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Story: A Disordered World
I saw this photoset on tumblr today, suggesting that Molly Hooper and Martha Jones had been to medical school together. Then this happened. It has pretty much zero editing and I will come back to this in a few months or whenever so that I can figure out the end and edit it to make sense.
**Disclaimer** I am an English major. I know zilch about medical school. Feel free to lynch me for taking liberties.
Also, I am not a fan of the Talking Heads
Title: A Disordered World
Fandom: Doctor Who and Sherlock (yep, primarily crossovers with me)
Rating: PG-13 for Toclafane-induced decimation?
Word Count: 3,860
Summary: Molly Hooper during the Year That Never Was
Molly had never been much of a science fiction fan. Her sister had devoured every episode of every version of Star Trek that she could get her hands on when they were younger, while Molly curled up in her room and read Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries. She preferred mysteries that were wrapped up at the end of the story: everything organized into explicable facts. Gregson’s monologues to his colleagues that laid out, scientifically, why all of the evidence pointed towards the shopkeeper’s assistant as the mastermind of the scheme, and why it could have been no one else. It made sense to her. No vast space operas, with bizarre technologies and inexplicable leaps of logic, for Molly Hooper. The one time she had tried to join her sister, she had been too put off by wondering why all of the aliens looked like humans with prosthetics. ‘If they’re from another planet, why don’t they look more alien?’ she asked her sister.
Laura huffed. ‘I don’t know,’ she grumbled. ‘Stop interrupting.’
Years later, Molly could have given her eight-year-old self a realistic explanation of why most television aliens possessed bilateral symmetry and humanoid features (namely, budgeting) but that didn’t mean she had any further interest in the fantastic. She still liked to have order in her universe; it was one of the factors in her decision to go to medical school. There was a reason that everything in the body worked the way it did, even if modern medicine hadn’t discovered that reason yet. She could look at a cadaver and understand what was different about it, why it was no longer a functioning organism; human bodies could be unexpected, but never truly inexplicable. Even if someone like her didn’t always understand what was going on, someone cleverer could pick it apart and lay everything out neatly so that it did make sense.
And then the Toclafane arrived.
It was, Molly thought, as she hugged her knees, like something out of one of Laura’s novels. The prime minister smiled on the television (reassuringly, and Molly felt herself relax a tiny bit) as he addressed the country. ‘We will take our place in the universe. Every man, woman, and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer.’ His expression flickered for just a moment, as he added, ‘I don't know--every medical student?’
Molly shivered. She wondered if that was a jab at someone specific — a rival? — and then corrected herself. This was exciting news, Britain leading the world into a new age of alien contact, not a moment for pettiness. Maybe Harold Saxon had a brother in medical school, and that was a shout out to him. (She couldn’t remember much about him personally; she’d voted for him because there were no other candidates as … qualified, she supposed.) She kept the news on all day after that, too nervous to leave her flat except to go to classes. As soon as her last class finished, she raced back to her room and turned on the news in case there was some new development that she had missed.
She had a class the next morning at eight, but skipped it and stayed home with a cup of tea in her hands and a copy of Grey’s Anatomy in her lap like a bible or a talisman. She liked to call it her favorite book in the world, which was not strictly true (her absolute favorite, not that she would ever admit to it, was the twenty-fifth Nancy Drew novel) but it had been her father’s copy, the one that made her decide to become a doctor when she was ten, and its weight on her legs was comforting.
Molly didn’t keep up much with politics — didn’t keep up much with anything outside of her schoolwork — but she took a dislike to President Winters when he appeared on her television screen. Why did the United States have to open up negotiations? It was so … Hollywood. Like those movies her last boyfriend had loved, the string of Armageddons that wiped out America and forgot about the rest of the civilized world. Molly watched with distaste, then forgot all about movie tropes as complicated-looking metal spheres — the Toclafane — appeared out of the air and came hovering down to head level. Their voices came out high and peevish; Molly wondered if there had been a miscommunication, and this “alien race” was actually just the work of a few child aliens. (And she could handle the concept of curious alien children far more easily than she could handle the thought of sharing the earth with another species.)
The Toclafane whined and refused to answer President Winters, insisting on the “Mister Master”. Molly put down her tea and leaned forwards. The edge of the book dug into her stomach, and the discomfort kept her feeling grounded, reminded her that this wasn’t a television special, not a fiasco like the War of the Worlds broadcast. This was actually happening. And then the Prime Minister stood up.
Molly watched with confusion, biting her lip, and then recoiled when blades and lasers sprang from the spheres. I didn’t like him, she thought, as all hell broke loose on the ship hovering miles above her head. Her voice sounded small inside her head. I didn’t want him to actually die.
This isn’t a movie, she reminded herself sharply. Pull yourself together, Molly. She refocused on the television, heart pounding, but it was so easy to let it slip out of focus and into fantasy; like coming in at the final battle of a very long, complicated film, with words like “perception filters” and “laser screwdriver” getting thrown around, because she did not just watch the President of the United States disintegrate on live television. She was not seeing the Prime Minister crouching close to the camera, face filled with badly-contained glee as he announced that this was the end of the world. The book pressed into her stomach hard enough to leave marks as she curled in around it more tightly to keep from shaking.
’Here. Come. The drums!’ said Harold Saxon. Molly fumbled for her phone, to call her sister, her father, her classmates — can you believe it, Molly, you actually thought this was real?¬ she wanted them to say — and Harold Saxon flipped a switch, danced off the screen, and left the camera lingering on a withered old man and a handsome corpse in a greatcoat. Molly dialed Laura’s number. The phone rang twice before it got cut off. No service, it read.
But that’s ridiculous, thought Molly, fear rising in her throat, and then she heard a great whirring noise descending on London. She forced herself to set aside the book, wincing at the residual stinging it left as she uncurled. She looked out the open window, and saw millions of small, spherical shapes descending from the sky. The prime minister’s voice boomed out over them as they filed down towards the city. “Remove one tenth of the world’s population,’ it said.
The fires started. Molly shut her eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She never finishes medical school. She has enough training, say the Toclafane, to be useful treating injuries in the shipyards that they are going to build. ‘But I’m — I’m not a doctor, I’m going to be a mortician,’ she stammers.
The Toclafane to whom she addresses her objection emits a tinkling laugh. ‘What need do we have of morticians? We do not care how the humans die. We need to keep the humans alive.’
‘But I could …’ Molly trails off and looks at the remains of the school around her, at the chaotic movement of humans and machines whirling together around the piles of ashes still left over from the decimation. She shuts her mouth. She wills herself to look at the Toclafane and face her enemy, but at the last moment, her eyes skitter to the side. ‘Where am I needed?’ she says.
They build shipyards on the beach at Normandy and in Cornwall, give her a choice between the two of those like it’s the most generous offer imaginable, so to the shipyards in Normandy Molly goes. With a whirring metal ball hovering over her shoulder the entire time, she packs two sets of clothing, her textbooks, and her father’s copy of Grey’s Anatomy, and takes the train to the coast. She sits down next to a silent, grey-faced man who keeps looking out the window as if straining for a glimpse of the Valiant through the clouds. Over the course of the trip, she learns that until a week ago, he was a janitor who worked the last night shift in the Swiss Re building; he had a husband and three children from a previous marriage.
‘My boss told me I couldn’t miss work, come hell or high water. Got to keep the floors clean for the aliens, yeah?’ says her traveling companion. ‘And then I got home, and they were all gone.’
Molly inclines her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
The janitor shrugs. The train pulls into the station several hours later; outside, the air buzzes with Toclafane zipping around, directing the passengers to their next destination. Molly doesn’t say goodbye to the man sitting next to her, just pats him on the arm and bows her head as she steps around debris from the fallen ceiling and makes her way to the buses.
The hospital near the beach, where they want to build the shipyards, is a disaster. Molly’s practical, well-ordered mind tells her that it makes sense: if you are going to remove one tenth of the population of the earth (she doesn’t think that she will ever forget the moment she heard those words, echoing across the planet’s surface) you might as well remove the least useful tenth, and the Toclafane haven’t exactly shown subtlety with how they get to their targets. Molly gets to the first floor of the hospital, looks around at the charred gurneys in the halls, and shuts her eyes to keep from throwing up.
She is assigned housing with four other doctors, in a house that used to belong to an elderly couple. The upper part of the house was blasted in the initial invasion, and one of the other doctors nearly falls through the landing when he tries to investigate, but Molly and her fellows ransack the lower level to learn about the identity of its former owners. It seems disrespectful, otherwise. Several Toclafane congregate to giggle as they sit around the kitchen table, flipping through the photo albums that Molly found in the bedroom. Molly presses her lips together and ignores them as best as she can.
Once construction on the shipyards is finished, and the assembly lines begin, Molly goes to work, harder than she had expected it would be while she was still in school. Of course, she was expecting normal, predictable conditions in a world that made sense, not one in which the Prime Minister spearheaded alien massacres of his own nation. She lugs her book around with her and sets it on the counter of every clinic room, every surgery that she enters. She hasn’t had any contact with her family since the invasion: the phone lines and the internet are down. Some of her fellows say that they’re almost glad they don’t know, because if they have no way of knowing, then there is hope. It seems unkind to disagree with them, so Molly bites her tongue and doesn’t tell them that, statistically, there’s a forty percent chance that someone in their immediate family has died, and if they wanted to rank their family members in terms of usefulness to the Toclafane, they could probably figure out who was most likely to have been slaughtered. She could tell them; but while it comforts her to go around assuming that her sister is dead and her father is alive, it’s unlikely that her method would be popular. So she stays quiet and tries not to think about it.
Two months after the invasion, Molly Hooper has settled into a routine that is, if horrifying, at least predictable. She wakes up at five am, when the Toclafane, as one body, emit a high-pitched shriek that pierces through her dreams and sends her shooting out of bed with her heart racing. She and her housemates (another third-year medical student, a pediatrician, and an army doctor) drive to the hospital under the guidance of the Toclafane who guards their street, and take over for the nurses working the night shift. The accidents that occur at the yards are horrific, would never happen in any sane world after the nineteen twenties. Molly does her best to repair crushed limbs and close gashes wide enough to fit her whole hand, and avoids daydreaming about the future she had imagined: sanitary, equipment vacuum-sealed and sterilized, her patients coming to her wrapped in plastic and without lives to hang in the balance. She stops to eat food that tastes slightly moldy at noon and at six, and goes back to the house late into the night to fall asleep, exhausted, and wake up at five o’clock again the next morning.
Day, after day, after day.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nearly a year after the invasion, Molly wakes up, not to the Toclafane shrieking, but to a tap on the front door. She jumps up from the couch (One of us has done something wrong I told John to shut up while the Toclafane were around where is the baseball bat they’re not getting anyone without a fight) and waits. They shuttered the windows after the first week in Normandy — it doesn’t keep out beings who can appear and disappear at will, but it makes them feel safer if no one can see in — so Molly pulls out the baseball bat from underneath the couch, creeps over to the front door and presses her eye to the peephole.
Outside, barely visible in the darkness, is a woman in black, standing by the door and looking around nervously. Molly doesn’t allow herself to sigh with relief, because the Toclafane have been known to use other people as bait to lure out dissidents before. Instead, she runs over to the bookshelves and tears out a page of the first book she finds. There’s no point in writing a message without light outside to read by, but people are resourceful, and have other ways to communicate. Molly folds the paper into fourths and slides it under the door.
After a moment of hesitation, the woman on the other side sends it back under, unfolded. Molly clenches her fists to steady herself and cracks open the door. The woman outside presses herself against the opening and slides in, easing the door shut behind her and leaning against it with her head back and eyes shut.
‘Thank you,’ she whispers.
‘Any time,’ says Molly. She fumbles around the kitchen until she finds the lighter (Jamie never leaves it in the right place, she’s so absent-minded these days) and a candle, to see her visitor better. Electricity is turned off between ten and five, allegedly so that there is enough at all times to keep the reactors at the shipyards from melting down. Molly isn’t willing to argue the point. She lights the candle and holds it up; then she nearly drops it in shock. ‘Martha Jones?’
Martha — intelligent, awe-inspiring Martha, dressed for war, face more hollow than Molly remembered — grins at her. ‘Molly Hooper,’ she says. ‘The mortician, right?’
‘Yes, I’m going to — I mean, I was. They don’t need morticians anymore,’ says Molly. She puts the candle down on the table and twists her fingers together. ‘You’re the Martha Jones, are you?’
Martha peers around at the shadowy first floor. ‘I expect so.’
‘Well, I just thought … Martha Jones is a common name, and you went missing days before the invasion …’
Martha frowns, like she’s forgotten about a time ‘before’. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about that — it was all a bit rushed, and I got back right as it all happened. Have you heard from anyone we knew, since then?’
Molly shakes her head. ‘Everyone got sent to different places. They emptied out most of London. I think Sarah was sent to Cornwall. Professor Moran was part of the one tenth.’ She swallows. She’s done her best not to think about … before … if she can help it. It’s not coming back, not ever, and she has work to do here.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Martha.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Molly says, and tries to give her a smile. It doesn’t quite stay on right, and Martha just looks down at her hands. Silence stretches between them for a few seconds. ‘Do you need anything from us? Is that why you’re here?’
Martha looks up. ‘Does Jamie Cooper live here?’
Ah. That makes sense. ‘In the living room. Should I wake her up?’ Jamie is terrifying to wake: she sleeps with a knife under her pillow like it will protect her, and if she’s dreaming then there’s always the off chance that she’ll be up and fighting before she’s awake enough to know what’s going on. Molly has a fading scar on her forearm from the first time that happened, before she learned to dodge.
‘Thanks.’ Martha sits down. ‘I’m sorry to jump in at you like this. Things got a bit mixed up in Lourdes, and my other contact here got arrested before I could reach him.’ Her face acquires a pinched expression visible even in the unsteady light of the candle. Molly nods; she knows how it is.
‘I’ll get Jamie. Wait here.’ She turns towards the living room, and her heart leaps in her throat when she sees movement there.
‘Sorry,’ says John. ‘I heard voices, is everything all right?’ His eyes slide past her, to the table, and his mouth drops open. ‘Martha Jones.’
‘That’s me,’ Martha says with a small smile.
‘Martha, this is John, he’s another doctor here from London. I’ll be right back.’ Molly leaves them to make their own introductions, and tiptoes through the living room until she reaches the far wall, where Jamie curls up into a ball every night on the love seat. She positions herself behind the arm above Jamie’s head, where it will be most difficult to access her, and taps her on the top of the head.
The response is immediate: Jamie flips around and off the cushions, tripping on the way to the floor and landing on the mattress where Sam sleeps. Sam jerks awake, groaning. Jamie mumbles an apology before she whips her attention around to focus on Molly, blinking.
‘What’s the matter?’
Molly fights the urge to take a step back. ‘Martha Jones, she’s … here to see you.’
Jamie straightens. She rolls her shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she says, and marches into the kitchen like she was born for this moment. Molly pauses to help Sam as he rolls to his feet, knees popping in a way that makes Molly wince. By the time they get to the kitchen, Jamie and Martha are already deep in murmured conversation, while John leans against the opposite wall and watches. Sam settles into a chair across the table from them, and Molly waits by the counter.
Martha breaks off mid-sentence. ‘Is this everyone here?’ she asks Molly, who nods. ‘Good. Because I’ve got a job to do, and I need you to help me do it.’
‘It’s true?’ asks Sam, eyes bugging out of his head. He leans forwards. ‘You’ve got a plan to kill the Master?’
Molly watches Martha. She’s heard the rumors — you’d have to have lived under a rock to not hear them — but they were just that: rumors, brought in from truckers delivering materials from Russia and Saudi Arabia, no evidence. Molly has refused to let herself believe any of them, preferring not to set herself up for any more falls.
Martha glances at her, and then addresses the table as a whole. ‘It’s not to kill the Master. I can’t do that. But we can help someone who can.’ She folds her hands together.
John limps over to join them at the table. His face is a mask that would have terrified Molly a year ago, and now makes her feel fierce pride in her housemate. ‘How,’ he says.
‘You remember when the hospital vanished,’ she begins.
‘It was in the papers, everywhere,’ says Molly. She hadn’t been sure what to make of it, and anyway, she’d had an enormous chapter in her textbook to read that night.
‘Right. Well. We really did go to the moon. And there was this — this man, there. He saved us, he figured out how to get the people responsible to put the hospital back without killing anyone. And when it was all over, he offered to take me with him.’
She continues, telling them about this time traveler, this Doctor person. It is only because in the past year Molly has seen more inexplicable things than she had ever imagined, that she is willing to listen to this story that Martha tells, of beauty and impossibilities. If so many terrible, chaotic things really do exist, she reasons, then she has to believe that there is an equal magnitude for beautiful, beneficial things as well.
‘He has saved your lives, so many times, and you never even knew about it,’ Martha says. ‘I’ve only been with him for a few months, and he’s been doing this for hundreds of years. And right now, he needs our help. Because he’s on board the Valiant, right this very moment, trapped by the Master. I’ve studied the network that the Master uses, and I realized — it’s all mental. He’s got this control over our minds with it, but what if we turned that against him?’ Her face glows with excitement as she explains, and Molly measures it against the story that she has been telling. It balances out, as far as she can tell: if she accepts everything else as fact, then this fits into that way of doing things without violating Occam’s Razor too badly.
‘When do we do it?’ she asks, when Martha has finished talking.
‘Four days from now, the fleet is going to launch,’ she says at once. ‘At that minute.’
‘That’s your plan?’ John sounds skeptical. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
‘I’ve been walking the earth for three hundred and sixty three days now, with six billion Toclafane out looking for me. I’ve been to all six continents, on my own, and I haven’t been caught. I know what I’m doing,’ says Martha, and Molly may fall a little bit in love for a moment.
John gives her an abrupt nod, and says nothing, pensive.
‘Where will you go next?’ Molly asks.
Jamie and Martha share a look. ‘I’ve got friends,’ says Jamie, ‘and it’s better if you don’t know anything more than that.’
‘I’ll be gone before morning,’ promises Martha.
**Disclaimer** I am an English major. I know zilch about medical school. Feel free to lynch me for taking liberties.
Also, I am not a fan of the Talking Heads
Title: A Disordered World
Fandom: Doctor Who and Sherlock (yep, primarily crossovers with me)
Rating: PG-13 for Toclafane-induced decimation?
Word Count: 3,860
Summary: Molly Hooper during the Year That Never Was
Molly had never been much of a science fiction fan. Her sister had devoured every episode of every version of Star Trek that she could get her hands on when they were younger, while Molly curled up in her room and read Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries. She preferred mysteries that were wrapped up at the end of the story: everything organized into explicable facts. Gregson’s monologues to his colleagues that laid out, scientifically, why all of the evidence pointed towards the shopkeeper’s assistant as the mastermind of the scheme, and why it could have been no one else. It made sense to her. No vast space operas, with bizarre technologies and inexplicable leaps of logic, for Molly Hooper. The one time she had tried to join her sister, she had been too put off by wondering why all of the aliens looked like humans with prosthetics. ‘If they’re from another planet, why don’t they look more alien?’ she asked her sister.
Laura huffed. ‘I don’t know,’ she grumbled. ‘Stop interrupting.’
Years later, Molly could have given her eight-year-old self a realistic explanation of why most television aliens possessed bilateral symmetry and humanoid features (namely, budgeting) but that didn’t mean she had any further interest in the fantastic. She still liked to have order in her universe; it was one of the factors in her decision to go to medical school. There was a reason that everything in the body worked the way it did, even if modern medicine hadn’t discovered that reason yet. She could look at a cadaver and understand what was different about it, why it was no longer a functioning organism; human bodies could be unexpected, but never truly inexplicable. Even if someone like her didn’t always understand what was going on, someone cleverer could pick it apart and lay everything out neatly so that it did make sense.
And then the Toclafane arrived.
It was, Molly thought, as she hugged her knees, like something out of one of Laura’s novels. The prime minister smiled on the television (reassuringly, and Molly felt herself relax a tiny bit) as he addressed the country. ‘We will take our place in the universe. Every man, woman, and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer.’ His expression flickered for just a moment, as he added, ‘I don't know--every medical student?’
Molly shivered. She wondered if that was a jab at someone specific — a rival? — and then corrected herself. This was exciting news, Britain leading the world into a new age of alien contact, not a moment for pettiness. Maybe Harold Saxon had a brother in medical school, and that was a shout out to him. (She couldn’t remember much about him personally; she’d voted for him because there were no other candidates as … qualified, she supposed.) She kept the news on all day after that, too nervous to leave her flat except to go to classes. As soon as her last class finished, she raced back to her room and turned on the news in case there was some new development that she had missed.
She had a class the next morning at eight, but skipped it and stayed home with a cup of tea in her hands and a copy of Grey’s Anatomy in her lap like a bible or a talisman. She liked to call it her favorite book in the world, which was not strictly true (her absolute favorite, not that she would ever admit to it, was the twenty-fifth Nancy Drew novel) but it had been her father’s copy, the one that made her decide to become a doctor when she was ten, and its weight on her legs was comforting.
Molly didn’t keep up much with politics — didn’t keep up much with anything outside of her schoolwork — but she took a dislike to President Winters when he appeared on her television screen. Why did the United States have to open up negotiations? It was so … Hollywood. Like those movies her last boyfriend had loved, the string of Armageddons that wiped out America and forgot about the rest of the civilized world. Molly watched with distaste, then forgot all about movie tropes as complicated-looking metal spheres — the Toclafane — appeared out of the air and came hovering down to head level. Their voices came out high and peevish; Molly wondered if there had been a miscommunication, and this “alien race” was actually just the work of a few child aliens. (And she could handle the concept of curious alien children far more easily than she could handle the thought of sharing the earth with another species.)
The Toclafane whined and refused to answer President Winters, insisting on the “Mister Master”. Molly put down her tea and leaned forwards. The edge of the book dug into her stomach, and the discomfort kept her feeling grounded, reminded her that this wasn’t a television special, not a fiasco like the War of the Worlds broadcast. This was actually happening. And then the Prime Minister stood up.
Molly watched with confusion, biting her lip, and then recoiled when blades and lasers sprang from the spheres. I didn’t like him, she thought, as all hell broke loose on the ship hovering miles above her head. Her voice sounded small inside her head. I didn’t want him to actually die.
This isn’t a movie, she reminded herself sharply. Pull yourself together, Molly. She refocused on the television, heart pounding, but it was so easy to let it slip out of focus and into fantasy; like coming in at the final battle of a very long, complicated film, with words like “perception filters” and “laser screwdriver” getting thrown around, because she did not just watch the President of the United States disintegrate on live television. She was not seeing the Prime Minister crouching close to the camera, face filled with badly-contained glee as he announced that this was the end of the world. The book pressed into her stomach hard enough to leave marks as she curled in around it more tightly to keep from shaking.
’Here. Come. The drums!’ said Harold Saxon. Molly fumbled for her phone, to call her sister, her father, her classmates — can you believe it, Molly, you actually thought this was real?¬ she wanted them to say — and Harold Saxon flipped a switch, danced off the screen, and left the camera lingering on a withered old man and a handsome corpse in a greatcoat. Molly dialed Laura’s number. The phone rang twice before it got cut off. No service, it read.
But that’s ridiculous, thought Molly, fear rising in her throat, and then she heard a great whirring noise descending on London. She forced herself to set aside the book, wincing at the residual stinging it left as she uncurled. She looked out the open window, and saw millions of small, spherical shapes descending from the sky. The prime minister’s voice boomed out over them as they filed down towards the city. “Remove one tenth of the world’s population,’ it said.
The fires started. Molly shut her eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She never finishes medical school. She has enough training, say the Toclafane, to be useful treating injuries in the shipyards that they are going to build. ‘But I’m — I’m not a doctor, I’m going to be a mortician,’ she stammers.
The Toclafane to whom she addresses her objection emits a tinkling laugh. ‘What need do we have of morticians? We do not care how the humans die. We need to keep the humans alive.’
‘But I could …’ Molly trails off and looks at the remains of the school around her, at the chaotic movement of humans and machines whirling together around the piles of ashes still left over from the decimation. She shuts her mouth. She wills herself to look at the Toclafane and face her enemy, but at the last moment, her eyes skitter to the side. ‘Where am I needed?’ she says.
They build shipyards on the beach at Normandy and in Cornwall, give her a choice between the two of those like it’s the most generous offer imaginable, so to the shipyards in Normandy Molly goes. With a whirring metal ball hovering over her shoulder the entire time, she packs two sets of clothing, her textbooks, and her father’s copy of Grey’s Anatomy, and takes the train to the coast. She sits down next to a silent, grey-faced man who keeps looking out the window as if straining for a glimpse of the Valiant through the clouds. Over the course of the trip, she learns that until a week ago, he was a janitor who worked the last night shift in the Swiss Re building; he had a husband and three children from a previous marriage.
‘My boss told me I couldn’t miss work, come hell or high water. Got to keep the floors clean for the aliens, yeah?’ says her traveling companion. ‘And then I got home, and they were all gone.’
Molly inclines her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
The janitor shrugs. The train pulls into the station several hours later; outside, the air buzzes with Toclafane zipping around, directing the passengers to their next destination. Molly doesn’t say goodbye to the man sitting next to her, just pats him on the arm and bows her head as she steps around debris from the fallen ceiling and makes her way to the buses.
The hospital near the beach, where they want to build the shipyards, is a disaster. Molly’s practical, well-ordered mind tells her that it makes sense: if you are going to remove one tenth of the population of the earth (she doesn’t think that she will ever forget the moment she heard those words, echoing across the planet’s surface) you might as well remove the least useful tenth, and the Toclafane haven’t exactly shown subtlety with how they get to their targets. Molly gets to the first floor of the hospital, looks around at the charred gurneys in the halls, and shuts her eyes to keep from throwing up.
She is assigned housing with four other doctors, in a house that used to belong to an elderly couple. The upper part of the house was blasted in the initial invasion, and one of the other doctors nearly falls through the landing when he tries to investigate, but Molly and her fellows ransack the lower level to learn about the identity of its former owners. It seems disrespectful, otherwise. Several Toclafane congregate to giggle as they sit around the kitchen table, flipping through the photo albums that Molly found in the bedroom. Molly presses her lips together and ignores them as best as she can.
Once construction on the shipyards is finished, and the assembly lines begin, Molly goes to work, harder than she had expected it would be while she was still in school. Of course, she was expecting normal, predictable conditions in a world that made sense, not one in which the Prime Minister spearheaded alien massacres of his own nation. She lugs her book around with her and sets it on the counter of every clinic room, every surgery that she enters. She hasn’t had any contact with her family since the invasion: the phone lines and the internet are down. Some of her fellows say that they’re almost glad they don’t know, because if they have no way of knowing, then there is hope. It seems unkind to disagree with them, so Molly bites her tongue and doesn’t tell them that, statistically, there’s a forty percent chance that someone in their immediate family has died, and if they wanted to rank their family members in terms of usefulness to the Toclafane, they could probably figure out who was most likely to have been slaughtered. She could tell them; but while it comforts her to go around assuming that her sister is dead and her father is alive, it’s unlikely that her method would be popular. So she stays quiet and tries not to think about it.
Two months after the invasion, Molly Hooper has settled into a routine that is, if horrifying, at least predictable. She wakes up at five am, when the Toclafane, as one body, emit a high-pitched shriek that pierces through her dreams and sends her shooting out of bed with her heart racing. She and her housemates (another third-year medical student, a pediatrician, and an army doctor) drive to the hospital under the guidance of the Toclafane who guards their street, and take over for the nurses working the night shift. The accidents that occur at the yards are horrific, would never happen in any sane world after the nineteen twenties. Molly does her best to repair crushed limbs and close gashes wide enough to fit her whole hand, and avoids daydreaming about the future she had imagined: sanitary, equipment vacuum-sealed and sterilized, her patients coming to her wrapped in plastic and without lives to hang in the balance. She stops to eat food that tastes slightly moldy at noon and at six, and goes back to the house late into the night to fall asleep, exhausted, and wake up at five o’clock again the next morning.
Day, after day, after day.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nearly a year after the invasion, Molly wakes up, not to the Toclafane shrieking, but to a tap on the front door. She jumps up from the couch (One of us has done something wrong I told John to shut up while the Toclafane were around where is the baseball bat they’re not getting anyone without a fight) and waits. They shuttered the windows after the first week in Normandy — it doesn’t keep out beings who can appear and disappear at will, but it makes them feel safer if no one can see in — so Molly pulls out the baseball bat from underneath the couch, creeps over to the front door and presses her eye to the peephole.
Outside, barely visible in the darkness, is a woman in black, standing by the door and looking around nervously. Molly doesn’t allow herself to sigh with relief, because the Toclafane have been known to use other people as bait to lure out dissidents before. Instead, she runs over to the bookshelves and tears out a page of the first book she finds. There’s no point in writing a message without light outside to read by, but people are resourceful, and have other ways to communicate. Molly folds the paper into fourths and slides it under the door.
After a moment of hesitation, the woman on the other side sends it back under, unfolded. Molly clenches her fists to steady herself and cracks open the door. The woman outside presses herself against the opening and slides in, easing the door shut behind her and leaning against it with her head back and eyes shut.
‘Thank you,’ she whispers.
‘Any time,’ says Molly. She fumbles around the kitchen until she finds the lighter (Jamie never leaves it in the right place, she’s so absent-minded these days) and a candle, to see her visitor better. Electricity is turned off between ten and five, allegedly so that there is enough at all times to keep the reactors at the shipyards from melting down. Molly isn’t willing to argue the point. She lights the candle and holds it up; then she nearly drops it in shock. ‘Martha Jones?’
Martha — intelligent, awe-inspiring Martha, dressed for war, face more hollow than Molly remembered — grins at her. ‘Molly Hooper,’ she says. ‘The mortician, right?’
‘Yes, I’m going to — I mean, I was. They don’t need morticians anymore,’ says Molly. She puts the candle down on the table and twists her fingers together. ‘You’re the Martha Jones, are you?’
Martha peers around at the shadowy first floor. ‘I expect so.’
‘Well, I just thought … Martha Jones is a common name, and you went missing days before the invasion …’
Martha frowns, like she’s forgotten about a time ‘before’. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about that — it was all a bit rushed, and I got back right as it all happened. Have you heard from anyone we knew, since then?’
Molly shakes her head. ‘Everyone got sent to different places. They emptied out most of London. I think Sarah was sent to Cornwall. Professor Moran was part of the one tenth.’ She swallows. She’s done her best not to think about … before … if she can help it. It’s not coming back, not ever, and she has work to do here.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Martha.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Molly says, and tries to give her a smile. It doesn’t quite stay on right, and Martha just looks down at her hands. Silence stretches between them for a few seconds. ‘Do you need anything from us? Is that why you’re here?’
Martha looks up. ‘Does Jamie Cooper live here?’
Ah. That makes sense. ‘In the living room. Should I wake her up?’ Jamie is terrifying to wake: she sleeps with a knife under her pillow like it will protect her, and if she’s dreaming then there’s always the off chance that she’ll be up and fighting before she’s awake enough to know what’s going on. Molly has a fading scar on her forearm from the first time that happened, before she learned to dodge.
‘Thanks.’ Martha sits down. ‘I’m sorry to jump in at you like this. Things got a bit mixed up in Lourdes, and my other contact here got arrested before I could reach him.’ Her face acquires a pinched expression visible even in the unsteady light of the candle. Molly nods; she knows how it is.
‘I’ll get Jamie. Wait here.’ She turns towards the living room, and her heart leaps in her throat when she sees movement there.
‘Sorry,’ says John. ‘I heard voices, is everything all right?’ His eyes slide past her, to the table, and his mouth drops open. ‘Martha Jones.’
‘That’s me,’ Martha says with a small smile.
‘Martha, this is John, he’s another doctor here from London. I’ll be right back.’ Molly leaves them to make their own introductions, and tiptoes through the living room until she reaches the far wall, where Jamie curls up into a ball every night on the love seat. She positions herself behind the arm above Jamie’s head, where it will be most difficult to access her, and taps her on the top of the head.
The response is immediate: Jamie flips around and off the cushions, tripping on the way to the floor and landing on the mattress where Sam sleeps. Sam jerks awake, groaning. Jamie mumbles an apology before she whips her attention around to focus on Molly, blinking.
‘What’s the matter?’
Molly fights the urge to take a step back. ‘Martha Jones, she’s … here to see you.’
Jamie straightens. She rolls her shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she says, and marches into the kitchen like she was born for this moment. Molly pauses to help Sam as he rolls to his feet, knees popping in a way that makes Molly wince. By the time they get to the kitchen, Jamie and Martha are already deep in murmured conversation, while John leans against the opposite wall and watches. Sam settles into a chair across the table from them, and Molly waits by the counter.
Martha breaks off mid-sentence. ‘Is this everyone here?’ she asks Molly, who nods. ‘Good. Because I’ve got a job to do, and I need you to help me do it.’
‘It’s true?’ asks Sam, eyes bugging out of his head. He leans forwards. ‘You’ve got a plan to kill the Master?’
Molly watches Martha. She’s heard the rumors — you’d have to have lived under a rock to not hear them — but they were just that: rumors, brought in from truckers delivering materials from Russia and Saudi Arabia, no evidence. Molly has refused to let herself believe any of them, preferring not to set herself up for any more falls.
Martha glances at her, and then addresses the table as a whole. ‘It’s not to kill the Master. I can’t do that. But we can help someone who can.’ She folds her hands together.
John limps over to join them at the table. His face is a mask that would have terrified Molly a year ago, and now makes her feel fierce pride in her housemate. ‘How,’ he says.
‘You remember when the hospital vanished,’ she begins.
‘It was in the papers, everywhere,’ says Molly. She hadn’t been sure what to make of it, and anyway, she’d had an enormous chapter in her textbook to read that night.
‘Right. Well. We really did go to the moon. And there was this — this man, there. He saved us, he figured out how to get the people responsible to put the hospital back without killing anyone. And when it was all over, he offered to take me with him.’
She continues, telling them about this time traveler, this Doctor person. It is only because in the past year Molly has seen more inexplicable things than she had ever imagined, that she is willing to listen to this story that Martha tells, of beauty and impossibilities. If so many terrible, chaotic things really do exist, she reasons, then she has to believe that there is an equal magnitude for beautiful, beneficial things as well.
‘He has saved your lives, so many times, and you never even knew about it,’ Martha says. ‘I’ve only been with him for a few months, and he’s been doing this for hundreds of years. And right now, he needs our help. Because he’s on board the Valiant, right this very moment, trapped by the Master. I’ve studied the network that the Master uses, and I realized — it’s all mental. He’s got this control over our minds with it, but what if we turned that against him?’ Her face glows with excitement as she explains, and Molly measures it against the story that she has been telling. It balances out, as far as she can tell: if she accepts everything else as fact, then this fits into that way of doing things without violating Occam’s Razor too badly.
‘When do we do it?’ she asks, when Martha has finished talking.
‘Four days from now, the fleet is going to launch,’ she says at once. ‘At that minute.’
‘That’s your plan?’ John sounds skeptical. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
‘I’ve been walking the earth for three hundred and sixty three days now, with six billion Toclafane out looking for me. I’ve been to all six continents, on my own, and I haven’t been caught. I know what I’m doing,’ says Martha, and Molly may fall a little bit in love for a moment.
John gives her an abrupt nod, and says nothing, pensive.
‘Where will you go next?’ Molly asks.
Jamie and Martha share a look. ‘I’ve got friends,’ says Jamie, ‘and it’s better if you don’t know anything more than that.’
‘I’ll be gone before morning,’ promises Martha.