4

The control-room door opens when I push it, which doesn’t seem right. A room like that should be locked. When I look down, I see that it probably was locked once, but there are scorch marks around the locking mechanism, as though someone fried it. It’s cool to the touch, though.

Inside the room, I can barely see. The wash of light from the corridor reflects off the central control panel and for a moment I think I am looking at a masked face reflected back at me in the shining metal. I turn, but there’s no one behind me, no one else in the room.

Except the two bodies lying on the floor.

They’re sprawled out as though asleep. But I know they’re not. I know they’re dead.

I take a step closer and fumble with the light panel. Overhead, the fluorescents flicker on, illuminating the pale faces of the technicians. All their blood has congealed beneath them, purpling the backs of their necks. Their eyes are cloudy and pale, their bodies stiff.

The Doctor has followed me in. He flares a single nostril the way another person might arch an eyebrow. ‘I think we can agree this room has been tampered with.’

Behind the bodies, a wall-sized control panel flashes red and yellow lights. A hole gapes in the middle, between labels marked COFFEE DISPENSER and LIGHTING SYSTEM. Wires stick out like messy curls and shards of twisted metal protrude from the hole like jagged teeth. The whole thing is hot enough that the air ripples around it. Above the mess is a timer, the numbers reading 00:00. A bomb, rigged to go off when we were in the coffee shop.

The scientist, I think. The scientist did this.

I reach out and tug a piece of metal shrapnel free. It’s warm in my hands, my skin being engineered to be resistant to heat, but, when I drop it, it makes a scorch mark on the floor.

The Doctor waves his sonic screwdriver over the bodies. ‘They’ve been dead for about fourteen hours. Which means this started before it began.’

‘What?’

‘I mean the beginning began before the start – when that girl collapsed in the queue, she wasn’t the first victim. So the new question is, who was the first?’ A single long finger taps the cleft above his lip.

‘Do you know?’ I ask. I’m honoured he chose me to be his companion. I believe he can solve this. I believe he’s going to turn round and tell me what to do about the scientist.

‘You have a ship here, right?’ he says, pointing to a sign indicating the direction of the docking bay. ‘Take me to it.’

He starts down the corridor. I run to catch up, puzzled. ‘We can’t go down there.’

‘Of course we can,’ he says. ‘We’re not allowed to, but that just makes it a bit more exciting, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure I can deal with any more excitement,’ I say, trying to keep up with him. His coat is flapping around him like he’s some tall, angular, sinister bat.

We are approaching the docking bay by now and he goes up to the large double doors and runs his sonic screwdriver over the entry panel. It sizzles a little and the lights dim.

‘Doctor!’ I yell.

‘Just a second. I’ve almost got it.’

And with that the doors begin to open. In the next room are robots and a few techs. They look over at us.

‘Identify yourselves,’ one demands in its tinny voice.

‘Just passing through,’ the Doctor tells the room, then turns back to me. ‘Which one of these is yours?’

‘Um, that one.’ I point towards the hangar door where my little ship is docked.

He pushes me towards it. ‘Go! Go!’

One of the techs gets in front of me. ‘You aren’t supposed to be in here. There was a murder at the coffee shop and there’s going to be an investiga–’

‘Already done. Found the murderer,’ the Doctor shouts, grabbing me and racing past. ‘Got to go!’

The tech starts yelling at the robots to stop us. They chug in our direction, but they’re too late. I’m already keying my code into the ship.

We tumble aboard and I seal the door. The robots pound on the other side.

‘Open up!’ the tech shouts. ‘You’re breaking the lockdown.’

‘What now?’ I ask, a little out of breath.

‘We take off,’ the Doctor says, as though this is obvious. He’s at my control console, tapping keys and flicking switches. I don’t like it. He’s scaring me and he’s making all the decisions and he’s touching my stuff. But I’m too frightened to tell him to stop.

‘And leave all these people? But you’re the Doctor. You help people! You don’t abandon them.’

‘Not this time,’ he says, sounding positively jolly. ‘Nothing we can do. We have to go. Right now!’

‘Wait!’ I say, surprising myself, because there’s nothing I want more than to run away. I’m always running. Even this job – shipping coffee – has been a kind of running. ‘If you know who the murderer is, then we should at least –’

‘RIGHT NOW,’ he shouts, and there is a command in his voice that makes me move before I can even think better of it. His pale eyes are blazing. I feel like I am looking at a creature who has stepped out of time. A god is staring out at me from behind the crack in his mask.

I unlock the anchoring system and engage the engines. The techs back off once those roar to life. They’re probably going to report me, which means I’ll be blacklisted at the Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station and I’ll have to find another way to pay for the upkeep of my ship. I feel guilty even worrying about that when we’ve abandoned all those people at the coffee shop and I feel even worse that we’ve left them behind. I think about all of that as we blast off into the endless sea of space.

Then I slump down on to the padded seating area – the one that can fold out into a bunk when I want to sleep. It’s been patched with fibre-tape and is half covered in the manuals I’ve been studying. To one side is a collage of pictures, arranged around the computer inset into the wall, images of warm, bright places that I think 78342 and 78346 would like.

‘I do remember you now,’ the Doctor says, turning to look in my direction. ‘Time is occasionally difficult for me. Most times it’s ridiculously easy, but that can make me miss things. Important things. You’re practically grown up, aren’t you, but not nearly as old as you look?’

‘I guess,’ I say, because I’m not sure how old I am. An unhappy childhood is supposed to make you grow up fast, but I still feel like a kid a lot of the time. Lately, though, it’s been weird. We were all always growing, but not in so many directions at once.

‘Well, you’re enough of an adult to hear this. You’re the one who killed those people, Fifty-one. You’re the one who drained their energy.’

I stare at him. It’s impossible. I was there when it happened. I was in the dark, afraid. I wanted to run. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I start shuddering all over.

‘What about the scientist?’ I ask. ‘The one in the mask? I saw him before the first attack in the coffee shop. And then I thought I saw him again reflected in the panel in the control centre.’

‘What did you call it? The place where I found you? The crèche. But that’s not what it really was, did you know that? It was a laboratory, where they experimented on you children from the moment you were born. I don’t know if you ever understood, if they ever explained, but you were patched together from bits of this and that – to be monsters. They wanted to make monsters out of children. They wanted to use you against their enemies and colonise all the galaxies. You think you’re seeing one of the scientists, but that’s your mind’s way of explaining the thing you don’t want to accept – that a different part of yourself, a hungry part, is emerging in the dark to feed. Sometimes we need to tell ourselves something important, something so important we don’t tell ourselves in a very straightforward way. Sometimes we can only do it with a new face. Sometimes even a face we don’t like. The scientists did terrible things, but they didn’t do this.’

I flinch. I think of my pallid reflection, of my dreams, of how tight my skin feels as he speaks. I think about how I’m almost as tall as the Doctor and how I’m pretty sure I still have more growing to do.

I think about whether or not I could hurt him.

I shake my head, to push away the vision I have of grabbing him in my over-large hands, of pulling him apart like taffy.

‘I understand how you feel more than you might think,’ he goes on, waving his long fingers in a gesture that seems to indicate many things. ‘Monstrousness can sneak up on you. One day you’re faffing around through the universe and the next day you realise you’re responsible for the murder of seven people. I let you out. I’m responsible for the murder of seven people too.’

‘Seven?’ I gasp, feeling sick.

‘Three people died at the ICRS, several months apart. I bet if I checked your logbook I’d find you were on the station each time. I heard about the deaths; that’s what got me interested. After all, who goes for the third best coffee in the universe?’

That was right – he’d told me he came to the ICRS to get a coffee for a girl. Clara. But I guess he’d mostly come here looking for the murderer. I did recall the other deaths on the station. The ICRS had been abuzz with talk about them when I was leaving with my last shipment. I hadn’t thought much about it. People die. I’ve seen lots of people – kids – die for no reason at all. Failed experiments.

‘Humans and some humanoids,’ the Doctor says, ‘produce cortisol and adrenaline. You need both, don’t you? People with coffee in their systems produce more adrenaline. The station must be an irresistible source of energy. The scientists made you as best they could for their purpose, but they gave you an enormous appetite.’

I don’t bother shaking my head. I’m too scared now.

‘I worked it out from your adrenaline levels.’ The Doctor’s gaze is pitiless. ‘In the coffee shop, the read-outs on my screwdriver were extraordinarily high. At first I supposed that you were a very nervous person – you are a bit twitchy, you have to admit – and, as such a rich source of energy, you’d be the next victim. When I pulled you into the corridor to find the control centre, I thought the murderer would come after us. But, when the darkness lifted, neither of us was dead and your adrenaline levels were lower instead of spiking the way they should have at a moment of such peril – I realised you were using it up in the darkness. By transforming. And you’re storing energy for some kind of further transformation, aren’t you?’

‘No! That’s not possible. If I was the murderer, why didn’t I attack you?’ I am reaching for anything that might disprove what he is saying. I need him to be wrong. My heart slams against my chest with a fear of myself that’s worse than any fear of the dark.

‘I’m not human enough, I imagine.’ The Doctor looks at me with something like pity. ‘I understand not wanting to remember all the terrible things you’ve done. I understand locking all those memories away, but sometimes it’s imperative to remember.’

He’s talking about himself, but it’s impossible to believe he understands what I feel. A horrible weight settles on my shoulders and I sag underneath it, because I can no longer argue. ‘If I’m doing this, you have to stop me! I don’t want to hurt anyone.’

‘I believe that,’ the Doctor says.

‘The others aren’t like me, either. We’re all different. They’re not monsters.’

‘I believe that too,’ he says. ‘Now, Fifty-one, let’s talk. Let’s really get to know one another.’

He reaches over, hits a key on the console and plunges us into darkness.