FIC: DW/Jake 2.0 - The Wreck of the Trimethian Star (5/8)
Been a while, I know, but I'm now trying to finish/edit these.
TITLE: The Wreck of the Trimethian Star
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved?
NOTES: Written for the Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and Jake 2.0's Jake Foley.
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Doctor hunched under a control panel, hands buried deep in the machine-guts of the warship, head and shoulders out of sight, just two bent knees clad in stripy trousers poking comfortably enough out of the machinery. Periodically, his muffled voice emerged from the innards of the ship along with, less frequently, a pointed hand. The voice invariably shouted an equation or problem, to which Adric shouted back a response. The hand usually pointed in the rough direction of Jake Foley, indicating a question it deemed appropriate for the human to attempt. Adric answered most of those, too.
It was apparent that the Doctor had remembered his promise, made quite some time ago, to work on Adric's mathematics. And he'd decided it wouldn't hurt to do some work on Jake's at the same time. Adric found himself unable to argue with the idea since, in the opinion he'd been biting his lip on for about an hour already, Jake was rubbish. He wasn't answering even a quarter of the basic questions the Doctor insisted on firing at him first. Although maybe, just maybe, there had been some slight improvement as they progressed.
"If these nanites of yours are computers," Adric said finally, interrupting the steam of problem/response and problem/pause/response, unable to keep his curiosity in any longer, no matter how rude and obvious the Doctor would inevitably consider it. "That means you have computers in your brain. Can't they do the calculations for you? I don't understand why you have to get so many wrong."
"Adric." The Doctor sighed. "What have we said about manners?"
"I know, Doctor," he defended. "But how am I supposed to learn anything if I have to sit on all the interesting questions?"
"Tact," said the Doctor meaningfully, "Is a learned skill."
But Jake was just blinking between them, or between Adric and the Doctor's feet, and he didn't look remotely offended. All he looked was apathetic. "The nanites don't work that way. I don't think they have enough processing power of their own. Maybe they could someday, but they're not programmed to right now. They are still experimental - I'm sure Diane will get to it in time." He looked thoughtful. "That would actually be pretty cool." He narrowed his eyes at Adric. "Come back in a few years and we'll see if I can give you a run for your money then."
"It wouldn't count anyway." Adric tapped the side of his head. "This is natural skill."
Inside his console, the Doctor made a sound of disapproval, but he didn't expand on it. Instead he said to Jake, "I'm not convinced it's a good idea to encourage these people to continue experimenting on you. Accidental exposure is one thing--"
"I already have to live with the nanites," Jake protested. "And if I already have to live with the nanites, why shouldn't they be better nanites?"
Adric supposed it was a reasonable argument. It was possible that the Doctor did, too, because after a moment, he just posed another mathematical problem. Adric answered it. Too easy. He felt a little bit guilty when he saw Jake's half-open lips, but the Doctor hadn't pointed.
Jake was improving, he decided, over the course of the next several equations. Maybe the human had just been rusty. And he knew a lot more than Tegan did, which did raise Adric's estimation of humans as a race. Tegan often made him wonder how humans had ever got to be so populous and widespread in the future-universe.
"Ah!" the Doctor exclaimed finally, talking over a rather fine solution that, annoyingly, fled Adric's thoughts instantly. "Yes - I think that should do it." He stood up and rubbed his hands together, then poked a button on the console. Nothing happened.
Apparently nothing happening was good, because the Doctor waited a moment and then beamed around them. "It looks like we're all wrapped up here. So - let's get back to Tegan and Nyssa in the TARDIS, and I'll plot a course to the nearest large city. We'll inform the authorities of this ship's incendiary payload, then be on our way. There's a rather pleasant ocean planet in the Sefis Nebula that I think we'd all rather enjoy, and Tegan does love to swim. You are waterproof?" He eyed Jake. "Yes? Excellent!"
Picking up his hat and squashing it between his palms, he prepared to move on.
Something clicked, loudly enough that the sound seemed to fill the whole room, and the Doctor froze mid-step a fraction of a second before alarms started blaring that made Adric (and Adric was secretly relieved to note, also Jake) jump.
"This can't possibly be good," the Doctor said in his most worried voice.
"What is it?" Jake asked. He looked to both of them for answers, but Adric couldn't appreciate the experience properly, he didn't know any more than the human did.
The Doctor ran over to one of the working consoles, jabbing quick-fire at buttons that he'd been cautious about touching before. Adric watched a screen flicker to life and the Doctor read something from it that was too far away to make out.
"Oh, dear."
The Doctor's 'oh dear' was very worrying for such a mild, innocuous phrase. Where other people might resort to stronger language and some thoroughly sensible panicking, the Doctor said 'oh dear'. 'Oh dear, we're moments away from a supernova.' 'Oh dear, the flesh-eating Kimfean invasion force is ready to attack.' 'Oh dear, the planet's about to explode.'
...Or maybe not the planet.
"Self-destruct sequence," the Doctor said tersely. "Somehow, I must have managed to activate it when I disconnected the power. It must be another security measure, to prevent the ship falling into enemy hands. I should have noticed--!"
"Doctor, how long?" Adric cried.
"Countdown from a thousand, approximately three-point-one seconds in between numbers..."
"About fifty-two minutes." It sounded like a lot of time, but it wasn't. It had just taken them nearly two days to turn the ship's defences off.
"I was just going to say that," the Doctor murmured. He frowned and leaned over the console, hands splayed on its edge, concentration intense. "We have just under an hour to stop this ship exploding. Maybe I should have left well enough alone."
"Too late now," Jake said. "We need to do something!"
"We should get out of here," Adric pressed. Wasn't that part self-evident at least? "I don't want to explode, Doctor."
"You're forgetting about the village, Adric. Tegan was right, earlier, an explosion here could bury them beneath half the mountainside. And if the payload catches, the explosion would be massive. We can't leave. I'm responsible for this, and I'm going to put it right." He tore the front panel off the console, with little care for his hands. An unfathomable collection of wires gaped out of the hole at them. The Doctor groaned. He dropped to his knees in front of the console and reached inside, but his hand faltered. It was obvious he had no clear idea where to start.
"Jake," the Doctor said heavily. "I realise we haven't had a lot of joy from this so far, but I very much need you to interface with the ship and turn the self-destruct mechanism off."
"But you can do it," Jake contradicted, hopeful, desperate, pleading for this not to rest on him. "Or if we all start pulling wires--"
"I'm nowhere near familiar enough with this technology. Our best chance right now is you," the Doctor insisted. "Talk to the computer. I know you can do it! Lives may very well be depending on it, Jake! I can't stop this in the time we have. You have to try - and keep trying."
"It hasn't worked already! Twice! We're wasting time--"
"Yes, we are!" the Doctor blazed back. Even Adric winced.
"All right." Jake grimaced down at the console. "All right."
The human's face blanked and he took on that look. The one where it was almost possible, or at least so it seemed, to see the flicker of circuitry at work within his eyes. It disconcerted Adric. Despite his earlier words, he didn't really want to see the affable human acting anything like a computer.
Jake's face stayed that way for what seemed an awfully long time, while the alarm continued to blare and the countdown Adric could now see on the screen ticked inexorably downwards. Somehow, it had passed 800 already. Adric suspected it was speeding up, or maybe the intervals between numbers weren't supposed to be regular. The Doctor's knuckles were white where he held the corner of the console.
When something finally happened, more than Jake's face changed. He dropped to his knees with a terrific jolt.
But the alarms and the countdown stopped too, leaving a silence that felt very, very complete.
Jake raised his hands to his head as if it hurt.
"I knew you could do it," the Doctor said, but even his congratulating excitement sounded hushed. He touched his hand to Jake's shoulder, and Adric came forward to help, too. Between them they tried to get the human back onto his feet. "You are all right?"
Jake brushed off the Doctor's concern, with a breathless, "Just... just disoriented. Damn, I need some Tylenol."
"I'm sure Nyssa will have something suited to your metabolism, back in the TARDIS." He hesitated and grimaced around. "Will you be all right heading back on your own? Adric and I need to make sure the countdown isn't going to start up again, before we all leave."
"Yeah," Jake said. Bleary-eyed, he patted the Doctor's shoulder. "Yeah, I'm... no problem. I'll just--" He winced and held his head, but his steps were steady, if slow, as he started to head off.
He paused in the doorway. Turned back to spout the proof, Adric's forgotten proof, of the Doctor's last mathematical problem.
***
His head felt like it was about to crack open. And yeah, he could just visualise his brains dribbling out of it like jelly. After the past few days, it was a wonder they weren't already leaking from his ears.
When, he asked himself sourly, had being on an alien planet, in an alien spaceship, with aliens, ceased to be a matter of whoa and started to twist in his gut?
Exploring the spaceship, the dalek-that-wasn't, the fight... and he'd done what he was, well, built for; he'd protected these people. Why, then, did he feel like this? Edgy, disoriented...
Did he want to go back to Earth? Jake tested the thought. He missed Diane, and Kyle, but it wasn't a urgent feeling of loss, they would be there when he got back. And the sorry truth was that at the NSA he was never much less out of his depth than on an alien planet.
He snorted to himself at the thought, paused in the corridor of the warship, leaning against the wall while he scrubbed his hands through his hair, as though he could shake his headache loose. It didn't work.
Maybe he needed air. He'd felt all right outside before, with Tegan, once they'd got a little way down the mountain. Maybe the air was thin up here, or he'd needed to clear the mould-and-dust air of the ancient, abandoned ship from his lungs.
Or maybe, he considered wryly, it had been a matter of interacting with someone who seemed to feel just as clumsy and ignorant among the company in the TARDIS as he did.
He made himself move from the wall, supporting his weight on his own two feet. It wasn't so much tiredness - the nanites dealt with the symptoms of that pretty well - more a lack of motivation to move, and inability to summon the will for effort.
He hoped he wasn't going to come down with some weird alien disease the nanites wouldn't know how to deal with. That would pretty much suck.
It wasn't far to the TARDIS. He moved his heavy feet down the corridor, taking each step at a time. Walking had never felt such hard work. Even the air felt warm and thick, and seemed to tug at him like glue.
He would get back to the TARDIS and find some wacky alien painkillers, and then he would go lie down until the Doctor, or Adric, or whoever, woke him up to tell him they were on the ocean planet. He hadn't done a lot of swimming since the accidental change in his status at the NSA. Come to think of it, he hadn't done a whole hell of a lot of things just trying out the nanites for his own purposes, when he stopped to think about all the things that were out there to do. He was pretty sure that ocean swimming with the nanites' enhancements would be brilliant.
He almost didn't see the TARDIS until he walked into it, hands to the blue-painted woodwork - far too flimsy, wood, to contain a time/space ship, explanations about 'chameleon circuits' aside. Jake held on to it, stumbling around its sides to find the door, and its surface seemed to saw at his fingers like it was rough and raw with splinters, not sanded smooth and painted over. His head thudded.
The door was locked. Of course. He bashed on it with an open palm, forgetting to dilute his nano-strength - but the door held implacably nonetheless. The flimsiness of the wood was an illusion.
It opened up beneath his palm and he stumbled as its support dropped from him. Nyssa was standing at the console with her hand on the lever.
"Jake," she said, faintly reproaching. She hesitated and her lips pursed in concern. "Are you all right? You look terrible. Did something happen?" Her expression froze. "Where are the Doctor and Adric?"
They were all the family she had left now, Jake didn't need to remind himself. "They're fine," he assured her quickly. "They're following on. I came back first. Not feeling too great. I don't suppose you have such a thing as extra strength Tylenol stowed away in here anywhere?"
She clearly didn't recognise the name. "I doubt it," she said, turning away from the console, leaving the door open for the Doctor. "But I'm sure I can find you something. Headache?"
"Great-granddaddy of headache." The glib line belied his growing desperation. There was a rushing sensation gathering inside his head, like rising water, threatening to flood everything else out.
Nyssa padded out of the console room. Her footsteps might have been soundless in her soft shoes, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't something wrong with his hearing. Jake leaned forward into his own steps - head lowered, grinding the heel of his hand into his forehead - as he followed her.
TITLE: The Wreck of the Trimethian Star
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved?
NOTES: Written for the Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and Jake 2.0's Jake Foley.
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Doctor hunched under a control panel, hands buried deep in the machine-guts of the warship, head and shoulders out of sight, just two bent knees clad in stripy trousers poking comfortably enough out of the machinery. Periodically, his muffled voice emerged from the innards of the ship along with, less frequently, a pointed hand. The voice invariably shouted an equation or problem, to which Adric shouted back a response. The hand usually pointed in the rough direction of Jake Foley, indicating a question it deemed appropriate for the human to attempt. Adric answered most of those, too.
It was apparent that the Doctor had remembered his promise, made quite some time ago, to work on Adric's mathematics. And he'd decided it wouldn't hurt to do some work on Jake's at the same time. Adric found himself unable to argue with the idea since, in the opinion he'd been biting his lip on for about an hour already, Jake was rubbish. He wasn't answering even a quarter of the basic questions the Doctor insisted on firing at him first. Although maybe, just maybe, there had been some slight improvement as they progressed.
"If these nanites of yours are computers," Adric said finally, interrupting the steam of problem/response and problem/pause/response, unable to keep his curiosity in any longer, no matter how rude and obvious the Doctor would inevitably consider it. "That means you have computers in your brain. Can't they do the calculations for you? I don't understand why you have to get so many wrong."
"Adric." The Doctor sighed. "What have we said about manners?"
"I know, Doctor," he defended. "But how am I supposed to learn anything if I have to sit on all the interesting questions?"
"Tact," said the Doctor meaningfully, "Is a learned skill."
But Jake was just blinking between them, or between Adric and the Doctor's feet, and he didn't look remotely offended. All he looked was apathetic. "The nanites don't work that way. I don't think they have enough processing power of their own. Maybe they could someday, but they're not programmed to right now. They are still experimental - I'm sure Diane will get to it in time." He looked thoughtful. "That would actually be pretty cool." He narrowed his eyes at Adric. "Come back in a few years and we'll see if I can give you a run for your money then."
"It wouldn't count anyway." Adric tapped the side of his head. "This is natural skill."
Inside his console, the Doctor made a sound of disapproval, but he didn't expand on it. Instead he said to Jake, "I'm not convinced it's a good idea to encourage these people to continue experimenting on you. Accidental exposure is one thing--"
"I already have to live with the nanites," Jake protested. "And if I already have to live with the nanites, why shouldn't they be better nanites?"
Adric supposed it was a reasonable argument. It was possible that the Doctor did, too, because after a moment, he just posed another mathematical problem. Adric answered it. Too easy. He felt a little bit guilty when he saw Jake's half-open lips, but the Doctor hadn't pointed.
Jake was improving, he decided, over the course of the next several equations. Maybe the human had just been rusty. And he knew a lot more than Tegan did, which did raise Adric's estimation of humans as a race. Tegan often made him wonder how humans had ever got to be so populous and widespread in the future-universe.
"Ah!" the Doctor exclaimed finally, talking over a rather fine solution that, annoyingly, fled Adric's thoughts instantly. "Yes - I think that should do it." He stood up and rubbed his hands together, then poked a button on the console. Nothing happened.
Apparently nothing happening was good, because the Doctor waited a moment and then beamed around them. "It looks like we're all wrapped up here. So - let's get back to Tegan and Nyssa in the TARDIS, and I'll plot a course to the nearest large city. We'll inform the authorities of this ship's incendiary payload, then be on our way. There's a rather pleasant ocean planet in the Sefis Nebula that I think we'd all rather enjoy, and Tegan does love to swim. You are waterproof?" He eyed Jake. "Yes? Excellent!"
Picking up his hat and squashing it between his palms, he prepared to move on.
Something clicked, loudly enough that the sound seemed to fill the whole room, and the Doctor froze mid-step a fraction of a second before alarms started blaring that made Adric (and Adric was secretly relieved to note, also Jake) jump.
"This can't possibly be good," the Doctor said in his most worried voice.
"What is it?" Jake asked. He looked to both of them for answers, but Adric couldn't appreciate the experience properly, he didn't know any more than the human did.
The Doctor ran over to one of the working consoles, jabbing quick-fire at buttons that he'd been cautious about touching before. Adric watched a screen flicker to life and the Doctor read something from it that was too far away to make out.
"Oh, dear."
The Doctor's 'oh dear' was very worrying for such a mild, innocuous phrase. Where other people might resort to stronger language and some thoroughly sensible panicking, the Doctor said 'oh dear'. 'Oh dear, we're moments away from a supernova.' 'Oh dear, the flesh-eating Kimfean invasion force is ready to attack.' 'Oh dear, the planet's about to explode.'
...Or maybe not the planet.
"Self-destruct sequence," the Doctor said tersely. "Somehow, I must have managed to activate it when I disconnected the power. It must be another security measure, to prevent the ship falling into enemy hands. I should have noticed--!"
"Doctor, how long?" Adric cried.
"Countdown from a thousand, approximately three-point-one seconds in between numbers..."
"About fifty-two minutes." It sounded like a lot of time, but it wasn't. It had just taken them nearly two days to turn the ship's defences off.
"I was just going to say that," the Doctor murmured. He frowned and leaned over the console, hands splayed on its edge, concentration intense. "We have just under an hour to stop this ship exploding. Maybe I should have left well enough alone."
"Too late now," Jake said. "We need to do something!"
"We should get out of here," Adric pressed. Wasn't that part self-evident at least? "I don't want to explode, Doctor."
"You're forgetting about the village, Adric. Tegan was right, earlier, an explosion here could bury them beneath half the mountainside. And if the payload catches, the explosion would be massive. We can't leave. I'm responsible for this, and I'm going to put it right." He tore the front panel off the console, with little care for his hands. An unfathomable collection of wires gaped out of the hole at them. The Doctor groaned. He dropped to his knees in front of the console and reached inside, but his hand faltered. It was obvious he had no clear idea where to start.
"Jake," the Doctor said heavily. "I realise we haven't had a lot of joy from this so far, but I very much need you to interface with the ship and turn the self-destruct mechanism off."
"But you can do it," Jake contradicted, hopeful, desperate, pleading for this not to rest on him. "Or if we all start pulling wires--"
"I'm nowhere near familiar enough with this technology. Our best chance right now is you," the Doctor insisted. "Talk to the computer. I know you can do it! Lives may very well be depending on it, Jake! I can't stop this in the time we have. You have to try - and keep trying."
"It hasn't worked already! Twice! We're wasting time--"
"Yes, we are!" the Doctor blazed back. Even Adric winced.
"All right." Jake grimaced down at the console. "All right."
The human's face blanked and he took on that look. The one where it was almost possible, or at least so it seemed, to see the flicker of circuitry at work within his eyes. It disconcerted Adric. Despite his earlier words, he didn't really want to see the affable human acting anything like a computer.
Jake's face stayed that way for what seemed an awfully long time, while the alarm continued to blare and the countdown Adric could now see on the screen ticked inexorably downwards. Somehow, it had passed 800 already. Adric suspected it was speeding up, or maybe the intervals between numbers weren't supposed to be regular. The Doctor's knuckles were white where he held the corner of the console.
When something finally happened, more than Jake's face changed. He dropped to his knees with a terrific jolt.
But the alarms and the countdown stopped too, leaving a silence that felt very, very complete.
Jake raised his hands to his head as if it hurt.
"I knew you could do it," the Doctor said, but even his congratulating excitement sounded hushed. He touched his hand to Jake's shoulder, and Adric came forward to help, too. Between them they tried to get the human back onto his feet. "You are all right?"
Jake brushed off the Doctor's concern, with a breathless, "Just... just disoriented. Damn, I need some Tylenol."
"I'm sure Nyssa will have something suited to your metabolism, back in the TARDIS." He hesitated and grimaced around. "Will you be all right heading back on your own? Adric and I need to make sure the countdown isn't going to start up again, before we all leave."
"Yeah," Jake said. Bleary-eyed, he patted the Doctor's shoulder. "Yeah, I'm... no problem. I'll just--" He winced and held his head, but his steps were steady, if slow, as he started to head off.
He paused in the doorway. Turned back to spout the proof, Adric's forgotten proof, of the Doctor's last mathematical problem.
***
His head felt like it was about to crack open. And yeah, he could just visualise his brains dribbling out of it like jelly. After the past few days, it was a wonder they weren't already leaking from his ears.
When, he asked himself sourly, had being on an alien planet, in an alien spaceship, with aliens, ceased to be a matter of whoa and started to twist in his gut?
Exploring the spaceship, the dalek-that-wasn't, the fight... and he'd done what he was, well, built for; he'd protected these people. Why, then, did he feel like this? Edgy, disoriented...
Did he want to go back to Earth? Jake tested the thought. He missed Diane, and Kyle, but it wasn't a urgent feeling of loss, they would be there when he got back. And the sorry truth was that at the NSA he was never much less out of his depth than on an alien planet.
He snorted to himself at the thought, paused in the corridor of the warship, leaning against the wall while he scrubbed his hands through his hair, as though he could shake his headache loose. It didn't work.
Maybe he needed air. He'd felt all right outside before, with Tegan, once they'd got a little way down the mountain. Maybe the air was thin up here, or he'd needed to clear the mould-and-dust air of the ancient, abandoned ship from his lungs.
Or maybe, he considered wryly, it had been a matter of interacting with someone who seemed to feel just as clumsy and ignorant among the company in the TARDIS as he did.
He made himself move from the wall, supporting his weight on his own two feet. It wasn't so much tiredness - the nanites dealt with the symptoms of that pretty well - more a lack of motivation to move, and inability to summon the will for effort.
He hoped he wasn't going to come down with some weird alien disease the nanites wouldn't know how to deal with. That would pretty much suck.
It wasn't far to the TARDIS. He moved his heavy feet down the corridor, taking each step at a time. Walking had never felt such hard work. Even the air felt warm and thick, and seemed to tug at him like glue.
He would get back to the TARDIS and find some wacky alien painkillers, and then he would go lie down until the Doctor, or Adric, or whoever, woke him up to tell him they were on the ocean planet. He hadn't done a lot of swimming since the accidental change in his status at the NSA. Come to think of it, he hadn't done a whole hell of a lot of things just trying out the nanites for his own purposes, when he stopped to think about all the things that were out there to do. He was pretty sure that ocean swimming with the nanites' enhancements would be brilliant.
He almost didn't see the TARDIS until he walked into it, hands to the blue-painted woodwork - far too flimsy, wood, to contain a time/space ship, explanations about 'chameleon circuits' aside. Jake held on to it, stumbling around its sides to find the door, and its surface seemed to saw at his fingers like it was rough and raw with splinters, not sanded smooth and painted over. His head thudded.
The door was locked. Of course. He bashed on it with an open palm, forgetting to dilute his nano-strength - but the door held implacably nonetheless. The flimsiness of the wood was an illusion.
It opened up beneath his palm and he stumbled as its support dropped from him. Nyssa was standing at the console with her hand on the lever.
"Jake," she said, faintly reproaching. She hesitated and her lips pursed in concern. "Are you all right? You look terrible. Did something happen?" Her expression froze. "Where are the Doctor and Adric?"
They were all the family she had left now, Jake didn't need to remind himself. "They're fine," he assured her quickly. "They're following on. I came back first. Not feeling too great. I don't suppose you have such a thing as extra strength Tylenol stowed away in here anywhere?"
She clearly didn't recognise the name. "I doubt it," she said, turning away from the console, leaving the door open for the Doctor. "But I'm sure I can find you something. Headache?"
"Great-granddaddy of headache." The glib line belied his growing desperation. There was a rushing sensation gathering inside his head, like rising water, threatening to flood everything else out.
Nyssa padded out of the console room. Her footsteps might have been soundless in her soft shoes, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't something wrong with his hearing. Jake leaned forward into his own steps - head lowered, grinding the heel of his hand into his forehead - as he followed her.