‘Then let’s find it.’ Ace’s shock was quickly turning to anger. She had initially believed that what had happened to her had been an accident, some freak trick that the universe had played on her. Whisked from her bedroom and dumped on an alien planet light years from home, forced to fend for herself, forced into demeaning jobs to earn enough to buy food to eat and have somewhere to sleep. Then she had met the Doctor and learnt that she had been the pawn of some ancient evil entity – one of the Wolves of Fenric. Now to discover that she might have just been one of hundreds …

She screwed up the paper angrily. ‘There’s only one sure way of finding out where those people have been taken, isn’t there?’

The Doctor glanced across at the eviscerated corpse and nodded. ‘Yeah …’

‘Oh no …’ Graham gave a groan of despair. ‘I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to set bait.’

‘It’s the only way.’ Ace looked at Yaz and Ryan. ‘But no one is going to force you two to do this if you don’t want to.’ She looked pointedly at the Doctor. ‘No one gets talked into anything.’

The Doctor opened her mouth to protest, and then thought better of it.

‘I’m up for it,’ said Ryan defiantly.

‘Yes.’ Yaz nodded. ‘Me too.’

‘OK then.’ The Doctor placed the Squidget back into its box. ‘I’ve got some homing tags in the TARDIS. I’ll go and get them …’

As the Doctor vanished inside the TARDIS, Graham turned angrily to Ace. ‘Now wait a minute. Why does it have to be these two? Why not you, or me or the Doctor or your astronaut pal?’

‘Wrong demographic,’ Ace explained matter-of-factly. ‘Yaz and Ryan are closest in age to the other abductees. We’ll mark them with some of the mucus from the shapeshifter, take them to different locations and wait for them to be abducted. The Doctor can track them and then we can follow on in the TARDIS, rescue the abductees and deal with whoever is behind all this.’

‘Wait …’ Ryan suddenly looked uncomfortable. ‘You’re going to smear me with some of that gunk? Gunk that came out of that rat-thing’s mouth?’

‘C’mon Ryan.’ Yaz grinned at him impishly. ‘That aftershave you used to use smelled worse than that.’

Ryan glared at her, aware that Chantelle was watching him in amusement. ‘That stuff was a present from my gran!’

The Doctor re-emerged from the TARDIS clutching a couple of complex-looking devices resembling diver’s wristwatches built into a red tubular casing. ‘Here we go.’

Ace took one of them from her and turned it over in her hands admiringly. ‘Neat. Are they going to have the range?’

The Doctor nodded vigorously. ‘Ought to …’