Chapter Text
After the activities of her busy day and night, Victoria should, by rights, have been ready to drop. Instead, she found herself filled with nervous energy, pacing to and fro in the torn and dirty clothes she'd worn to the castle. Zoë, her usual obsession with cleanliness seemingly forgotten, had not changed out of her mud-streaked tracksuit either. Ever since their return to the camping coach, she had been hunched over her tablet, swiping her decidedly grubby fingers this way and that across its screen.
"Have we done it?" Victoria asked eventually, when Zoë seemed to have reached a natural break in her activities. "Are these the nine tiles we wanted?"
"Yes: look." Zoë flipped through the images. "Now, if we replace the pictures on these four with concentric squares, and reduce the colours to black and white... there. What does that look like to you?"
"I have not the least idea."
"I thought you'd been to the future? It's a QR code. All we need to do is get the tiles in the right order and read the code off."
"How can you tell which order's the right one?"
"I don't, but there are only nine factorial times four to the eighth possible arrangements of nine tiles. That's around twenty-three billion. But these four have to go in the corners with particular orientations, so it's more like four factorial times five factorial times four to the fourth. That's only seven hundred thousand. It shouldn't take the computer long to work through the possibilities." She began typing again.
"But if there are thousands of possible messages, how do you know which one's right?"
"QR codes include error correction. Only a handful of the combinations will be valid." Zoë continued to tap. "For n equals zero, n is less than five..."
Victoria pulled off her ruined jumper. "I think, if you are going to be some time, I shall wash and get ready for bed."
"Wash," Zoë repeated. She looked down at her grimy hands as if seeing them for the first time. Her expression of horror was such that Victoria had to stop herself laughing. "I'm filthy! Victoria, why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"I thought it was obvious," Victoria said, still trying to repress a smile.
"Well, I was focusing." Zoë turned back to the tablet. "I'll just set this going and then I'll get cleaned up too."
After they had washed, cleaned their teeth, and changed into night clothes, Zoë once again made a beeline for the tablet.
"You should go to bed," Victoria said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "There will be time enough for this in the morning."
"There's time for it now," Zoë said. "Look, here are the possible messages. I think it's got to be this one." She tapped at a line on the screen.
90Sr 25mESEofkeep ZH
Victoria read, and reread, the message with some bafflement. "Whatever does that mean?"
Zoë looked as if she wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. "It means we've come on a wild-goose chase," she said. "I know what the curse was, now. Radioactivity. That first bit means Strontium-90."
"And the rest... that's where it's buried?"
"I think so. Twenty-five metres east-south-east of the keep — presumably its southeastern corner. That puts it somewhere in or near the moat between the keep and the outer bailey."
"But if it is radioactive it had surely better be left safely in the ground?"
Zoë shook her head. "Yes, but it wouldn't be as dangerous now as it was then. Strontium-90 has a halflife of twenty-nine years. By now over ninety-five percent of it will have decayed to zirconium. Strontium-90 decays by beta emission," she went on, sounding as if she was thinking out loud. "The radiation could be blocked by a sheet of metal, but it would be dangerous to anyone who wasn't wearing full body armour."
"I see. That's why you said the curse was radiation poisioning."
"I think so. And someone must have found the source, and buried it."
"Someone who knows what a — did you say 'QR' code? — is," Victoria said. "Someone who keeps thinking she's been here before." She tapped Zoë lightly on the head. "Someone who is fond of the number nine, because she has nine letters in her name. Someone with the initials ZH."
Zoë's mouth opened soundlessly. She put both hands to her head, leaned forward, and for a moment looked as if she was about to faint.
"Are you well?" Victoria asked in alarm.
"You know what it feels like when your ears pop?" Zoë asked. "I feel like my brain just popped. Victoria, I remember."
"Remember what?"
Zoë stared into the middle distance with an expression of wonder. "Everything. I was at the castle with the Doctor and Jamie, centuries ago. An alien probe had crashed nearby, and everyone was poking about at its betavoltaic generator — and of course they were all getting sick and dying. We convinced people that it was cursed and it had to be buried."
"Then why did you leave the code? A code that nobody, even today, can understand?"
"Well, the Doctor said we should make a note of where we'd left it. And so I said, we should do it as a QR code, so that it couldn't be read until there was advanced technology to study the probe with. Also I... I think I wanted to prove I could do it."
Victoria smiled. "Yes. I can easily imagine that."
⁂
The stone crumbled beneath them and Zoë was falling, impossibly slowly, down the well. Victoria stretched out her hand, but Zoë was already beyond reach, looking up at Victoria as she fell, a resigned expression on her face.
"Zoë!" Victoria shouted. "Zoë!"
"What's the matter?"
Victoria woke with a jolt, to find herself tangled up in her blankets with Zoë's hand on her shoulder.
"Did I... Did I talk in my sleep?" she asked, timidly.
"You were calling for me," Zoë said. "Were you dreaming?"
"I saw you falling down the well." Victoria sat up, realising that her nightdress was soaked with sweat and clinging uncomfortably to her. "I couldn't reach you."
Zoë sat down on the edge of the bed. "Well, you can now."
"I know," Victoria said. "But for how long?"
"What do you mean, for how long?"
Victoria took a deep breath. "Now you've solved the mystery of Corfe Castle I presume you're going to build a time machine and go back to your own time. And... I shall miss you terribly. I don't think I could bear it." She paused. This was hardly the safe, neutral ground that Georgetta's video had recommended, but she had come too far to go back now. "I think I must have fallen in love with you, Zoë. That is the only way I can describe my feelings."
There was a long pause. Then Zoë said "I thought about building another time machine. But you told me that the Daleks came for your father when he tried to do that. It looks as if I dodged them coming here, but I don't want to take that risk again. Also," she added, in the same matter-of-fact tone, "I love you too, and if I left you I don't think I'd ever be happy again."
"Really?" Victoria asked.
Zoë kissed her on the cheek. "Really."
Despite having just received the only answer that wouldn't have broken her heart, Victoria found that her nervousness was, if anything, increasing.
"Does that mean you— would you like to—" she began, stammered incoherently, and finally forced out the word "intimacy?"
"Are you asking if I want to have sex with you?" Zoë asked.
"Yes." Victoria found she was shivering, though with fear or excitement, she could not say.
"Well, of course I do. I've wanted to ever since that first night. Maybe before. You're lucky I've had mind-training or I mightn't have been able to resist the temptation."
"I had no idea what effect I was having on you." Victoria reached for Zoë's pyjama jacket and began, with shaking hands, to unbutton it. "Please excuse my nervousness. This is new to me. Do any of Miss Georgetta's lectures provide suitable guidance for this situation?"
Zoë cautiously began to unlace Victoria's nightdress. "She says to relax and trust to instinct. I'm not very good with instincts."
Victoria shivered with guilty anticipation. "Then we shall just have to manage as best we can."
⁂
The beds that British Railways had installed in 'Coral' were no larger than the bed in Victoria's flat. Fortunately, Zoë and Victoria, their desires finally sated, were well practised at both fitting into a bed designed for one.
"I think Danny was right after all," Zoë murmured. Victoria couldn't see her face, owing to the relative positions of their bodies, but she sounded as if she was smiling from ear to ear. "I really needed to get laid. What about you?"
"It gave me very great pleasure," Victoria admitted. "But now I feel... guilty. That I must be a wicked person to enjoy doing such things."
Zoë groped for Victoria's hand, found it, and squeezed it. "You're not a wicked person. It isn't wrong to get pleasure out of sex."
"I might think as you, but I cannot stop myself feeling guilty. How do you feel?"
"Sweaty, sticky, unhygienic and undignified," Zoë said. "It was disgusting and biological and I loved every second of it."
Victoria groaned. "I could tell. It was as if my touch transformed you into a Maenad. I am utterly exhausted."
"'Maenad,'" Zoë recited, as if by rote. "'A female follower of Dionysus, god of wine, associated with divine possession and frenzied rites.' Was I really frenzied?"
"I fear so. Parts of me I dare not name are still aching."
"You gave as good as you got. Take it from me."
"I did?" Victoria sounded contrite. "I thought I must be hurting you, but you asked me not to stop. In fact, you begged me."
"Well, I think I got a bit carried away." Zoë shifted her position slightly. "Oooh. That stings. It serves me right for being a Maenad, I suppose. We'd better take it easy tomorrow."
"I have had quite enough of castles," Victoria said firmly. "Suppose, tomorrow, we take the train to Swanage and visit the beach?"
"As long as you don't get any bright ideas about bouncy happy funtimes in the surf," Zoë said.
Victoria laughed, then blushed as as the implication of Zoë's remark sank in. "You knew I had watched that video?"
"I'll have to explain browser history to you at some point, won't I? Anyway, why shouldn't you watch it?"
"It would be improper..." Victoria tailed off, realising that after the earth-shaking activities she and Zoë had just been engaging in, the impropriety of watching a video scarcely registered on the Richter scale. "Anyway, no more treasure maps. No more ninefold keys. And no more nightmares."
"I can't make any promises about the nightmares," Zoë said. "I think, after what we've seen travelling with the Doctor, we won't be able to avoid them."
Victoria gathered the strength to pull Zoë into a tight embrace. "But at least now, we won't have to face them on our own."
