1

Space is so dark that looking out at it confounds the brain. The more you stare at the vastness of it, at the hanging stars and the swirling galaxies, the more you start to notice how imprecise words like ‘dark’ and ‘black’ and ‘endless’ are. There are so many gradients of shadow, all of them terrifying to me.

That’s why I keep the lights on.

I know that it’s silly. I’m many years away from the cramped spaces of my childhood in the crèche on the Collabria Research Colony. But in the dark there’s always the possibility of things being close by: stalking, mask-wearing things, with cold hands and sharp needles. Nasty hiding things that I can’t see. Lately, even my dreams are full of monsters.

That’s why I like to travel alone. Here, in my own ship, I can track heat signatures to make sure I’m the only one on board. I can keep everything as super-bright as I like. I can view my cargo hold – currently empty and waiting for a new shipment of freshly roasted coffee beans from the Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station (or the ICRS, pronounced ‘Icarus’ by long-time transporters) – right here from the control-room console. But, no matter the precautions, I’m still always looking over my shoulder. My heart hammers in my chest, my skin feels clammy and rippling and stinging-goosefleshy. Thank goodness I rarely have to leave my ship.

After leaving Collabria, I lived in a lot of places, hand-to-mouthing it. I even did a contract term with the Galatron Mining Corporation. I’ve always been big for my age, so they didn’t question me signing the contract, even though I’m not sure it was strictly legal. Three whole years I worked for them, sifting red sand and breathing in poison, but in the end I saved up enough to buy a second-hand ship.

It was towards the end of my time in the mines when the fear started. There was a collapse and I was trapped deep under the earth. No air. Incredible heat. Terror ballooned inside me in the dark.

At first, I worried that being on board a ship would feel like being trapped under the earth or in one of the cage-cribs of the crèche, but instead it felt a lot closer to freedom. I repaired it myself, teaching myself from a big old book. Now my ship runs well enough for me to have a steady gig – my first – transporting coffee.

My route between the ICRS and the Planet of the Coffee Shops is a slog. I spend my time watching holovids, spraying myself with fiction mist, exchanging messages with 78342 and 78346 from the crèche (lately, 78342 spends hours complaining because her secondary antennae finally came in and, ever since, boys have been paying her more attention) and avoiding sleep. It should have been dull, swimming through the same old sea of stars in the same old ship, but I don’t feel that way at all. I feel hounded, like I don’t want to slow down for fear of a nameless, suffocating something nipping at my heels.

The past is hard to outrun. You have to go faster than my run-down ship can manage.

Fiddling with the controls, I see the reflection of my face in the polished glass surface – my mottled grey skin and the forked tongue that tastes the air around me without me even noticing I’m doing it half the time. My eyes are red-veined. I look like I could use more sleep.

What I really need is more coffee.

The Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station orbits the planet Chloris, which has an ideal climate for growing the super-caffeinated coffee beans that make it famous. People say that the ICRS is the most caffeinated place in the universe. Just breathing the air is supposed to wake the newly dead, make hair grow on your eyeballs and recharge depleted batteries.

I like it there. Oddly, I actually feel less twitchy when I’m on the station, although I might be the only one. The caffeine calms me. I worry that I’m becoming an addict, but maybe that’s a hazard of a job like mine.

By the time I dock, my chronometer says that I am running a little ahead of schedule. I go outside and fingerprint a bunch of official forms for a spiky Vinvocci, while robots load my cargo hold with bags of beans that shine like mahogany, sticky with oil. Even through the airlock, I’ll be able to smell the stuff on the ride back. That’s always a bonus.

The Vinvocci says something to me, and when I turn to reply he takes a step back. I guess I’m a little intimidating when you don’t know how young I am: large, slightly hunched and too shy to smile when I should. Growing up the way I did, I don’t know how to talk to people or put them at ease. I sign his datapad, go back to my ship, eat my dinner out of a packet and get ready for bed. As I stare up at the ceiling above my bunk, I have the pleasant thought that tomorrow, before I leave, I’ll go to get a cup of coffee – real coffee, scorching hot and brewed on the station by baristas who know what they’re doing, not made in my ship’s old, rust-stained pot.

My mouth waters at the thought.

I don’t like sleeping because no matter how bright the room is, when my eyes are closed, I’m in the dark.

I don’t like my dreams, either. Lying there, I find myself wishing I could sneak out and grab a quick coffee, but the shop will be closed. Maybe I could find some loose beans? No, I tell myself, forcing my thoughts to focus on how impressed 78342 will be when I’ve saved up enough for us to get a place of our own in one of the nicer star systems. And 78346 too. We’ll live all together and then I won’t have to be nervous about anything any more because they’ll always be looking over my shoulder for me.

When I wake up, the lights are off and my heart is pounding. For a long moment, I think I am still in the same old nightmare, plunged into darkness, skin crawling. I fumble for the computer screen on the wall. Gradually, the room brightens. I blink rapidly. I must have hit the light switch in the night.

Groggily, I stumble out into the electroshower, turn the heat up as high as it will go, and let the night’s dirt and flop-sweat burn off my skin.

There’s a legend that drinking enough coffee at the Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station will make a person stay awake for a week at least. Right now, I like the sound of that.

I get dressed and make my way through the corridors to the little coffee shop. They keep it small, grubby and only open for limited hours because they don’t want the transport staff – like me – to consume too much of the good stuff. It’s filled with workers from inside the station too, along with a few travellers stopping because they felt the need for coffee strong enough to bench-press a star system. Behind the bar, by the bubbling, steaming machines, is a purple-skinned barista with six arms. She’s making espressos and frothing milk faster than I can follow.

Glancing around the room, I see a tiny Graske borrowing money from a Terileptil in a cloak. I think I’ve seen them on the station before. A Blowfish with an eye patch sits in a shadowed back corner, scanning the shop with a sinister look on his face. At one table, a group of workers in overalls are kicking back, laughing together. At another, a soldier stares gloomily into the depths of her cup.

The queue is short: I’m at the back; at the counter is a woman wearing a military uniform; between us stands a whippet-thin man in a navy-blue coat with a scarlet lining. He turns to look at me with piercing, hollow-set grey eyes, then furrows his impressive silvery brows.

‘I’m buying a coffee,’ he says. ‘For a girl.’

‘Ah,’ I say, wondering if her secondary antennae came in. It sure sounds like it. ‘Great.’

‘She thinks I’m just buying her a twenty-first-century Earth coffee,’ he goes on, rocking back on his heels. ‘Won’t she be surprised? Turns out I’m the fetching sort after all. I mean, this isn’t as good as the incredible coffee made by Elisabeth Pepsis, of course, or that amazing stuff Benton used to make – what was his first name? Oh yes, Sergeant. Sergeant Benton. Something to do with the temperature of the water, he said. But this is still good.

‘Clara’s a bit annoyed with me, but once she tastes this her mood will be much improved. Or possibly not, but at least she’ll have coffee.’

‘Clara?’ I echo. He’s said a bunch of names, but that seems to be the important one.

He nods. ‘She’s impossible.’

‘You seem so familiar,’ I say, before I think better of it. The man he reminds me of looked very different, but spoke in the same dizzying, joyful rush. I understood less than half of what that man said, but he’d saved my life, so I was determined to pay attention to anyone who was even a little bit like him.

This man’s frown deepens. His eyebrows do things I didn’t even know eyebrows could do. ‘I don’t get that a lot.’

‘He was called the Doctor and he saved –’

‘Ahhhhh, right,’ he says, interrupting me. ‘I remind you of me. Oh, well, that makes much more sense.’

‘What?’

At that moment, a nondescript human dressed in grey joins the queue behind me. He’s wearing a respirator mask over the lower half of his face – the white, paper kind that scientists always wore in the crèche. Even though I can only see his eyes, he looks hideously, uncomfortably familiar. Might he really be one of the scientists?

‘I am the Doctor,’ the man with the eyebrows says, looking quite puffed up about it. ‘I bet we had some good times, didn’t we?’

I don’t know how to respond to that because it doesn’t make any sense. If he really is the Doctor, then surely he must remember coming to Collabria, must notice the resemblance of the masked figure behind me to the scientists there. I open my mouth to ask, when the coffee grinders shudder to a halt, blades crunching metallically against each other in the sudden absence of beans.

Astonished words slip out of the barista’s mouth. She even looks surprised to have said them. ‘There’s no more coffee!’

The beans have stopped automatically feeding down into the machines from a chute in the ceiling. On the Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station, that’s the worst thing that could ever happen.

Then the lights go out.

To me, that’s even worse.

Everyone around me is screaming. I feel that familiar terror, so intense that I am unable to think beyond it. I want to run, but I feel cold and hot all at once and I can’t seem to control my feet. Just as I think I might be able to move, the lights flicker back on. I gasp.

The man with the respirator mask is gone, but lying on the metal floor is the body of the female soldier who was ahead of the Doctor in the queue. A cup is still in her hand, spilling out its precious contents on to the greyish floor tiles. The fumes of the freshly brewed coffee do not seem, as the legends would have it, to be bringing her back to life.

She’s dead.

It’s not the first corpse I’ve seen, but it’s the first since the mines. I had kind of hoped never to see one ever again.