3

In the darkness, everything is different. The air feels thick. My skin itches. I close my eyes, but that just plunges me deeper into nothingness. It’s like being out in space, drifting, without even the comfort of stars. It’s like being buried in the earth, buried in my past, buried and trying to dig my way out.

When the lights come back on, the Blowfish is lying on the ground not far from where I’m standing. His patch has slipped, revealing a gem in the hollow socket where his eye ought to be. Everyone is screaming. I think I might be screaming with them.

‘Fifty-one,’ the Doctor says, bringing his hand down on my shoulder hard enough that I shut up and turn towards him. I’m shivering all over.

Then I realise the Doctor’s calling me ‘Fifty-one’. He’s given me a nickname. I’ve never had a nickname before.

‘S-sorry,’ I stammer. ‘The dark. It b-bothers me.’

‘Is it because whenever the lights go out, someone dies?’ the Doctor asks, his fierce eyebrows contracting. His eyes look a little sunken, ominous. ‘Because that bothers me too. But good idea!’

‘What idea?’

‘I had one and it was excellent, and I had it because of you.’ He looks at me as though expecting me to be pleased. Then he walks quickly towards the exit.

I follow him. Glancing back, I see that several of the patrons are crying. Someone is eating coffee grounds straight from the machine and two people are shouting at each other.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

‘Like you said. We’re going to keep the lights on,’ he says, pointing his screwdriver at the door. It opens and he continues on into the corridor. ‘All we have to do is find the master control centre, figure out what’s broken and fix it.’

Relief fills me. ‘Yes, the lights. I can help. I’m good at figuring out how things work.’

As we walk, the bulbs overhead flicker, and I shudder, even though it’s just us in the corridor. ‘When we were in the queue, Doctor, did you see a scientist?’

‘A scientist?’ the Doctor echoes, clearly distracted. He’s holding out his sonic screwdriver, monitoring the air.

‘In a respirator mask,’ I say, thinking of the marks that the Doctor claimed could have come from two tiny swords. Needle marks might look like that too. ‘He’d gone when the lights came back on, but he was there in the queue with us. Right behind me.’

‘Interesting,’ he says, frowning in concentration. I’m not sure if he’s actually paying attention to what I’m saying.

After the laboratory on Collabria was destroyed, I didn’t know where all the scientists went. I wondered if they started again somewhere, on some other planet.

When I was a child, I lived in a cage-crib. We all did in the crèche – well, the ones who were like me did, anyway. Not the scientists. I don’t know where they lived but I imagine it was somewhere big and open and clean. But those of us in the cage-cribs, we charted time by the fluctuations of the dim amber light, the beep of monitors and the drip of fluids. 78346 was in the cage next to mine and he would put a tentacle through when I was super-scared and I’d sneak him food when they wouldn’t give him enough. We’d whisper to one another until the scientists made us stop. 78342 was in a cage above me. She would lie on her stomach and peer down at us with bright yellow eyes. She couldn’t speak until they grafted a mouth on her, and when they did they gave her two, both a little too big for her face; she claims that’s why she won’t stop talking now.

There were others, all of us different from each other, but we three were the ones still alive when the Doctor came. He took us away in his blue box. He spoke to us as though we were normal children. We liked him.

I want to tell him that, to tell him how grateful we were; how grateful we will always be. I want to thank him for choosing me to be his assistant, for giving me the chance to watch his great mind at work up close, but something in his manner tells me he wouldn’t appreciate hearing it.

‘This seems to be it,’ says the Doctor, pointing to a door with a graphic representation of switches on it. ‘The control centre of the station.’

It’s then that the flickering lights go out entirely. We are plunged into darkness.

I am terrified.

I feel as though something is with us, something huge and awful, something nearly on top of me, breathing on my neck. Somehow, I know it must be the scientist. He’s come looking for me. And now he’s going to get me. I brace myself for the sting of a needle.

Then the lights come back on and everything’s fine – I’m still alive and so is the Doctor. He’s staring at me with fierce, narrowed eyes and I’m staring back at him, my relief draining away. In that moment, he scares me almost as much as the dark.