michael peered down from beside her. The afternoon light that filtered from the stained-glass windows seemed to make his wings flutter in faint disapproval.

  She studied her handiwork with satisfaction. Her repair of the dematerialisation circuit was fiddly, but ultimately successful. It stood on the altar, a delicate tetrahedron of complex equipment small enough to fit in her palm. Essential for operating the TARDIS. Much good that would do if the power wasn’t restored.

  ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

  A cross old woman squinted up from the altar rail. The nun’s hands were fluttering in disapproval, too. Her black habit reached the floor. Missy was reminded of an agitated Dalek.

  ‘Maintenance work.’ Missy ushered her away, to distract from the smudges on the linen altar cloth. ‘I’ll be done soon.’

  The nun shied from her touch. ‘I will check with the procurator.’

  Missy watched her shuffle off. ‘Bless you!’

  A clatter nearby made her whirl round. The two young thieves had sneaked up to the altar, and were rummaging through her equipment with a hungry look. The boy held his clipboard in one hand, and in the other was the dematerialisation circuit.

  The girl noticed that she’d spotted them, and shouted her friend’s name. The boy jumped one way, and the girl skirted in an arc around Missy in the opposite direction.

  Missy snarled, and lunged for the boy, but he slipped past her and around the corner. She snatched up her parasol and ran after him, her heels tapping an angry staccato on the cathedral floor.

  He’d got as far as the confessional when the nun stepped into the aisle, and the boy staggered to a halt. The old woman clucked furiously, and hobbled away.

  Missy had caught up now, and pointed her parasol’s ferrule at the quivering boy. His back pressed against the confessional, and he edged sideways in search of an escape route.

  ‘I said, consider your sins,’ she admonished him, ‘not commit more. Your friend called you Mario. Is your papà a plumber?’

  A shake of the head. ‘No papà. Mario like Mario Balotelli.’

  Missy stared blankly.

  ‘The footballer. People say I look like him.’ Mario clutched his clipboard like a protective shield. ‘Don’t hurt me.’

  Missy gave a hoot of laughter. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to kill you, either, though that’s usually much more fun.’

  The ragged boy flinched, and his eyes widened. He hadn’t even considered this possibility.

  Missy clucked her tongue. ‘I said that out loud, didn’t I?
Sor-reeee.’

  She lowered the parasol and put it in the crook of her arm. Couldn’t use it, in case she damaged the dematerialisation circuit.

  Mario saw his chance. He pushed himself away from the confessional, and jumped around the corner, where that brightness suffused the area.

  Missy leapt sideways to follow him. But the brightness had flared more brilliantly now, and made Mario into a stark silhouette. He flailed in desperation, and was abruptly jerked backwards into the light with a shriek and a series of slowly diminishing curses.

  Ah, the musicality of the Italian language.

  Missy was surprised to hear a hum from the confessional. The TARDIS had obtained a power boost from a Vortex void. How had she not noticed that before?

  She seized a nearby candlestick and tossed it into the abyss. It was swallowed up at once. The light flared and the TARDIS hummed again.

  A temporal rift!

  Missy cast round for other items to jettison into the void. Hymnals, cushions, several chairs. Each vanished and generated a short pulse of energy. If it was to recharge the TARDIS, she’d need to push an enormous amount of stuff into it.

  The old nun had seen what was happening, and shambled back to remonstrate.

  Missy had no time to argue. She seized the front of the nun’s habit and shoved hard. The old woman squeaked a little cry of dismay and tumbled into the void.

  There was a horrified gasp from behind Missy. Antonia was staring in appalled disbelief. Missy snapped a hand out and seized the girl’s wrist.

  Antonia gasped. ‘Please, signora!’

  ‘Signorina, if you don’t mind.’

  Missy’s mind was awhirl. How could she recover the dematerialisation circuit? ‘That brat took it with him through the void, and who knows if that’s survivable. When the TARDIS crash-landed out of the Time Vortex, it weakened the fabric of reality close to it. A glitch in time. A temporal portal …’

  Antonia stared at her.

  ‘Talking out loud again, wasn’t I? Interior monologue. Must try to avoid that.’

  A flutter of whispers echoed from the middle distance. Down in the apse, in front of the main altar, a huddle of nuns pointed in her direction. Too many to push into the Vortex void, that was for sure.

  Missy tightened her grip on Antonia’s wrist. ‘I can’t have you blabbing about temporal portals now, can I dear?’

  ‘Don’t hurt me! I’m just a little child.’

  ‘In my experience,’ said Missy, ‘that makes it easier to hide the body.’

  She yanked open the confessional, propelled Antonia into the gap, and slammed the door shut.

  The nuns waddled down the aisle. At this rate, they’d be right next to her within a week and a half. Missy glanced at the TARDIS. She could leave, but perhaps the nuns would have an urge to confess something.

  Missy hunted through her pockets, pulled out the museum handbill, and scribbled GUASTO on the back for an out-of-order sign. She was attaching it to the confessional when she noticed the crumpled image on the front.

  She couldn’t believe it.

  Missy launched into a run. Her heels clacked all the way down the aisle, through the huge entrance doors, and into the piazza.

  Outside, a street cleaner was attempting to remove the fly-poster from the scaffolding. She batted him away with her parasol, to get a better look.

  The Tesori della laguna poster had changed too. The object in the photo was still caked in mud and barnacles. But it wasn’t a candlestick any more.

  It was her dematerialisation circuit.

  *

  Within the hour …

  … Missy was looking at the real thing with a growing sense of despair. All that fiddly work to repair it, and now here it was encased in centuries of grime, behind glass, presented for gawking mediocrities in a museum exhibit of grimy bric-a-brac. Fat chance of that ever working again.

  It had survived its journey into the past – and perhaps so had Mario. But even assuming she tracked it down and retrieved it, that was pointless unless she could power up the TARDIS pilot system.

  A nearby tour guide was particularly keen to get himself murdered. The young man interrupted her train of thought with a tiresome monologue about where all the treasures on display had come from. Her interest perked up when he mentioned the dematerialisation circuit.

  ‘… unusual decorative jewellery, possibly of North European origin—’

  ‘A bit further than that,’ she snorted.

  ‘Signora?’ His badge said he was Gabriele.

  ‘Signorina,’ she replied. ‘Are you an expert on this jewellery?’

  ‘I am but a humble guide.’ Gabriele furrowed his pretty brow. ‘You should ask the curator here. A dottorato di ricerca, who knows far more than me.’ He gestured around the room. ‘All these treasures were unearthed during tests and excavations being done beneath Venice.’

  ‘What’s the use?’ said Missy. ‘There’ll be no saving Venice after the ice caps melt in … oooh, not long from now as the crow flies.’

  Gabriele looked puzzled. ‘We have a barrier now. Thanks to Ugo Esposito, the Venice Tidal Barrier protects our whole lagoon. Otherwise, at times like this, with the convergence of the aqua alta and a strong sirocco wind, the rising water would slowly drown Venice.’

  Missy smiled. ‘What if the water didn’t rise slowly?’

  Gabriele’s loveable frown deepened. ‘But it is rising.’

  ‘I didn’t say it isn’t rising,’ said Missy. ‘I said, what if it didn’t rise slowly?’

  Later that day …

  … she was on the water.

  Missy had set out to where the lagoon met the Adriatic in a stolen speedboat, trilling operatically and thrilling at her long hair’s battle with the wind and spray.

  She visited each section of the barrier, left her calling cards, and then moved on to the next. It was obvious that she could feed the Vortex void next to the TARDIS with every last chair in the cathedral, or all the nuns she could lay her hands on, and it would never be sufficient to reboot her ship.

  But a relentless rush of water coursing unchecked through the church and into the rift would certainly float her boat. The final thing that stood in her way, literally, was the Tidal Barrier. Remove that, and the water would surge in an unstoppable torrent from the Adriatic right across the entire lagoon.

  Venice would be submerged, of course. But that wasn’t a problem. There’s a reason that TARDISes are watertight.

  Missy sat primly on a seat in Ugo Esposito’s office, and eyed him up. The chief engineer thought she’d come to inspect his accounts.

  ‘Be a pet,’ she said, ‘fetch me an espresso. One part hot water to seven parts gravel. I’ve been gadding about all day, and I need a bit of a kicker.’

  While Esposito was away, she placed her final device beneath the barrier’s control suite, right behind his desk. Like the others, it was a cunning contrivance of her own design that used Time Lord tech – though she’d stopped using sentient validium connections, after too many of her contraptions criticised her wiring.

  ‘I like that.’ She indicated the framed Tesori della laguna poster on Esposito’s wall as he returned with her drink. It was the photo of her encrusted dimensional stabiliser. ‘D’you know what it is?’

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘We recovered it encased in fourteenth-century sediment when we excavated Venice. The curator at the museum would know. Something of an expert, I’m told.’ He paused. ‘Would you like a water with your espresso?’

  ‘No.’ Missy took the cup from him and swigged it in one gulp. ‘I think I’ll be seeing quite enough water, thanks all the same.’

  That evening …

  … the museum was about to close, but Missy was still able to squeeze in an appointment.

  The curator’s office was an odd jumble of papers and artefacts. Bulging ring binders jostled with sculptures and goblets. A plague doctor’s medico della peste mask hung from a peg. A triptych painting showed a view of
Venice. Old and new books mingled on the shelves.

  Missy closed the door. ‘You took your time.’

  ‘I’m a busy woman,’ said the curator. ‘Didn’t my assistant tell you?’

  Missy thought about the charred heap of ashes she’d kicked under the desk in the outer office. ‘He wasn’t chatty.’

  ‘So, what d’you find so fascinating about …’ The curator checked her paperwork. ‘… stolen goods in fourteenth-century Venice?’

  ‘I’m writing a short story.’ Missy affected a knowing look. ‘It has a backdrop of illegal trade. I need to know where thieves did their deals,’ she said. To track down my stolen goods, she didn’t add.

  ‘There are a lot of things to consider there,’ said the curator. ‘A buoyant economy sees Venice awash with money. That coincides with a surge in demand and the market is flooded with stolen items flowing through the city.’

  Missy scowled. ‘Can you help?’

  The curator handed her a printout. ‘Old school.’

  Missy unfolded the paper. It showed a historical chart of Venice, with streets emphasised in highlighter pen. ‘It certainly is. GPS coordinates would have been fine.’

  ‘No, the thieves met in an old school. Or the Venetian equivalent of a school in that period, according to museum records. I’ve indicated the building for you on that map.’

  The curator stood, as though to indicate their own meeting was now concluded, studying Missy as she might one of her exhibits. ‘Good luck, signorina. I do enjoy this kind of research myself. It’s a real trip into the past.’

  Missy’s hand was already on the door handle. ‘You have no idea.’

  The smell was what Missy noticed first as she re-entered the cathedral. Behind the musky aroma of church incense there was now a stink of decay.

  The place was busier. Ragged vagrants shambled around the dark building. Missy avoided them as she returned to the confessional. Beside it, the Vortex void was larger. Its soft light swirled and coalesced and split again into luminous soft colours.