Instead she slapped her nursemaid hard across the face. In the pub on the corner of the same street, a quiet regular customer yelled uncontrollably at the barmaid that ‘I’ll be with you in a minute’ wasn’t good enough. Not far away, a boy’s ‘excuse me’ as he inadvertently knocking into an old woman was answered with a crack of her walking stick across his back. All across the city, tempers simmered close to boiling point, ready to explode at any moment. But as the rest of London slowly began its dissolution into anger, hatred and imminent violence, there was one small area that resisted. Watching the emotional indicator levels overlaid on a map of the city, Milton frowned. That made no sense. How come the cloud was having less effect in that one particular area? He zoomed the map on his screen to a higher level of detail. Things became both clearer and more vexing. ‘The Doctor?’ he wondered out loud. But what could the Doctor be doing at the Carnival of Curiosities that would hold back the effects of the cloud?
