Sam and Willie walked with Jarod between them, another sweeper behind. Jarod had never needed very much guarding before. The Centre was his home. No one had ever considered him trying to run away. But he had been more and more stubborn in the last few years, and Mr. Raines had given them strict instructions to watch him. They watched him. He walked slowly with his head down and his shoulders slumped, his hands clasped behind him. He seemed to have turned from his old inquisitive, interested self into a defeated man.

            Then the world exploded in chaos. The blond girl they had caught earlier came running toward them shouting, “I’m not going back! Leave me alone!”

            The tall man in black leather rounded a corner. “Stop her! Miss Tyler! Stop that girl!”

            She dove behind Jarod and clutched at Willie. “Don’t let him take me!” Willie tried to shake her off.

            The man barreled into them, reaching for her. Then his hard fist was connecting with Sam’s stomach, Jarod was whirling, his lassitude dissolved in energy as he tackled the third sweeper, and the little blond girl was backing away from Willie, his gun in her hands and her big smile on her face.

            “Don’t you move, Willie.”

            The third sweeper was lying on the floor, and Sam was on his knees looking up into his own gun in the tall man’s hands. The man pulled something that looked rather like a large pen out of a pocket and pointed it at them too, while the girl removed their radios and phones.

            “Now get up and into that closet.” The man pointed with the gun. “Take your friend.”

            As he and Sam bent to hoist their fellow sweeper up, Willie’s hand snuck into the man’s holster.

            “Now, now, Willie, none of that,” Jarod’s familiar voice smiled. He held up the gun between two fingers, then smoothly removed the clip and tossed the empty gun down the hallway. “Into the closet now.”

            Helpless with rage, the three tall men crammed into the dark closet. A peculiar electric sound at the doorknob told them what their hands twisting at it already knew. They were firmly locked in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

            Sydney and Raines took the elevator down a level, silent. Once they had been colleagues. Now each despised the other. Sydney was trying to remember why Miss Tyler’s words and her strange gesture at him had been so familiar. He could almost hear those words in his mind spoken in a man’s voice, in crisp, sardonic, perfect British Received Pronunciation. <i>Number Two. Number Two. What is Number Two?</i> Then the voice flashed in his mind again, a hard, angry, <i>“Who is Number One?”</i>

            “What are you gasping about?” Raines snapped at him.

            “Number Six! ‘I am not a number! I am a free man!’”

            “What? Have you gone insane, Sydney?”

            Sydney took a deep breath and explained. “Before Miss Tyler left, she called me ‘Number Two’ and said, ‘Be seeing you.’ I’ve only just remembered that those are catchwords from an old British television series. It must have been…oh, thirty years since I have seen any of it, but the protagonist has remained buried in my memory. A very remarkable man, called only ‘Number Six.’ He is a man who was kidnapped and is being held in a prison called The Village so his captors can obtain information from him. Number Two is in charge of the Village and in charge of gaining the information. Number Six’s goal in each episode is to escape.”

            “Escape? Was she calling herself Number Six?”

            “Wouldn’t that make the Doctor Number Two, then? She called me Number Two.”

            They stared at each other. “Jarod,” Raines said. His hand lashed out at the wall of the elevator. <i>“Jarod.”</i>

            On cue, the elevator stopped, and the door opened. The two men hurried out and down the corridor, around a corner, pulled up short. Jarod walked down the corridor toward them, his head up, his shoulders back, his eyes alight, every vestige of depression gone. With him walked the Doctor and Miss Tyler, both grinning. The Sweepers were nowhere to be seen.

            <i>“Jarod?”</i> Sydney gasped. In the moment between seeing Jarod and understanding what was happening, he had felt nothing but a flood of relief. No, Jarod had not been broken.

            “Oh, hello, Sydney.”

            Raines’ hand was in his pocket, but the Doctor was faster, a familiar-looking gun trained at his head. “Don’t even try it, Raines. Rose?”

            The blond girl, who was suddenly not looking seventeen any longer, took Raines’ gun and phone from him, then pulled open Sydney’s jacket.

            “Sydney doesn’t carry a gun,” Jarod said.

            “Apparently not. Neither do I, usually.” She ran down to the end of the corridor and looked around the corner. “Coast is clear, Doctor. And the lift is there.”

            “Lift is good. Ring to go up, Rose.”

            When the elevator door opened and no one came out, the Doctor and Jarod herded Sydney and Raines back into it. Rose came in last, handling Raines’ gun as if she did indeed carry one frequently, and leaned against the door grinning.

            “You know, Doctor, we ought to come back here some time. I like Delaware!”

            “We will. That is, I already have. Will come back. You know, that’s the one thing about the English language. No tenses for temporal paradoxes. Ah, here we are.”

            He pressed the Emergency Stop button, then pulled out a long, silver instrument and began fiddling in the control panel. “I hope you two Doctor Frankensteins don’t mind being stuck in an elevator for a few hours.”

            “It’s better than being locked underground your whole life,” Jarod said, and there was something in his voice Sydney had never heard there before.

            “Jarod, what are you doing?”

            “I’m taking my life back, Sydney. You’ve had it for thirty years. Now it’s mine. And I’m not coming back.”

            Standing, the Doctor pointed his instrument at the grating in the ceiling of the elevator, then jumped and pushed it out. Easily he pulled himself up into it and leaned back down through it.

            “Rose?”

            Jarod offered a knee and a hand, and the Doctor pulled her, grinning cheekily, up through the hole. Finally Jarod pulled himself up as easily as the Doctor had. He stuck his head back down.

            “Jarod, <i>why?”</i> Sydney asked helplessly.

            “You’ve stolen my life, Sydney! Well, no more. Goodbye, Syd.” He slammed the grate back into place, leaving them trapped in the elevator.

            It was a long time before anyone realized they were there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

            Jarod shuddered as he looked around the gloomy, burnt-out corridors the Doctor and Rose led him through. Rose gave him a sympathetic smile. You didn’t have to be Angelo to know there was something ominous about SL-27.

            “I did not know there were twenty-seven sub-levels to the Centre,” he said. “Although, perhaps if you were to do a calculation involving the earth displacement in building the Centre—”

            “I don’t know anything about maths,” Rose said. “Come on. The TARDIS is this way.”

            “The…TARDIS? What is a TARDIS?”

            “It’s your ticket out of here,” the Doctor answered. “They’d have expected you to go up, after all, not down. Having gone down, you will now go—not up but <i>out.</i> Here we are. This is the TARDIS.”

            The blue police box did look out of place in the smoke and gloom. And yet somehow it always managed to make itself look at home.

            “This is…familiar. A telephone booth? A British telephone booth from the 1960s and 1970s? I saw one of those in my Irish terrorism simulation—in 1971.”

            “Irish terrorism?” Rose whispered. “1971? You couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve then.”

            “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about math.”

            “Oh, look!” the Doctor called. “Somebody’s left us a present. Left you a present, Jarod.” He picked up the silver Halliburton briefcase leaning against the door of the TARDIS. “Your DSAs.”

            Jarod slowly reached out and took it, opened it. “When I planned my escape for yesterday, I planned to take these. They’re my entire life.” He held up a small, round disc labeled with some numbers. “My whole life on these discs.” He ran his fingers over them. “There’s one here that says ‘Doctor.’” He held it up.

            “That’s it. Jarod, this is why you didn’t escape yesterday. Your time simulation. Do you remember it?”

            “Yes, I do.” Jarod’s face went dark. “Another thing the Centre has used against me and other innocent people?”

            The Doctor put a hand on his shoulder. “Yes. It must never fall into Raines’ hands. Can I take it? It will be safe with me.”

            Jarod looked him in the eyes for a long moment. “Yes,” he said. He held onto the disc another moment, a tiny piece of his life, and then relinquished it. “Who put them here? Who knew?”

            “Someone’s left you a note,” Rose said. She picked it up out of the case. <i>“’Your life.’</i> Signed, C.J. With an email address.”

            “C.J.? There’s someone inside the Centre helping me? Is that why you two came?”

            “Er…not exactly,” the Doctor said.

            “Who <i>are</i> you?”

            “An old friend, Jarod. Come on, now. Into the TARDIS.”

            Jarod gasped and gaped at the TARDIS’s interior, larger and far more peculiar than its outside. “But this is—”

            “Impossible?” the Doctor said. “Well, impossible is what I do, Jarod. I frequently think of six impossible things before breakfast, and then I do them, just for fun. I’m the Doctor! Hold onto something now.”

            He pushed buttons, pulled levers, gave something a kick, and the wonderful TARDIS sound that always made Rose smile grew around them, died again.

            “Here we are.”

            “Here we…are? We’ve…<i>gone</i> somewhere?”

            “We are in the woods outside Blue Cove, Delaware, yesterday. In a few minutes a man will drive by and give you a lift, and your adventure will begin. It’s quite a world you’re going to discover, Jarod. I’ve been to a lot of places, but I have a soft spot for Earth.”

            <i>“Earth?</i> Who are you?”

            “Oh, you know. Just a bloke who goes around solving problems, fixing things, helping people. Like you.”

            Jarod muttered, his eyes darkening, “I haven’t helped anyone.”

            “Oh, but you will. Are you ready?”

            “Will I see you again?”

            “Me, yes. Don’t be surprised if I don’t recognize you. At that point I won’t have met you yet. Your future but my past, you see. Rose? I don’t know. It’s still the future for her.”

            “Goodbye, Jarod,” Rose said softly, and she did what she had been wanting to do since she first saw him. She spread out her arms, and he, with a rapid blink and a swallow, stepped into her embrace, clinging almost like a child might, his face down on her hair.

            “Goodbye, Rose.”

            The Doctor opened the door. It was dark out. They could barely see a road ahead through some trees. Jarod picked up his DSA case and gave them both a sudden smile, his whole face alive, then stepped through the door.

            “Who is he really?” Rose asked.

            “Just a man. Just another Human.”

            “Doctor…”

            “Well…OK, it’s true that there’s a genetic marker in his blood that makes him unique.”

            “What <i>kind</i> of genetic marker, Doctor?”

            “Perhaps not entirely Human, Rose, but that’s pure speculation. I’m a Time Lord, not an alien geneticist.”

            “You mean he’s not entirely Human?”

            “Genetics aside, he’s Human alright, Rose. No one’s more Human than Jarod.”

            They watched him walking away down the wooded road in the moonlight. In the distance a vehicle was coming.

            “Time to go,” the Doctor said. He closed the door and began pushing and pulling and kicking things.

            “So the timeline’s all restored?”

            “Yes, it is. Ticking along beautifully. Though I might have been wrong. The results Jarod came up with for that time simulation might really have put an end to life as we know it.”

            “It always does.”

            The TARDIS sound rose around them.