The Two Jasons (Novel) by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone [Stone, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9781844352791
Publisher: Big Finish
Published: 2007-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

A Second Life: Eight

A judge who would condemn a man who has killed his assassin, because homicide is forbidden, would be as iniquitous as he was poor reasoner.

– Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary

‘Up, you silly sod!’ 2Jason shouted. ‘On your feet!’

I did as I was told, operating on automatic; it was simply easier to do what somebody told me to do than not.

‘Is he going to be okay?’ said Mira dubiously. ‘You realise, yeah, he goes down in the middle of this and I’ll leave you both behind?’

‘No problems,’ 2Jason lied sincerely, knowing that nobody was going to be buying this putative lack of problematical matter for a second. He said it again: ‘No problems. Let’s go.’

I was looking at Mira because she happened to be in my line of sight, so I saw her posture change. She just stood there for a moment, but accelerated, as though shot standing still by stop-motion.

And then she was gone.

I’d learnt where the Girl I Loved was living through the simple expedient of hanging around the bars we’d gone to and the club in which we’d met, listening in on the talk from people who had been her friends and never mine.

It was during one such conversation that I caught the word refuge.

This had alarmed me. I’d just assumed, without thinking much about it, that the Girl I Loved would have gone back to stay with her family or something like that. I knew she had a proper family, unlike me, though I hadn’t really met them.

The thing was, in a town as small as this, there was only one place that could be called a battered woman’s refuge. It was run by a couple of women, commonly thought to be lesbians, who had moved down from London bringing their big city Trotskyite ways with them.

It wasn’t exactly official, but the social services had been known to refer people there because it was, basically, the only game in town.

I remembered that my mother had taken me there one afternoon, once. We hadn’t stayed and, being a little kid, I can’t remember why. Maybe she simply lost her nerve.

Here and now, standing outside, I tried to work out what to do. The drink was wearing off and, combined with the cold, I had a splitting ache in the back of my skull.

Maybe the Girl I Loved was in there, or maybe I’d got the wrong end of the stick. Maybe she’d let me talk to her and try to explain things, maybe not. Either way, I supposed, it couldn’t hurt to see. It couldn’t hurt anything at all.

‘Pick up those feet!’ 2Jason snapped at me. ‘One foot in front of the other! Move!’

Ahead of us, an accelerated Mira tore through the hessian-clad figures like, well, bags of meat in rotten sacking. There was something mind-jammingly wrong about this: the human form was simply never meant to move this fast.

‘Die, foul abomination in the sight of the – glurk!’ cried some worthy member of the Church of the Righteously Ascended Pure as he went down.

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