“Oh, lovey,” said the woman. And she put her arms around Donna and pulled her close and held her tight.
“Will you take me home with you?” asked Donna.
“I can’t,” said the woman. “Home isn’t there for you yet. You haven’t met any of the people who are going to help you get off the street, or help you get a job. You haven’t met the person who’s going to turn out to be your partner. And you’ll both make a place that’s safe, for each other and for your children. Somewhere warm.”
Donna felt the anger rising inside her. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“So you know it gets better. To give you hope.”
Donna stepped back. “I don’t want hope,” she said. “I want somewhere warm. I want a home. I want it now. Not in twenty years.”
A hurt expression on the placid face. “It’s sooner than twen—”
“I don’t care! It’s not tonight. I don’t have anywhere to go. And I’m cold. Have you got any change?”
The woman nodded. “Here,” she said. She opened her purse and took out a twenty-pound note. Donna took it, but the money didn’t look like any currency she was familiar with. She looked back at the woman to ask her something, but she was gone, and when Donna looked back at her hand, so was the money.
She stood there shivering. The money was gone, if it had ever been there. But she had kept one thing: she knew it would all work out someday. In the end. And she knew that she didn’t need to do anything stupid. She didn’t have to buy one last Underground ticket just to be able to jump down onto the tracks when she saw a train coming, too close to stop.
The winter wind was bitter, and it bit her and it cut her to the bone, but still, she spotted something blown up against a shop doorway, and she reached down and picked it up: a five-pound note. Perhaps tomorrow would be easier. She didn’t have to do any of the things she had imagined herself doing.
December could be lethal, when you were out on the streets. But not this year. Not tonight.
Nothing O’Clock
2013
I.
THE TIME LORDS BUILT a prison. They built it in a time and place that are equally as unimaginable to any entity who has never left the solar system in which it was spawned, or who has only experienced the journey into the future one second at a time, and that going forward. It was built solely for the Kin. It was impregnable: a complex of small, nicely appointed rooms (for they were not monsters, the Time Lords. They could be merciful, when it suited them), out of temporal phase with the rest of the Universe.
There were, in that place, only those rooms: the gulf between microseconds was one that could not be crossed. In effect, those rooms became a Universe in themselves, one that borrowed light and heat and gravity from the rest of creation, always a fraction of a moment away.
The Kin prowled its rooms, patient and deathless, and always waiting.
It was waiting for a question. It could wait until the end of time. (But even then, when Time Ended, the Kin would never perceive it, imprisoned in the micro-moment away from time.)
The Time Lords maintained the prison with huge engines they built in the hearts of black holes, unreachable: no one would be able to get to the engines, save the Time Lords themselves. The multiple engines were a fail-safe. Nothing could ever go wrong.
As long as the Time Lords existed, the Kin would be in their prison, and the rest of the Universe would be safe. That was how it was, and how it always would be.
And if anything went wrong, then the Time Lords would know. Even if, unthinkably, any of the engines failed, then emergency signals would sound on Gallifrey long before the prison of the Kin returned to our time and our Universe. The Time Lords had planned for everything.
They had planned for everything except the possibility that one day there would be no Time Lords, and no Gallifrey. No Time Lords in the Universe, except for one.
So when the prison shook and crashed, as if in an earthquake, throwing the Kin down, and when the Kin looked up from its prison to see the light of galaxies and suns above it, unmediated and unfiltered, and it knew that it had returned to the Universe, it knew it would only be a matter of time until the question would be asked once more.
And, because the Kin was careful, it took stock of the Universe they found themselves in. It did not think of revenge: that was not in its nature. It wanted what it had always wanted. And besides . . .
There was still a Time Lord in the Universe.
The Kin needed to do something about that.
II.
ON WEDNESDAY, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD POLLY Browning put her head around her father’s office door. vDad. There’s a man at the front door in a rabbit mask who says he wants to buy the house.”
“Don’t be silly, Polly.” Mr. Browning was sitting in the corner of the room he liked to call his office, and which the estate agent had optimistically listed as a third bedroom, although it was scarcely big enough for a filing cabinet and a card table, upon which rested a brand-new Amstrad computer. Mr. Browning was carefully entering the numbers from a pile of receipts onto the computer, and wincing. Every half an hour he would save the work he’d done so far, and the computer would make a grinding noise for a few minutes as it saved everything onto a floppy disk.
“I’m not being silly. He says he’ll give you seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds for it.”
“Now you’re really being silly. It’s on sale for a hundred and fifty thousand.” And we’d be lucky to get
