Gwen's arms pumped, sweat and rain mixing on her face as she sprinted down the corridor of the autism centre. Somewhere up ahead, glass smashed. Nurses peered out from their rooms, the adult faces alive with curiosity and worry and the need to get involved.
'Get back inside and shut the doors!' Gwen yelled at them, dimly aware of figures starting back as she shouted. 'Stay back!'
Following the narrow corridor, Gwen turned the corner, peering quickly into each room. Where the hell was it? Three doors down, right towards the back of the centre, she finally stopped.
Staring into the small room, she very slowly raised her hand to her ear. 'Jack?' she whispered. 'Hurry up. We've got a situation.'
'Oh my God.'
The voice made her jump and, turning, Gwen grabbed the woman's arm and pushed her gently but firmly away from the door. 'I told everyone to stay back. I need you to go and wait in the reception area.' Gwen hoped her own hand wasn't trembling too much. Blood rushed through her veins, its content almost pure adrenalin.
'I'm his nurse.' The woman's round face wobbled as she swallowed back shocked tears. 'I'm Ceri Davies, Ryan's nurse. He's severely autistic. I've cared for him ever since he came in. That… that woman's his mother, Adrienne. She was visiting.' She paused. 'Oh my God.' A hand went to her mouth and she stifled a sob. 'What is that thing? Is it going to hurt him? I can't leave him. I can't.'
Gwen rubbed the woman's arm. 'Stay here. We might need you.' She didn't answer any of her questions. She didn't have the answers. Leaving the woman leaning against the wall, Gwen peered slowly round the door and into the little boy's room. Nothing had changed.
The window was smashed, blown inwards with such force that some parts of it had sliced all the way through the smart-looking brunette who lay twisted and wrecked on the carpet. Her pale and manicured hand was separated from her wrist and a large fragment of thick glass was embedded just below her cheekbone, standing upwards and reflecting the vacant stare from her glassy eyes. Gwen didn't even think about trying to get closer and checking for a pulse. She didn't need anything but her eyes to tell her the boy's mother was very dead. Her blood was everywhere, a large, growing pool under her body, and huge splatters across the walls of the small room where her arteries must have severed as her heart was still beating, pumping the crimson fluid out to stick to every surface it touched.
Gwen looked at the small boy sitting cross-legged on the floor. His mother's blood had tarnished his straw-blond hair and a thin, shiny streak trickled down his cheek, but his smooth face remained impassive. He was singing, softly but perfectly, despite his dead mother lying so close by, and despite the awful creature that crouched in front of him, one hand extended, one thick finger touching his slim, small throat.
'He sings all the time.' The nurse had crept up alongside her. She stared at the devastation, the horror of it echoing in her soft whisper. 'He sings to keep the world out.' Gwen felt the woman's warmth close to her own and couldn't bear to move her back.
Heavy boots thumped out an urgent rhythm on the clinically hard-wearing carpet, and Gwen looked up to see Jack and Cutler running towards her. She raised a hand, turning her gaze back to the boy and the alien in the room. Instinctively, Jack slowed his pace and Cutler did the same, quietening their approach.
Silently stepping aside, Gwen let Jack see the situation for himself. His eyes would read it faster than she could explain it. Jack edged into the room, staying close to the wall, and Gwen followed him, her movements tiny, creeping an inch at a time closer to the scene.
'He's severely autistic,' she whispered to him. 'Sings all the time.'
Jack nodded. Slowly he pulled the portable prison device from his pocket. 'We need to get the kid away from him. I can't trap him when he's touching the boy. And aside from that he might slash his throat open.'
'I'm not feeling that emptiness Ianto talked about.' Gwen let Jack pull away from her. If they were going to distract the alien to get little Ryan they needed to be on different sides of the room.
'Neither am I.' Jack's voice was low. 'But then we're not used to this thing keeping people alive either.'
Gwen looked over at the woman's body on the floor. 'It didn't keep her alive.'
In the centre of the room, the alien tilted its head, the red beams of light pouring from the dark spaces in its head caressing the boy's still face. The uneven hole below opened and shut a few times and then eventually it spat out some sounds.
'The others stopped.'
The words sounded like they were being forced through water, garbled and bubbled with phlegm, and although the creature struggled to produce them their meaning was clear.
Gwen looked over at Jack. In the doorway, the nurse and Cutler appeared, blocking the exit. Jack didn't signal them back, nor did he signal to Gwen that he wanted to start any distraction manoeuvre in order to grab the boy. He frowned. Gwen knew that look. He was curious.
He stepped forward two paces and then tilted his own head.
'What do you mean the others stopped?'
The alien didn't look up from the boy, but rolled its head this way and that as if bathing in the sound.
'It called me.' The words were rough, no tone or resonance, barked out as if the sound was a crime against the creature's nature. 'So far away. The nothing brought me to the sound. It was beautiful.'
Jack moved slowly to the far side of the room, crouching down where he could see both the boy and the alien. The singing child had lifted his head, his eyes on the grotesque fractured and grey visage in front of him.
'Are you from the Silent Planet?'
The beams of red sharpened and lessened, the edges softening. 'My world has no name. There are no names. No sound. No sight. There is only yourself. For ever.'
Jack frowned. 'So why come here?' He edged an inch closer to the boy and Gwen could see the portable device in his hand. 'We must be your worst nightmare.'
The creature sighed, its mouth losing shape. 'I am…' It paused. 'I am wrong.'
'Why did you kill those people?'
There was a long moment where all Gwen could hear was the boy's singing. It was 'Pie Jesu'. It was a song she must have heard a hundred times before, but it had never moved her until now. If her heart hadn't been about to explode from tension, she thought, it might have broken with the sheer emotional quality of his voice.
'The sound. I want the sound.' The creature shook its head, and Gwen felt the air tremble with the weight of the movement. 'But the parts didn't work.' For the first time, the alien turned its attention away from the boy and towards Jack. 'When I took them and made them part of me, they wouldn't work. I couldn't make the sound. Only the words.'
For the first time, Gwen felt a wave of the awful loneliness Ianto had talked about sensing. The sheer despair and hollowness of being entirely alone.
'It's not the parts that make the sound.' Jack eased forward and was within reach of the boy. 'It's the person. Alive. We're not machines.'
The alien's hand hovered, and for a second it moved just the tiniest bit away from the boy's neck, the contact broken. Jack crouched ready to move, and Gwen prepared to take the boy from him and run.
'Look!' In the doorway, Ceri gasped out the word and pointed.
On the floor, Ryan had reached up, his small hand touching the alien's face.
Cutler cursed from the doorway, and Gwen shared his exasperation. The moment was gone. The alien was focused back on the boy again, its own hand once again touching his throat.
Ceri let out a small laugh. 'He's never done that. He's never touched
anyone
He's never even shown any indication that he knows anyone else exists!' Clapping her hands together, she held them to her face with joy, as if there were no dead woman on the carpet and no alien seated in the middle of the room. Gwen stared at her and then looked over to Jack. He watched the boy and the alien for a long time and then slid the prison device back into the hidden pocket of his jacket before backing away.
'Jack?' Gwen frowned. What the hell was he doing?
Jack stood up. 'He's never done anything like this before?'
The nurse shook her head. 'Never. He just sings. Has done since he could speak. It keeps the world out.'
'What are you thinking, Jack?' Gwen tapped her foot. They needed to save the boy before this thing disappeared on them again.
He didn't look at Gwen, fascinated instead by the boy's hands on the alien's face. 'I'm thinking that these two are made for each other.'
'What?'
'It makes perfect sense. It will make them happier.'
'I'm out in the cold here, Harkness,' Cutler said from the doorway. 'Although this is Torchwood, so I don't know why I should expect any different.'
Jack looked from the alien to the boy and back again.
'Jack?' Gwen growled. It was one thing Cutler being out of the loop, but she was one of the team. And it didn't help that she had Ianto in her ear pushing to know what was going on.
'They need to become one. Look at them.' Jack's face carried a weight of seriousness that Gwen had only seen rarely, and always when he was struggling with a decision that went against all he believed about the sanctity of humanity. Gwen felt her own frustration ebbing away. Looking to the door, she saw Ceri was nodding.
'Yes.' She smiled. 'Yes.'
'What are we doing, Jack?' Gwen's eyes darted between the humans and the alien.
For the first time, Jack looked up at her and smiled gently. 'Don't you get it, Gwen? Here, this boy is different because he doesn't want the world. He
wants
the isolation; to be completely alone. He doesn't understand the concept of society, of company, of communication…' Jack didn't bother keeping his voice low, instead becoming more animated as he explained. 'Everything that is part of our world he hides from behind his singing.' He turned to Ceri. 'Have I got that about right?'
The nurse nodded, tears still making tracks and carrying her mascara down her cheeks.
'And I should imagine that on the Silent Planet our visitor here is their equivalent of autistic. He wants to connect with someone or something. That's why he followed the music.' He looked up at Cutler. 'And that's why he killed the best singers. For the power of emotion in their performance. To be able to share emotion.' He shook his head slightly.
'The terrible isolated loneliness Ianto felt…' Gwen felt understanding prickle on her skin. 'That was the alien's emotion. How it's lived all its life.'
Jack nodded. 'Awful, isn't it? Imagine no light, no sound, nothing but the essence of your being. No memories to cherish. No sense of love. To be reviled by any of your kind you tried to connect with. Totally alone.'
Gwen tilted her head. 'So what are you saying we do? Let him go? Send him back?'
'No. We need to make existence easier for both of them.'
'How?' Gwen frowned. She wasn't getting it.
'The boy needs isolation, and the alien needs something to make the isolation easier.'
'Just speak bloody English, Jack.'
'Instead of absorbing the vocal cords, it needs to absorb the whole child.'
Gwen felt stunned. 'You can't be serious. How can we let it do that?'
The dark and frustrating eyebrow rose. 'How can we not?'
'Because…' Gwen stepped forward. 'Because he's just a little boy. We need to get him away from that thing and send it back.'
Jack shook his head. 'Don't think of his life in your terms. This is hell for him. And if we send this creature back, then we're condemning it. Can you really live with that?'
'He's right.' Ceri whispered softly. 'It's what Ryan needs. His mother's dead. We haven't seen his father since he came in here. He has no one.' She paused. 'And he hates the world.'
'This is crazy.' Cutler shook his head. 'But it makes a crazy kind of sense.'
Gwen looked at the perfect child, his blond hair stained with his mother's blood, his tiny hands paying the fractured creature more attention than he'd ever given the woman that bore him. She saw the want in those hands, greedily drinking in the creature's dark years of emptiness as his young voice continued to steadily create the aching music so out of place next to the cooling, damaged body.
'It's pulling me back.' The creature gargled the words. 'You have nothing more to fear from me.'
'Tell me.' Jack crouched between them. 'Can you absorb the whole? Can you make the boy part of you? Without killing him?'
The creature nodded.
Jack looked over to Gwen. 'Agreed?'
'Agreed.' And she was. Cutler mumbled his yes, and Gwen didn't have to look at the nurse to know what she thought.
Jack smiled. 'Then do it.' Standing up, he joined Gwen against the wall.
The alien opened the cavern of its mouth and tilted its head backwards, stretching out its thick neck. The fractures in the smooth skull grew wider and Gwen stared, both fascinated and horrified, as its solid form began to disintegrate. Where Ryan's fingers touched its cheek, the chubby childish digits dissolved as they became one with the dark cloud that had only seconds before been a solid form, his particles lighter than the mass of the alien until the two sets danced into one thick cloud. Gwen was sure she saw a light smile tickle his face just before it unravelled.
The dark shadow hovered above them for a perfectly still moment, and then it slid out of the window and was gone, disappearing into the sky, and the Rift, and the universe beyond.
The last strains of 'Pie Jesu' hung in the air like the memory of a taste just out of reach; the ghost of all the music that Ryan had used to hide from the world behind. And then eventually they were left in silence.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly, insisting that the world move relentlessly onward, and finally Jack smiled. 'Now there goes a big step forward in interplanetary relationships.' He winked at Gwen. 'I mean, let's face it. You can't get closer than those two are now.'
'Harkness?' Cutler leaned against the doorframe. Folding his arms across his chest, he nodded towards the nurse. Ceri wandered into the small room, looking out of the smashed window, her face a mask of awe despite the rain falling into her open eyes. 'I think she could use a stiff drink.'
'Oh, trust me, we can do better than that.'
'In the meantime,' said Cutler, pulling his mobile out of his pocket, 'I'll call my team to clean this up. Unless you have any objections?'
'Go ahead. We don't need her for anything.'
Gwen looked down at the glazed, resigned expression on the dead woman's face and wondered what she'd make of this outcome. She hoped she'd be happy for her child. She sighed. Not that it mattered. When you were dead, you were dead. This woman's worries were over.
Turning away, Gwen left the room and its horrific contents behind. It seemed there had been so much death lately. Suddenly she felt the urge to run back to the flat and curl up with Rhys and eat a Chinese takeaway on the sofa and pretend that everything in the world was all right. And, just for a few hours, it would be. Rhys had that effect on her. He might not be the most exciting man on the planet — which Gwen knew for a fact, since she worked for the man that must surely claim that title — but Rhys was the most dependable and he loved her, and at the end of the day what more could she want than that?
Jack squeezed her arm. 'You OK?'
'Yeah.' Clearing the dark cloud from her face, she smiled. 'Yeah. Just glad it's over.'
Leaving Havannah Court Autism Centre behind, for the first time in days Gwen was happy to feel the heavy drops of rain running through her hair.