Chris lay on her face on the damp strip of grass by the road, listening to the rumble of cars as they drove by. It all felt totally normal, so much so that it made her afraid to move. When she did, time would restart, then she'd have to go on an adventure again.

"Good jumping," she heard the Doctor say from somewhere.

"We're alive," said her mother, half listening as she got to her feet. "I wish that didn't keep being a surprise."

"Some of us," said the Doctor sadly, looking back to her old machine.

From the outside the TARDIS looked the same as it always had to Chris: a shabby old box that no one would bother to destroy. But instead of a vast forest inside the open doors there was now nothing there at all. All that was left was a tiny space painted yellowish white, as faded and ruined as everything seemed in the world.

"It's gone," said the Doctor. "Maybe forever now. Space and time crushing it, as pressure crushes lungs. The TARDIS is dead, and the future is. Whatever happens now"— she shook her head —" I don't know what it'll be."

"I'm sorry," said Chris. "It was a beautiful thing."

"The Daleks are here," said the Doctor. "I can smell them. Rotten metal, like oil seeping through wood."

Chris gasped. "Are they here to attack us?"

"I hope so," said the Doctor. "The alternative's much worse."

"Worse?" said Lorna. "What could be worse than that? The Daleks destroying all of us, like they burned that city in the sky?"

The Doctor sighed very heavily, looking away from her friends into the emptiness of her TARDIS.

"What's worse is if this is the day I've always feared. When the Daleks don't come to destroy you, but to join you. I think he was planning that, that other Doctor. He thought you would stand with the Daleks."

"We would never!" shouted Chris. "We would die before we did something like"—

"And what did you think, Doctor?" asked her mother very quietly. "When he made you think that way. Did you think he might be right?"

The Doctor swallowed. "I thought"—

She caught herself, about to lie again without even considering the truth.

"I knew," she said. "I knew before he said it that there was a very good chance you would. Because it's what I've been running from, for so many centuries now. The day you join up with the Daleks to take the universe. Take everything from every species that ever lived, and keep it for yourselves over their bodies. Of all my millions of worries, that was my biggest fear: that one day the Daleks would stand together with the human race. And when you did? That you wouldn't be ready."

"But I wouldn't do that!" said Chris. "Go up to another person, even if they were an alien, and kill them just so I could have what's theirs."

"Few people would. But that's not what they'll ask you to do. The killing people, the exterminating. It'll happen a long way away. You wouldn't have to like it, or even have to notice. Eventually you'd forget it was even happening."

"No I wouldn't," said Chris, folding her arms in a huff.

"No," said her mother. "We know you wouldn't. But what the Doctor's saying is that some of us— maybe most of us"—

She swallowed.

"I can't say it," she said to the Doctor.

"It's the distance in the end, Chris," said the Doctor. "Who cares about aliens from the Planet Zog? People you'll never meet or never see, if it means your world has a future once again?"

"I do," said Chris. "I care."

"It's whether enough people do," said her mother.

"Doctor," she added after a pause. "Is this"—

"What?" said the Doctor.

"All of this. Is it… you know"—

She mimed whispers, unable to say the word.

The Doctor sighed and looked her right in the face.

"You have to understand," she said gently. "The most dangerous things in the universe know never to speak their names. Right to the end, they'll always keep you guessing. They do their job right"—

–she smiled softly–

—"you won't even be sure they were there."

Chris's mother looked down at the ground and its grass both alive and dead.

"I'm sorry," said the Doctor. "And I know how hard this is. But this isn't a place for certainties. Except for one."

She was looking up past Chris and Lorna, and reluctantly they followed her gaze.

"The Daleks are here and you're rolling out the carpet," she said. "This isn't going to be easy. 'Cause you know who's got here before us?"

Chris and Lorna looked up to the billboard at the other side of the road, which was shinier and glossier than they'd ever seen it before. At its centre was a picture of a thin and handsome man, and behind him the board was all covered in Daleks. The man and the monsters were red and gleaming and new, ready to lead the Earth into another age.

"The Doctor," said Chris's mother with a sigh.

"The Doctor," said her friend. "And the Doctor always wins."