Chapter Text
Donna was sitting in the garden with a cup of tea going cold and a book she had been holding open on the same page for about twenty minutes, even though she was honestly trying to read. Reading was useful. Reading was normal. People read when their lives were going along the way they were supposed to, not when a whole year had somehow fallen out of their heads and left no memory at all of what had happened to them during it.
Except the traces were still there.
They were everywhere.
In the way her mother now went quiet too quickly whenever Donna walked into the kitchen. In the way her granddad no longer started talking about stars, telescopes, strange lights in the sky, and the endless, stupid, beautiful universe he used to go on about for hours, until the kettle boiled dry for the second time in a row. In the way the house had become soft now, careful, unbearably gentle, as if Donna hadn’t been saved after some kind of nervous breakdown, but had been wrapped in cotton wool, put on a shelf, and the whole family had agreed not to breathe too loudly around her.
Before, Sylvia could make her feel like a schoolgirl who had done everything wrong again with just one look. Before, every morning started with comments, irritated sighs, that eternal motherly “Donna, how many times?” that made her want to slam a door, even if she was a grown woman, not a little girl anymore, and had every right to drink tea in the garden in her dressing gown if she felt like it. But now Sylvia kept asking if she was cold, if her head hurt, if she wanted to lie down, if she was tired from the shop, from talking, from the news, from standing up too quickly and too sharply, and sometimes Donna wanted to scream at this new softness even more than she used to scream at the old harshness.
She was not made of glass.
She was not ill.
Well, maybe she was, but not in the way they thought. Or the way they told her. Or the way the doctors told her, lowering their eyes to their papers whenever she asked how someone could just lose a year and not remember where she had gone, who she had talked to, why there was such a gap in her records, why people she apparently ought to know looked at her with that strange mix of pity and caution.
Nervous breakdown. Exhaustion. Psychological trauma. The body protecting itself. You must give yourself time, Miss Noble.
Time. Brilliant. Wonderful. They had given her so much time that she was starting to suspect if they gave her any more, she would finally go mad from knowing everyone around her remembered her life better than she did.
She turned the page, even though she hadn’t read half of the previous one, and looked over the fence into the neighbour’s garden, where two children were running across the grass while their father tried to hold a plastic sword, a ball, and a glass of something that had clearly already spilled down his sleeve all at once. The younger child laughed so loudly that Donna smiled despite herself; not because she loved other people’s children, God forbid, her patience for them was limited, but because there was something normal in that laugh. Noisy. Alive. Without careful looks and family whispers.
The book slid back onto her knees. The tea had gone completely cold. Somewhere inside the house, dishes clinked, and Donna could almost physically feel that her mother was about to look out into the garden and ask if she wanted more tea, even though before she would have said something like, “Sitting around doing nothing again?” And the most annoying thing was that the old Sylvia would have irritated her less in that moment.
Beyond the fence, the children ran along the flower bed, jumped over a low plastic car, one of them shrieked something about a dragon, and then everything suddenly stopped.
Not because the game ended. Not because their father shouted at them or someone fell over. One second the child was running, waving his arms about in a ridiculous way, and the next he was standing in the middle of the garden, straight and still, as if someone had switched him off from the inside.
At first, Donna didn’t even understand what had caught her attention. She lifted her head, narrowed her eyes, and was already about to call over the fence with something like, “Oi, everything all right over there?” when the boy turned his face not toward her, not toward his father, not toward the house, but as if he was looking straight into empty air in front of him, and said in a flat, too-adult voice that was not his own:
“We are coming.”
Donna froze with the cup near her mouth.
The boy’s father was the first to laugh. Nervously, uncertainly, as if he hoped his laughter would explain what had happened better than any words could.
The child blinked as if he had woken up, looked at him with completely ordinary eyes, and immediately reached for the ball as though nothing had happened. The other child started moving again too, shot off across the grass and shrieked, demanding that the game continue.
Donna kept watching them for several more seconds, waiting for someone to explain what that had been. The father beyond the fence seemed to be waiting too, but the children were already running again, the grass rustling under their trainers, the plastic sword lying by the bush, and everything once more looked so much like an ordinary day that Donna almost got angry with herself for having tensed up.
Children repeated all sorts of things these days: from adverts, from television, from the internet, from those idiotic videos where people danced in shopping centres or froze in the middle of the street just so they could post it somewhere afterwards and collect comments. Flash mobs, pranks, school jokes, some new fashion adults first called stupid and then started copying themselves six months too late.
Donna forced herself to look back down at the book, but the lines began to blur in front of her eyes. A weak, unpleasant feeling remained inside her, as if something was trying to get her attention but couldn’t quite knock loudly enough.
By evening, that feeling had almost gone.
Almost.
They were sitting in the living room: her mum in the armchair, too straight, too collected, knitting in her hands, though she was doing more fiddling with it than actually knitting; Wilf by the window, as if he was about to go out for a smoke or just look at the sky, but each time he stopped before opening the door; Donna on the sofa, legs tucked under herself, with her second cup of tea of the day and an irritation that had built itself up out of all the little things at once. Sylvia had asked again if she was tired. Wilf had pretended again that he wasn’t watching her too closely. The television murmured in the background until footage appeared on the screen of a schoolyard, clearly filmed on a cheap phone camera, where children stood in rows and said something together.
Donna lifted her head.
“…reports are coming in from different areas of London,” the newsreader was saying, keeping that special newsreader voice people used to talk about disasters as if they were reading out train times. “Parents and teachers describe the same pattern: children freeze for a short period of time and say the phrase ‘We are coming.’ At this stage it is unclear whether this is an organised event, a mass prank, or a new internet phenomenon.”
Sylvia snorted so sharply it was as if she had been waiting for exactly that.
“There, see? Some sort of flash mob. Everything’s through computers with them now. One idiot starts it, the rest copy. They ought to be doing their schoolwork, not playing silly beggars.”
“Mum,” Donna turned to her, “that doesn’t look like a flash mob.”
“And how many flash mobs have you seen?”
“I’ve seen enough people doing stupid things on purpose to know when they’re not doing it on purpose.”
Sylvia looked up from her knitting. Something flickered through her eyes too quickly: not irritation, not an argument, but fear, which she immediately tried to cover with her usual sharpness.
“Don’t work yourself up, Donna.”
There it was. Again.
Don’t work yourself up. Don’t think. Don’t worry. Don’t ask questions. Don’t remember what you’re not allowed to remember, though of course no one said that out loud, because everyone pretended she just needed rest, walks, decaf tea, and kind little programmes on the telly.
“I’m not working myself up,” Donna said, feeling her voice get louder than she meant it to. “I’m just saying children all over the city can’t all agree at the same time to say the exact same phrase.”
Wilf gave a soft cough by the window.
“Could be some sort of school prank, sweetheart.”
He said it gently, almost guiltily, and Donna looked at him with disbelief, because her granddad was not a man who explained strange things away with school pranks. Her granddad was a man who looked up and said, “But what if?” Her granddad was a man who could see an ordinary plane in the sky and still smile for half a second as if he hoped it wasn’t a plane. And now he was standing with his back to the window and talking about a prank, not looking at the television or the sky.
And that was when something started itching in her head again.
It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t clear. It didn’t feel like a memory. More like the feeling of walking into a room and knowing you had come in for something important, but you couldn’t remember what.
Donna opened her mouth to say it, to turn to someone and throw out, “Listen, this isn’t normal, right? It’s not just me?” — and in that same second she realised she was speaking into empty space.
She had really turned her head, almost automatically, as if someone should have been standing behind the back of the sofa. Someone who would answer faster than anyone. Someone who would say far too many words in one breath, stride around the room, grab the remote, turn the volume up, and start explaining that mass suggestion didn’t work like that, that if children were speaking at the same time all over the city, then it wasn’t the internet, it wasn’t school, it wasn’t some bloody flash mob.
But there was no one behind the sofa. Only the wall, a family photo, a floor lamp with its crooked shade, and her mother, who was looking at her as if Donna had done something dangerous just by turning her head.
“What?” Donna snapped. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
“Yeah, course you’re not.”
She turned back to the television, but she was no longer listening. An old, angry tiredness rose inside her, the kind that had been coming more and more often lately. This was not the first moment like this. Not the first time she had wanted to share a thought with someone and caught herself already turning toward an empty place.
And every time afterwards, she got angry. At herself, at her mother, at her granddad, at the doctors, at that blasted “nervous breakdown” that was such a convenient answer to everything because after it, no one had to explain anything. Why don’t you remember your work? Nervous breakdown. Why is there a gap in your records? Nervous breakdown. Why do you sometimes know words you shouldn’t know, or get frightened by ordinary phrases, or wake up with the feeling that somewhere nearby there had been danger, huge and impossible, and then it had vanished together with a person whose name you didn’t know? Nervous breakdown, Miss Noble. Give yourself time.
Donna had given herself time. A whole year, or almost a whole year, or however long it had actually been, because at home they spoke about that just as vaguely, as if the calendar might come to life and bite them on the arse if anyone named an exact date. In that time she had managed to go to several interviews and hate every one of them. At first, everything went fine: she smiled, joked, held herself confidently, because, in the end, she knew how to talk to people, knew how to push where she needed to, knew how to be useful, knew how not to shrink back from every sideways look. And then the questions began: where did you work last year, what were you doing during this period, why is there a gap here, can you explain why your references stop and then there’s nothing?
Can you explain.
No, she couldn’t. That was the funny thing. That was the brilliant thing. She was Donna Noble; she could explain anything to anyone, could put a smug manager in his place in ten seconds, could look at a person in such a way that he started doubting his own job description. But she could not explain her own life. All she could do was sit in a chair in someone else’s office, hold her bag on her knees, and say something about illness in the family, about exhaustion, about a short break, and then watch the face opposite her change: polite, sympathetic, already refusing.
We’ll call you.
No one ever called.
By night, the news about the children had drifted to the edge of her mind, pushed aside by her familiar irritation. Donna went up to her room earlier than usual, said she was tired, and almost got that horrible “I told you so” from her mother, but Sylvia bit her tongue in time. That was worse. Donna could have dealt with nagging. Caring silence was harder.
In bed, she lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark, and tried not to think about the boy next door, or the newsreader, or the way she herself had turned toward an empty place behind the sofa. A car passed outside, headlights sweeping across the ceiling for a second, and Donna closed her eyes, ordering herself to sleep, because tomorrow all of this would probably turn out to be another stupid thing the papers had blown up because there weren’t enough proper stories.
The next day she went to the supermarket.
Sylvia wanted to go with her, of course. Sylvia now wanted to go everywhere with her, as if Donna might get lost between the house and the shop, even though she knew the area better than some taxi drivers. Donna cut her off, said she could manage on her own, took the list, took a bag, and left before her mother could come up with a reason to stop her.
The street felt uneasy, though the day looked no different from any other. People went about their business, buses hissed at the stops, someone argued into a phone, a courier on a bicycle nearly knocked into a woman with a pushchair, but under all that ordinary city noise there was tension, like the air before a storm. Parents stood outside the school, too many parents for that time of day. Several women were talking quickly over one another; one held a child’s hand so tightly the boy was trying to twist away and whining. At the bus stop, an elderly man was reading a newspaper, holding it open in such a way that Donna caught sight of a large headline about children and the mysterious phrase.
“Of course,” she muttered. “They’ve blown it up.”
But she walked faster.
In the supermarket, everything was normal at first. Too normal, even, as if people were deliberately trying to pretend they had come only for bread, milk, and cheap cereal, not for fresh gossip and proof that yesterday’s flash mob had not been something they imagined. Trolleys bumped their wheels together, the till beeped, somewhere someone argued about a discount on yoghurts, a child in a red jacket demanded a chocolate bar and pulled at his mother’s sleeve, an elderly man spent ages choosing tinned peas and created a blockage in the aisle.
Donna was standing by the tea shelf, trying to choose the one Sylvia would not call “too strong,” when the sound in the shop changed.
It did not vanish at once. First, the child in the next aisle stopped crying. The beeping of the till cut off halfway through a sound. Someone dropped a tin, and it rolled across the floor far too loudly, because all the other noises had already fallen away.
Donna turned slowly.
The children were standing still.
The boy in the red jacket, the girl by the fridges, two schoolchildren near the magazine stand, a little girl with plaits holding a bag of apples. They were not looking at their parents or at one another, but somewhere straight ahead, and there was something so wrong about it that Donna felt her fingers go cold around the handle of the basket.
Then they spoke.
“We are coming tomorrow.”
The voices were different, but the phrase was one and the same, flat, identical, as if the children were not saying it at all, but someone was using them like speakers.
“We are coming tomorrow.”
The woman next to Donna gave a small scream and dropped a packet of biscuits. The mother of the boy in the red jacket grabbed her son by the shoulders and started shaking him, saying his name over and over, first in a whisper, then louder. At the till someone said, “Oh God,” and the words sounded so helpless that Donna suddenly understood: yesterday they could still laugh. Today no one was laughing anymore.
The children blinked almost at the same time.
The boy in the red jacket started reaching for the chocolate again, as if there had been no pause. The girl with the apples looked at her mother and asked why she was crying. One of the schoolboys became embarrassed by everyone staring at him and pretended to adjust his rucksack.
The adults did not move.
The shop became frightening not because of the children’s voices, but because after them, the ordinary world could not switch itself back on straight away. People stood among shelves, trolleys, price tags and bright packets, and no one knew who was supposed to be the first to say everything was all right, because now it was obvious: it was not all right. No flash mob could make a child speak in a voice that was not his own, bringing mothers to tears and panic. No internet trend could run through the city like current through wires and switch children off at the same time for a few seconds, leaving their parents staring with their mouths open.
“Is it happening again?” someone whispered.
“I told you, this isn’t normal,” a woman at the till said, and her voice cracked.
Donna put the tea into her basket, then for some reason took it back out, then put it in again, because her hands were doing something on their own while her head tried to hold on to simple actions: buy tea, buy bread, buy milk, go home. Don’t look too long at the children. Don’t think about the phrase changing. Don’t think about the word “tomorrow.” Don’t think about who “we” was.
She went to the exit faster than she had meant to. Outside, the chaos was not real chaos yet, not the kind in films where everyone runs and screams, but the city had clearly lost its calm. Parents dragged children by the hand, children cried because they did not understand what they had done wrong or why they were being held so tightly. Someone was on the phone, speaking too loudly: “Here too, yes, right in the shop.” The crowd outside the school had grown. A car stopped in the middle of the road because the driver had turned round toward a child in the back seat, and behind him people were already honking, angry, frightened, useless.
Donna walked home with the bag banging against her leg and was angry at everyone at once: at the children, though none of it was their fault; at the parents, who were beginning to panic and only frightening the children more; at the city, which had tried to pretend it was normal that morning and was now thrashing about in fear; at her mother, who would no doubt meet her at the door with a face as if Donna had not gone out for groceries but come back from a war.
The house was quiet.
Too quiet.
Donna opened the door with her own key, put the bag down on the hallway floor, and immediately heard the conversation in the kitchen break off. Not fade naturally, not finish, but break off, like a snapped thread.
“I’m home, if anyone’s interested,” she called loudly, taking off her coat.
Something clinked in the kitchen. Then Sylvia came out, wiping her hands on a towel even though her hands were dry. Wilf appeared behind her, already in his coat, cap in his hands.
“You’re quick,” Sylvia said.
“And you sound disappointed.”
“Don’t start, Donna.”
“I’m not starting. I’ve just come from a shop where half the children turned into radio receivers again, so, you know, I’m not exactly in the mood to start an argument with you, Mum.”
Sylvia went pale, though she tried to hide it by turning toward the bag.
“It happened there too?”
“It happened there too.” Donna walked into the kitchen and looked at her granddad. “And where are you off to?”
Wilf put his cap on too quickly, then took it off as if he had changed his mind, then held it tight in his hands again.
“Oh, nowhere much, sweetheart. Just going for a walk. Pop into a couple of shops.”
“I have literally just come from the shop.”
“I know.”
“We’ve got bread, milk, tea, eggs, those awful biscuits of yours you hide from Mum in the top cupboard even though she knows exactly where they are. What else do you need?”
Granddad smiled, but it came out crooked and nothing like his usual cheerful grin.
“Can’t have too many supplies.”
Donna looked from him to her mother. Sylvia was already unpacking the bag with far too much concentration, as if mentally checking things off a list.
“Supplies for what?”
“Just in case,” Sylvia said.
“In case of what?”
They exchanged a look.
That was what Donna hated most of all. Not even the lying, but those looks. Those looks that made her not a part of the conversation, but the subject of it. She had seen them a thousand times over the past year: when she woke after a nightmare and couldn’t explain what she had dreamt about; when she asked about her old things; when she argued about work again; when Granddad accidentally started talking about the stars and then immediately stopped because Mum gave him that quick, warning glance.
“Were you talking about me again?” she asked.
“Donna…”
“No, really, go on. I walk in, you shut up. He’s going out for supplies, you look like you’re about to wrap me in a blanket and pour chamomile down my throat. Is this about my nervous breakdown again? Afraid I’ll hear the news and start having hysterics?”
“No one thinks that,” Sylvia said, too quickly.
“Of course. You just walk around me like I’m a ticking bomb.”
“We’re worried about you.”
“I know!” Her voice broke louder than she had meant it to, and that made her even angrier. “I know you’re worried, but you make me want to scream. I can’t get a job because I can’t explain where I was. I can’t ask about my own past because both of you look at me like I’ll die from one question. I can’t even be properly scared when children all over London start speaking in chorus, because everyone around me thinks first not about the children, but about whether poor Donna can cope with it.”
Wilf took a step toward her.
“Sweetheart…”
“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me.”
She turned away, because his face made it worse. If Sylvia irritated her with her care, Wilf broke through her resistance by being truly afraid. Not for himself, not for the city, not for whatever was happening to the children, but for her — so openly and helplessly that Donna couldn’t look at it for long without feeling guilty for her own anger.
The television was on in the living room. They had obviously been watching the news before she came in and had simply turned the volume down. On the screen, footage flashed from different countries: a classroom, a street, a hospital corridor, a playground, children again, still faces again, adults around them again, not knowing how to touch their own sons and daughters after something foreign had spoken through them.
Donna went closer, even though Sylvia said quietly behind her:
“Don’t…”
And, of course, that was exactly why Donna picked up the remote and turned the sound up.
“…reports are no longer coming only from London,” the newsreader was saying. “Similar cases have been recorded in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australia and Africa. According to early information, the children affected are approximately primary-school age. They all freeze for several seconds and say the same phrase in English: ‘We are coming tomorrow.’”
The image changed. A man in a smart suit appeared on screen, with a caption under his name that Donna didn’t manage to read in full: something about neurology, a university, an advisory group. He looked tired and was trying very hard not to look frightened.
“Doctor Edward Hale, a specialist in neurological sciences, has said that experts still cannot explain the nature of this phenomenon,” the newsreader continued. “According to him, the theory of mass hysteria has not been confirmed, as children in different countries, with no contact between them, are displaying completely synchronised behaviour…”
Doctor.
Donna blinked.
The newsreader kept talking, Sylvia said something behind her, Wilf seemed to put his cap down on the table, but all of it suddenly became quieter, as if the sound had gone underwater and only separate, broken pieces were reaching her from there.
Doctor.
Not “Doctor Edward Hale,” not the man in the suit, not the tired-looking television expert, but simply the word itself, standing in the middle of the room too clearly, too wrongly, like a stranger who had walked in without knocking and knew where the light switch was.
Her head began to hurt, not sharply, not like a blow, but as if something inside was trying to turn around in too tight a space. The edges of her vision darkened. Donna gripped the remote, feeling the warm plastic under her fingers, and for some reason thought she had to tell someone, “It’s not a flash mob.” Not her mother, not her granddad, not the television. Someone else. Someone who would understand the first time and wouldn’t tell her to lie down and not think.
“Donna?” Sylvia’s voice came closer. “Donna, what’s wrong?”
She wanted to answer that she was fine. Wanted to say that if one more person asked her in that tone, she really would scream. Wanted to turn around and prove she was still on her feet, that she wasn’t falling apart, that a word on the television meant nothing.
But the room tilted.
For a second, she thought there was someone behind her shoulder. Not a face, not a name, not a memory, but movement — quick, nervous, almost familiar. A tall figure somewhere to the side. Someone else’s breathing nearby. The feeling that any second now someone would say too much, too quickly, and the world would become more frightening, but easier to understand.
“Donna!” Wilf shouted.
The television blurred into a white patch, the floor slid sideways, and the last thing she managed to hear before the darkness closed in completely was that same calm, impossible, television voice:
“…the doctor stresses that the phenomenon requires immediate international investigation…”