‘Oh, it wasn’t that,’ Alex answered with a grin. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to hear too much of his voice.’

‘Speaking of not hearing voices,’ said Ewan, ‘everyone be quiet. We’re clones, and you’re dead.’

Alex obeyed, and the identification chamber fell quiet. Five long minutes passed in dull, lifeless silence, Ewan’s fingers fidgeting in anticipation, before a beep sounded at the door. Ewan took a deep breath, and lowered his hands to his hips.

The door opened, and a short man with a face like a turtle ambled into Office 35. He was flanked on one side by the tall blonde clone model, and on the other by a clone of Japanese origin. Ewan did not recognise him. He must have been an import.

He and Alex, as agreed ten minutes earlier, waited until the precise moment the door closed and locked itself before they drew their pistols and shot both clones dead.

The clones fell lifeless to the floor. Between the two corpses, Arnold Salter wore an expression of clueless horror. His jaw hung open, but he was as wordless as the two dead clones. The whites of his eyes began to stand out more than the rest of his face.

‘You must be Arnold Salter,’ Ewan said. ‘Good to meet you face to face.’

Salter looked to his left, and let out an audible gasp as Kate and McCormick’s bodies rose from the examination table. To Salter, it must have been like watching zombies rising from their graves.

‘You may have gathered, but—’

Salter, seemingly fuelled by impulse (or perhaps fear of what Grant would do to him if he put up no resistance), reached for his holster to draw out a little pistol. Before he could do so, Alex fired a bullet, which popped through his right hand and tore through most of its tendons. Salter stumbled around in agony, producing a sound that Ewan almost didn’t recognise as human. It certainly wasn’t monotonous anymore.

‘Didn’t have to do that, did you?’ Alex said to him as he and Ewan grabbed his arms.

Salter’s body did the only thing it knew how to do under the circumstances, and a small pool of vomit spilled over his bottom row of teeth. Most of Ewan froze in disgust, except for his feet which shuffled away from the floor beneath Salter’s mouth. He looked at the man in disbelief as he choked on the thin trickle that hadn’t quite made it to the top.

‘Really?’ he asked, forcing Salter towards the centre of the room and bundling him onto the table with an Underdog at each corner.

Not all monsters look fearsome, Ewan thought to himself as he stared at Salter’s face. Some monsters hide away in their offices signing death warrants. Some monsters wear suits or sit at computer desks. Some vomit in fright when they’re caught.