The Central Research Headquarters was a fifteen-minute walk from the lift, with the Outer City monorail several floors away. But the walk was anything but boring. Ewan had to stop his eyes from widening as he gazed at his fancy surroundings, a world apart from the bland yet haunting atmosphere of the lower floors. Floor F looked like a serious attempt at a laboratory complex: the walls had white paint, and the floor was textured with the flat, patterned material found on the hospital wards of old. There were metal labels on every door from security offices to store cupboards, and the whole atmosphere had an air of quality. Ewan had not felt so amazed at man-made beauty since his brief visit to the officers’ sector three weeks earlier.

It’s not the beauty I remember about that visit though, he thought, with Charlie on his mind.

Wait, Alex was on Floor F for that same mission , at the clone factory . Why is he looking as fascinated as me?

Alex, Jack and Kate had all seen Floor F, but none of them had told Ewan what it looked like. It had been a minor detail compared to everything else that had happened that week. But Alex’s face – as much as he tried to disguise it and as difficult as Ewan found it to read – suggested he was seeing it for the first time.

Do you even remember this place?

At the end of their fifteen-minute journey, there was no mistaking the door to the Central Research Headquarters. The set-up of the surrounding area had based itself around that one chamber: octagonal, wide, and placed mid-crossroads between four approaching corridors. Ewan walked to the windowless entrance and swiped Arnold Salter’s keycard through the slot. When the LED flickered from red to green, he pushed through the door looking as unexcited as he could.

The chamber’s interior looked just as he had predicted. Its walls were lined with computer desks and monitors, an air conditioning unit rumbled loudly on the ceiling, and a trolley of spare laptops lay by the door. A security camera hung from one of the top corners.

However, Ewan had not imagined he and Alex would be the room’s only occupants.

‘Empty?’ he whispered, his lips facing away from the security camera. ‘The Central Research Headquarters can’t really be unattended?’

As Ewan glanced around the room, Alex walked to the computer furthest to their left. There were no blind spots in the octagonal chamber, but he picked a chair that would face away from the lens of the spying CCTV camera.

‘Why not?’ Alex answered. ‘The AME project is complete now. How much else do you think they need to do here?’