Torchwood: Exodus Code

surface, waves smacking hard against their heads. Gwen was coughing and sobbing, her fingernails scratching at Jack’s neck.
    Jack inhaled deeply, smelling Gwen’s terror – iron and lilac.
    They went under again. This time Jack swallowed too much water and he had to fight the urge to gag until they broke for air again. When they did, Gwen’s grip was even tighter on Jack’s throat. Her struggles were wearing them both down. Jack knew he couldn’t waste any more energy this way or they were both going to drown.
    Jack let Gwen hold him under for the last time. Then with all his strength, he forced her head and shoulders above the surface.
    ‘Sorry, Gwen.’
    He drew back his fist and punched her. Dazed, her legs loosened their grip and she slipped under the water. Jack grabbed her before the current could pull her away from him. She moaned. He flipped her into a lifesaving hold, keeping her head above the water, treading water until he was able to get their bearings and strike out towards the distant lights of the shore.
    *
    A frantic Rhys was waiting for them in the kitchen, running into the street when Jack, drenched and freezing, every muscle screaming, stumbled towards the house with Gwen cradled in his arms.
    Later, the two men sat on either side of the bed, watching Gwen sleep, an ice-pack pressed across the bridge of her nose, the swelling puffing out her cheeks.
    ‘How many families do you reckon are having a night like this one?’
    ‘Too many,’ said Jack, leaning forward in the chair, taking Gwen’s hand. ‘Christ, if all these women are going to start taking their own lives whenever they have a brief moment of sanity then the clock is ticking down faster than I thought.’
    Rhys stared sadly at Jack, realising that in all the years he’d known him he’d aged only a little. Still handsome, still larger than life, still with that same killer smile and dimpled chin, but changed somehow nonetheless. Jack glanced over at Rhys. For a fleeting moment, Rhys saw such pain in Jack’s blue eyes that his breath caught in his throat. One thing Rhys was suddenly certain of, more than ever: whatever Jack wanted to do, his actions would be to protect Gwen and Anwen and, yes, him.
    ‘This situation can’t be left to right itself,’ said Jack, turning Gwen’s wrist over so he could look for the millionth time at the shape she had carved into her arm. ‘All these women can’t just be left to heal themselves.’
    ‘Too bloody right,’ said Rhys. ‘So what are we going to do?’
    Jack smiled, tracing his finger above the pink wound on Gwen’s arm. ‘This has to mean something. It seems so familiar to me, but I can’t get the memory of it to settle, to fully form in my mind. And that is driving me nuts.’
    ‘Is it alien?’ Rhys asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But I know I’ve seen it here… on Earth. Somewhere. I know this is going to sound weird, but every time I look at it I get this odd taste in my mouth.’
    ‘Have to say, Jack,’ smiled Rhys, ‘not the weirdest thing I’ve heard you say.’
    Jack drew the shape in the air above Gwen’s arm, not wanting to touch the pink raw wound again. Closing his eyes, he traced and retraced the image, letting it seer itself into his brain. He kept drawing, over and over again. He did this for so long that Rhys thought he’d put himself into some kind of a trance.
    Gwen stirred, the ice-pack tipped onto the pillow. Rhys reached across for it. Gwen’s hand shot out and she grabbed Rhys’s arm.
    ‘Kill me. Please.’

Part Three
    ‘The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.’
    Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein

45
    Whitehall, London, next day
    AT 9 A.M. sharp, a severely coiffured woman in her twenties ushered Dr Trimba Ormond into Alan Pride’s suite of offices in Whitehall, directly between Horse Guards and 10 Downing Street. The London Eye was visible through the window, a perfect metaphor, Ormond thought, for the man’s position in government – there he was at the heart of everything, yet somehow maintaining enough distance to avoid having to tilt too far one way or the other.
    The madness that was afflicting women worldwide had been bumped down the news agenda. The sporadic tremors and subsequent appearance of the strange geysers rising up from beneath the world’s oceans had captured the attention of the press, in Britain and abroad. Dr