5

I open my eyes, expecting to be blind, but everything is glowing with a gentle light. Predator instincts flood me – urges of hunger and violence. Memories flood me too: all the stuff my weaker self doesn’t want to recall, the pain and fury of needles and scalpels, the stench of bleach and rot. I hunch forward; my body has grown larger, my back has split open to reveal spines running down it. The forks of my tongue have become pointed and needle-sharp, perfect for puncturing skin. I have a second set of eyes too, newly opened. It’s with those eyes that I am seeing in the dark. It’s with those eyes that I see the Doctor.

An instinct presses down on me to let my consciousness, the part of me that’s in control, drift away. I fight against it. If I don’t stay focused, I’m going to try to hurt him. And he is going to hurt me.

Now I can recall skulking through the ICRS in the early hours of this morning, entering the control room. It is with some satisfaction that I think about the terrified looks the faces of the engineers wore when I found them, just before I …

Before I killed them. Before I fed on their energy.

I overheard the scientists talking about it once, about what I was made from, before they knew I could understand them. Before I was aware what the words meant: a pinch of Axon, a bit of Ogron, a dash of Pyrovile.

‘We all have things inside ourselves we can’t kill,’ I say, not sure which part of me would be better off dead: this monster self, or the normal one who wants nothing more than a little place on a little planet with his friends, the one who will have to live with being a killer.

‘Yes,’ he says, and I can hear in his voice that, again, he isn’t just talking about me when he speaks. ‘Which is why I worry that some of us can’t be saved. That some of us shouldn’t be saved.’

‘Back at the crèche, they’d tell us that the things they did in the dark didn’t matter because no one could see them,’ I inform the Doctor. Even my voice sounds different, deeper.

‘And you believed it. Some part of you must have believed it, because you hid yourself in yourself, bottled yourself up until you burst,’ says the Doctor. ‘I thought about sending you to Boukan. It’s in a planetary system that has three artificial suns. It would always be bright there and you could live a good life. But …’

‘But one day the stars will die and I’ll be in the dark again?’ I ask. With Pyrovile in my genetic make-up, who knows how long I might live?

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ says the Doctor. ‘So then I thought –’

‘You thought you would have to kill me,’ I finish for him.

‘Did you know that when human boys enter puberty, their voices change?’ His voice is light again, as though we aren’t talking about living and dying. As though I wasn’t a murderer. As though he wasn’t wishing he hadn’t saved me in the first place. As though, in a few moments, we weren’t going to fight and one of us wasn’t going to die.

‘What does that have to do with anything?’ I ask.

He moves around the room, fingers trailing over my control panel. I watch him warily.

‘Their voices change, but not all at once. They go back and forth – deep one moment and high the next. Mortifying stuff. Try to chat up a girl and all of a sudden you go all squeaky, new hormones just showing up and humiliating you. But that’s not all that puberty does. It makes you aggressive and temperamental. All that hate for all the things that happened to you – all that fear.’

I think about 78342 and her talk about boys. We’re about the same age; maybe we’re both changing because this is when it happens. But, if so, puberty doesn’t seem very fair – she got antennae and I got this.

‘I’m not scared,’ I say. ‘That’s the other me. He’s scared.’

The Doctor brings up his hands, fingertips pressing against each side of his head. ‘It’s amazing how we hide from that, isn’t it? How much of the violence of the universe comes from the unwillingness to say those two little words: “I’m scared.” Everyone gets scared. Every last one of us. But have you ever admitted it, ever said it aloud? Go ahead. Just say it: “I’m scared.”’

‘I’m scared.’ I grit the words out.

‘Good,’ the Doctor says. ‘You should be. That’s the first step. You’re going through a growth spurt, Fifty-one, a transformation. It hasn’t stabilised yet. The question is, what are you going to do to stop yourself from killing until it does?’

‘You mean that, once I’m transformed, I will be able to control myself?’ I ask.

The Doctor shrugs. ‘It depends on what kind of adult you turn out to be.’

The lights all around the cabin flash on, making me stumble back and cover my face because the bright lights hurt my second set of eyes. The Doctor must have turned them on while we were talking. I recall him touching the control panel, but I haven’t been paying close enough attention.

By the time I’m able to figure out how to shut my night-time eyes and open my regular eyes, he’s standing very close. ‘Time to decide.’

I blink at him and then look down at myself. My hands are huge mottled-grey claws. I move towards the control panel and see myself, my almost-adult self – if the Doctor is correct – for the first time, reflected in the glass.

I am enormous, hunched over on two stocky legs, bony ridges and spines running down my back, sharp teeth to match the sharp forks of my tongue.

‘When will it stabilise?’ I ask.

‘You’ve just killed four people in quick succession and taken their energy. You might have enough to make the full transformation now. Your body is still processing what you’ve ingested,’ the Doctor says.

I punch some coordinates into the computer. ‘Get to the escape pod,’ I say. ‘It will take you back to the ICRS. I know what I have to do. I know where I can get the energy I need.’

He looks out at the darkness of space and down at my coordinates. ‘That’s a sun.’

‘Heat doesn’t hurt me,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve got a cargo hold full of coffee. It could provide me with a last blast of energy – maybe that will stabilise me enough to get control.’

‘And what if it doesn’t? You’ll be burned to ash and scattered on solar winds. Roasted like a coffee bean.’

‘Then at least people will be safe. That’s what you would do, isn’t it? Keep the people safe, even if it means getting roasted by the sun. You got into a spaceship with a monster, didn’t you?’

‘If that’s what I taught you, it was an awful lesson.’ The Doctor’s expression is one I haven’t seen on him before. He looks very serious and very sad.

‘Do something for me,’ I say. ‘Will you?’

‘If I can,’ he tells me.

‘I have a … friend. From the crèche. You might remember her from when she was little. She’s got these two mouths and she talks a lot.’

‘The little mite,’ says the Doctor, looking a bit unnerved. Sometimes 78342 had that effect on people. ‘Who could forget her?’

I smile. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? And I never got to tell her that. You said you were buying coffee for a girl. Buy my girl a coffee too. Tell her I thought – no, just tell her I think she’s beautiful.’

He nods solemnly, and I believe that he will. I watch him head for the escape pod. He gives me one last look, as though he’s waiting for me to back down, to chicken out. But I don’t and, a few moments later, he’s heading back towards the Intergalactic Coffee Roasting Station and his blue box.

Then it’s time for me to go on my own journey.

I lock the screens so I can’t have second thoughts.

I go over to my bunk and pull down my pictures, studying all the little places I imagined buying. Living all together again seems like a kid’s dream, but not a bad one. Once I’m permanently changed, I hope I can remember dreams like that. I hope I can be the kind of grown-up that doesn’t lose the good part of being a kid, even if I’m a grown-up monster.

I hope I get to be a little bit like the Doctor.

As I hurtle towards the sun, everything else burns away. The bunk smoulders, fibre-tape catching on fire. The paper pictures blacken in my hand. Hot molten energy fills me, licking at my skin, burning up the coffee beans in the hold into a cloud of energy. I am the creature I was always meant to be. Wings break free from my back. A cry rises from my throat.

All around me, everything is light and bright. And, for the first time I can remember, no part of me is afraid.