Doctor Who: Drift Read Online Free PDF Page A

just her and the snow.
    She could do what she liked.
    Pretty soon she was marching between the trees, away from the track - which you couldn‟t see anyway - and after a while the sting in her cheeks was only the wind. And as she walked, enjoying the effort it took to plant and re-plant her boots in the drifts, she imagined all sorts of craggy faces carved in the silver-white bark around her. She wished she had her knife so she could carve them some angrier faces, and the idea made her laugh.
    She trotted for a while to keep warm and to get her to her secret place just a little quicker. She kicked the snows and spun about, and she sang out loud, a note of triumph she couldn‟t have explained if she‟d wanted to.
     
    Her own voice stopped her, like she‟d screamed in the middle of someone else‟s party. Too loud. She searched around fast for the people who must have heard her. The ones she felt sure must be watching. Except she knew - she
    knew - there was nobody up here. How could there be? She was alone on the mountain. Makenzie‟s mountain.
    Mount Shaw. Makenzie had joked about how it was his mountain that day they‟d moved in - when taking the family for a summer evening walk seemed like a good idea. But they‟d stopped close by another cabin, maybe fifty yards short, Makenzie said, of the view he‟d promised them.
    Because Amber had complained she was tired, complained until Mom took her side. Today that cabin was only a shadow on the air, but the look in Makenzie‟s eyes as they‟d trekked back down his mountain was carved in bark.
    Well the mountain was hers right now. She was alone here.
    She ruled the mountain. She could do what she liked and it didn‟t matter who was watching.
    She bent to scoop up a lovely helping of the ground. She pounded it together, thinking it was like a ball of frozen mashed potato.
    Then she hurled it, full force, at the face in the nearest tree.
    But she didn‟t watch what it did to the face. She was more interested in the way her creation broke apart in soft lumps, flying in every direction and falling noiselessly back to being just part of the ground once more.
    Done standing still, Amber spun and carried on up the hill with a fresh spring in her step. There wasn‟t any movement in the forest; none at all. So perhaps it was the stillness that kept provoking her to glance around. There was never anything there, ever, and she didn‟t like feeling so stupid.
    She wanted to get to her hideout already.
    Gearing herself up, she turned her run into a charge for the last stretch of the slope.
    She was about ready to let out another great hurrah - but as she conquered the rise, a layer of ground, huge and purest white, flew up to smother her. And trapped the cheer in her throat.
     
    „Don‟t you people know any other welcome? Honestly, put a gun in a man‟s hands and he seems to forget all about tea and biscuits.‟
    Given that the air had to escape over such a wall of teeth, the power in the man‟s voice was phenomenal. Sufficient to command Kristal‟s attention, such that she hardly noticed as Hmieleski carefully plucked each tiny splinter of glass from her forearm. There was such gravity too in the stranger‟s face, and eyes that could stare down an owl.
    „Oh, please, you‟ll have to excuse the substandard hospitality,‟ parried the Captain, his tone a poor glue for patience already snapped, „but you and your girlfriend have just walked in on something of a situation here and it so happens you look to me like a couple of cultists.‟
    Oh really? And what do they look like?‟
    All the guns levelled at the prisoner might as well have been water pistols, although he kept his hands aloft as a courtesy. Or as an example to his companion.
    „Well, the specifics I think vary from cult to cult, but broadly speaking they tend to look weird. And if I put that description out to the local cops, my guess is you‟d be the first suspects they bring in for questioning.‟
    „We