Torchwood: Exodus Code

decision made.
    She tiptoed out of Anwen’s room and into her bedroom, lifting the baby monitor from Rhys’s bedside table and turning the volume to high. Anwen’s breathing was steady and clear. Downstairs, she grabbed her phone from the table in the hallway where she’d set it on top of today’s post, and a torch from under the sink. Grabbing her coat from behind the kitchen door, she dropped her phone into her pocket, keeping the baby monitor in her hand. When she got to the front door, she held the monitor to her ear to be sure she could still hear Anwen. She could.
    Gwen hurried along the street, putting the monitor to her ear every few steps just to be sure. At the end of the road, she took a right turn, heading for a row of lock-ups and opening one of the garage doors. Satisfied that Anwen was still asleep and that she could still hear her, Gwen took a set of car keys from her pocket and clicked the fob. Directly in front of her in the darkness, something beeped and flashed twice. Gwen lifted up the bottom of a camouflage tarp and popped up the rear doors of a large black vehicle.
    Leaving the rear doors open, the tarp draped over them, Gwen climbed inside the burned-out shell of the only surviving Torchwood vehicle. The back of the SUV was empty. The seats destroyed long ago, the smell of charred rubber, gunpowder and pizza of all things lingering inside. For a brief moment, Gwen was sitting in the back as the SUV sped through the streets of Cardiff, Jack driving, laughing, his hand resting lightly on Ianto’s knee. Ianto serious as ever. Tosh and Owen taunting him from the back seats.
    Anwen’s soft cries from the monitor brought her back to the SUV and the shell it really was. Gwen waited to be sure Anwen settled back to sleep. When she did, Gwen crawled to the front of the vehicle, pulling up a thick plastic liner, swinging it all the way to the rear doors.
    She pressed the key fob in a series of three beeps, a pause, and then another two, watching as a compartment opened in the middle of the SUV’s floor, a computer screen and keyboard emerging.
    Gwen set the baby monitor next to her, its soft static comforting her. She powered up the system. On the roof of the SUV, an antennae the size of a knitting needle revealed itself from the folds of the cracked skylight.
    She logged in to the system, smiling as the familiar Torchwood logo appeared on the screen. After they’d been so easily discovered by the CIA a few months ago, and assuming that they might still be being watched, Gwen had agreed with Rhys that they’d keep computers and the internet out of their home. Every week, Gwen scanned the house and their car for bugs. So far they’d been left alone. If Rhys discovered this set-up, Gwen was sure, given everything that she’d put him through, that this would be the proverbial last straw.
    ‘So we’ll keep this our little secret,’ she said, setting the baby monitor off to the side.
    Gwen googled ‘supermarket madwoman’ and found six versions already uploaded to YouTube. After she’d played three of them and watched herself attack the shop manager from a variety of angles, she was embarrassed, but, she had to admit, she also felt a bit chuffed that she could still defend herself, that she could still kick someone’s arse.
    No, Rhys was right, she thought. She really did need an anger management class. By no stretch of the imagination had she been defending herself or Anwen. But still, she couldn’t stop herself from grinning as she replayed, rewound and replayed again, the moment when she shoved the manager into the breakfast cereals and the look of terror in his eyes.
    Pausing the video, Gwen leaned back against what was left of the SUV’s dashboard, her heart racing. She’d snuck out here intending to use Torchwood software to delete all record of the incident, but before she did she decided to play the last of the four versions of the incident. This one had recorded from the other side of the aisle so it had captured Gwen, Anwen clutched to her chest, ducking out the emergency exit to make her escape. The person recording had darted back to the woman and the paramedic after Gwen had left. The local news had not shown any of this and when Gwen finished watching it she could see why. As the medic slipped the jacket off the woman’s head, she gasped at the violence the woman had inflicted on herself.
    Strange. Gwen’s curiosity trumped anything else she had been feeling. She opened