She nodded, remembering with a shudder the sheer chaos of Operation Goldenrod. It had been before Gwen had joined them, when Suzie was still part of the team. Toshiko had been working for forty-eight, perhaps seventy-two hours, on a hugely complex piece of alien technology that kept reconfiguring itself while she worked, but what she remembered, above all else, was the people that had been melted together during sexual congress by Goldenrod; their flesh joined, teratological monstrosities that Owen had to try to separate surgically leaving, for the most part, deformity and death behind him.
Ianto raised an eyebrow. ‘And what about you, Tosh? What are you looking for down here?’
‘That device we recovered from the nightclub — I think it’s part of a set. According to the files, we have several more of them in a box.’ She waved vaguely down the tunnel. ‘Down there somewhere. Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen.’
‘Ah.’ Ianto took her by the elbow and guided her back down the tunnel, the way she had come, away from the chamber where he had been working. ‘You’ve come too far. It’s a little confusing, down here. Let me help you orientate yourself.’
They walked back, Ianto holding Toshiko’s elbow all the way. Something made a noise behind them, a movement, a scuffling, but when Toshiko turned her head she couldn’t see anything. And Ianto didn’t turn his head.
It was a rat. Just a rat. That’s what Toshiko told herself.
‘This chicken is delicious. What did you do with it?’
Gwen smiled. Suzanne Vega was still playing softly in the background, the alien tech was glowing a soft amber, which had surprised her but fortunately blended in with the candle, and Rhys was wolfing everything down with an enthusiasm she hadn’t seen for ages. ‘Nothing, really. I just marinated it for a while.’
‘There’s nothing “just” about that. It’s inspired genius. And it certainly makes a change from the usual pasta in sauce.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘We used to eat like this a lot,’ he said reflectively. ‘We used to cook together, remember? We’d buy a recipe book and go through the recipes, one by one. Sometimes they were great, and sometimes they were… well, not so great… but they were always interesting.’
‘Remember the turkey with chocolate and chilli pepper sauce?’ Gwen giggled.
‘Which might have worked if we’d read the recipe properly and used dark chocolate instead of milk? I remember.’
‘Give us some credit, we were drunk.’ She wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the alien tech, but she was feeling like she was slightly out of control now as well. Or possibly she and Rhys were synching together, so in a sense they were both controlling each other. Whatever: it was a nice feeling.
He was laughing now. ‘What about the Brie wedges in breadcrumbs?’
‘Which we left in the deep fat fryer for so long that the Brie just melted away and all we had left were these breadcrumb shells that tasted faintly of cheese!’
‘What was the silliest thing we ever cooked?’ Rhys asked. He reached out a hand and placed it over the back of Gwen’s hand in a gesture of familiarity that took her breath away momentarily, it was so unexpected.
Gwen smiled at him, catching his eye for longer than they usually managed these days. ‘The pork, paprika and pears, when the pears just cooked down to this porridge-y mush?’
His gaze locked with hers. ‘No. No, I think it was the Cuban lamb. The one where the recipe said we had to marinade it in Coca Cola before barbecuing it.’
‘Oh! Oh!’ A sudden memory made her eyes widen. ‘Surely it was the peanut butter and apple soup?’
Rhys nodded. ‘Yes! Oh God, didn’t we do that for a dinner party?’
‘Rebecca and Andy came over. You found the recipe in a vegetarian cookbook. You were so proud of it.’
‘And it was so thick and stodgy that none of us actually wanted our main course.’ His fingers curled around her hand, touching the soft palm, stroking down to her wrist. ‘Oh, Gwen, when did we stop having so much fun?’ he asked softly.
She sighed. ‘When I got a promotion, and you got a promotion, and we both ended up working silly hours just so we could get together enough money to pay the bills and take an exotic foreign holiday, once a year, just to keep ourselves sane.’
‘Looking back, we may have made the wrong choice, somewhere along the line. No promotion, and a week in Criccieth every August. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds like hell. Have you ever been to Criccieth?’
Rhys looked down at the remains of his chicken. ‘Lovely though that is, I’m not sure I could finish another mouthful.’
‘You usually clear your plate. What’s wrong?’
He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. ‘I thought I could do with losing a few pounds.’
Gwen reached out and placed her hand over his.
‘I wouldn’t complain,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t find you shaggable just the way you are.’
Gwen could feel a slight tugging in her hand, as if Rhys subconsciously wanted to pull her towards him. Or was it subconscious? There was a slight curve to his lip, a certain glint in his eye, that sent a tingle through her, from her head to her toes but lingering somewhere around her middle. She could feel her nipples getting hard, rubbing against her dress. ‘Er, you know I did dessert?’
‘Get thee behind me, temptress.’
‘I was rather hoping to have you behind me,’ she said, enjoying the way his eyes widened.
‘We could always bring the dessert with us,’ he said, teasingly. ‘I could lick it off your… stomach. And your breasts.’
‘It’s crème brûlée,’ she breathed. ‘I need to caramelise the sugar.’
Rhys stood up at the same time Gwen did.
‘The way I’m feeling right now,’ he said, pulling her towards him, ‘heat isn’t going to be a problem.’
As Gwen felt his fingers spread themselves through her hair, pressing her lips hard against his, she in turn pressed herself hard against him. They stumbled together towards the bedroom, not even noticing the amber light that pulsed in time with their heartbeats, from the dining table.
Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six looked exactly like the twenty-five chambers that had come before it and the fifteen that Toshiko had overshot by: a red-brick arch in a red-brick tunnel, water trickling down and etching the mortar away, small patches of fungus spread across the walls. Toshiko hoped that they were good, old-fashioned Earth funguses, and not spores of something alien that were patiently eating their way into the walls. She hoped that the rats that she heard scurrying in the darkness sometimes really were rats, and not tiny things with many legs and many eyes that had snuck in along with some of the alien technology they had found. She had nightmares occasionally that something was growing, deep in the bowels of Torchwood. Something alien. Something bad.
Toshiko shivered. They were just dreams, provoked by some of the strange things they did and saw in Torchwood. They weren’t real. They weren’t backed up by observation, or evidence. By science.
She looked around, trying to work out where they were exactly, in relation to Cardiff geography. The Hub was directly beneath the centre of the Basin, but now they were probably some distance away, somewhere under the Red Dragon Centre, if she didn’t miss her guess. How much of Cardiff rested on Torchwood’s tunnels? How many ways in or out were there?