"And there's no one here to ask," said Molly. "Funny, that. There ought to be somebody around. Especially as we've just arrived out of nowhere, riding an emergency exit in reverse. You'd have thought someone would have noticed that."

"Yes," I said. "Spooky, isn't it?"

I armoured down. There was always the chance Doctor Delirium, Tiger Tim, Methuselah, or any of the base's security people might be able to detect the presence of strange matter. I turned to look at Molly, and she actually gasped, her hands rising to her mouth.

"Oh Eddie, what have they done to you?"

I looked at my blurred reflection in the steel wall. Even in that distorting surface, I looked pretty bad. I raised a hand to my face, and winced as I touched swollen eyes and nose, and a pulped mouth. When I took my hand away, there was blood on my fingers. As though seeing made it suddenly real, my whole face pulsed with pain. Those dark shapes really had done a number on me, even inside my armour. Suddenly it was all I could do to stand up straight, as the pain kicked in; all the damage, from torn muscles to cracked ribs, the sharp aches flaring up from a hundred injuries, inside and out. Molly must have seen something of it in my bloodied face, because she stepped forward and placed a gentle hand on my chest.

"My hero," she said. "My knight in shining armour. Sometimes I forget how brave you are, Eddie. Because you try so hard to seem as strong and invulnerable as your armour. Look at what they've done to you…"

"Don't fuss," I said. "I've had worse. Comes with the job, and the territory."

"Not while I'm around," said Molly. "Hush. Hush, my darling."

She pressed her hand hard against my chest, and a subtle thrilling energy ran through me. I cried out despite myself as the pain blazed up, and then was suddenly gone. I could move without wincing, breathe without hurting, and when I put my hands to my face all the damage was gone.

"There," said Molly. "All better now."

She produced a clean handkerchief and dabbed at the blood on my face. But her voice hadn't been entirely steady, and neither was her hand, and there was a grey cast to her face that hadn't been there before. The healing had taken a lot out of her.

"I know," she said, before I could say anything. "But it's my choice to pay the price, instead of you. If I'd told you what it would cost me, you wouldn't have let me do it, so I didn't ask. You can be too bloody noble for your own good, sometimes."

I just nodded, kissed her briefly, chose a direction at random and set off down it. Molly bounced along beside me, smiling hap pily, quite ready to lash out at someone she didn't know and do terrible things to them. After a while the corridor branched out into junctions and side turnings, and I just kept changing directions at random. But even as we penetrated deeper and deeper into Area 52, we never saw another living soul. The whole base gave every indication of being deserted, abandoned. No sign of any struggle, or violence, nothing to suggest any sudden emergency. It was as though everyone had just… walked out. Except there was nowhere to walk out to-just the bitter and unforgiving cold of the Antarctic above. So where had everybody gone?

I remembered Tiger Tim boasting that all the Base personnel were dead; but where were Doctor Delirium's people?

We found a canteen. The door was wide open, and when we looked in the long tables had all been set out for a meal. Plates and cutlery, jugs and glasses of water; but no food. And no one there to eat it. We kept on walking, pushing open doors along the way that led to offices and living quarters, and there was every sign of life except people.

"This whole base has gone Marie Celeste," said Molly. "Spooky…"

"Deja vu all over again," I said. "And not in a good way." I filled her in quickly on what I'd found at Doctor Delirium's Amazon base. On what Tiger Tim had done there. Molly shook her head in slow disbelief.

"What a bastard. All right, no way are we taking him in alive."

"No," I said immediately. "You have to leave him to me, Molly. He's family. That makes him my responsibility."

"Okay, I'll take the Doctor and the Immortal."

I had to smile. "Self-confidence has never been a problem for you, has it?"

Some time later, we came to the Area 52 Armoury. Carefully sign-marked, with a whole bunch of not at all veiled warnings and threats, about not opening the Armoury door without all the proper instructions and authorisations, and a whole army of heavily armed security to back you up. The massive door was the kind you usually only find in banks, in maximum security vaults.

"Just a quick look," pleaded Molly. "Come on, Eddie; you know you want to. We can get in there, no problem."

"Yes," I said. "We probably could. But… later. We've work to do first, and we can't let ourselves be distracted."

But just down from the Armoury we stopped again, at a door labelled simply RED ROOM. The signs surrounding the door were just as ominous, just as self-important; but here the heavy bank vault door was hanging half open. And since I had never even heard of a Red Room in Area 52, I thought I had a duty to at least take a quick peek inside. So Molly and I squeezed through the gap, and went in. Into the Red Room.

At first, I couldn't figure out what the place was for. White-tiled walls, bright electric lights, clean as clean could be. And then I noticed the runnels in the floor, to carry away liquids to the drains at the side, and the sharp astringent smell of antiseptic. There were long steel tables, bolted to the floor, with trays bearing surgical instruments. Some of the tables had heavy restraining straps.

"It's a dissecting room," I said, and my voice came out cold and flat in the white-tiled room. "They cut things up here. And I don't think everything that came in here was dead to begin with."

"But… why, for God's sake?" said Molly. "What did Area 52 want with a dissecting room?"

"I don't know," I said. "But I can guess. Area 52 was all about getting at secrets. Whatever it took. I didn't know about this, Molly. I swear no one in my family knew; or we would have come here in force and put a stop to it. There wasn't supposed to be anything here like this."

"You're right," said Molly. "Look…"

She was looking around a corner at the end of the room. I went forward to join her, so I could see what she was seeing.

The long hall stretched away before us, lined with rows and rows of tall transparent tubes, lit from within. Display cases. Inside the tubes: aliens. A hundred different species of aliens, cut open and investigated in the Red Room, and then brought here as specimens to be studied. There were other, smaller containers, holding alien organs, limbs, other items of interest. I walked slowly down the hall, between the illuminated display cases, Molly moving quietly along beside me.

"I know most of these species," I said. "None of them are threats to the Earth! None of them were any danger! Some are our allies, with pacts and treaties going back generations. And those… they're just tourists! None of them did anything to deserve being cut up like this… Some of them, if their worlds ever find out what happened here… No. That can't be allowed to happen, for all our sakes. We're going to have to burn this whole place out, destroy the evidence, and then bury the ashes deep. Make the whole thing never happened."

"The people who did this must be punished," said Molly.

"I'm pretty sure that's already happened," I said. "Oh no… Oh Molly, look at this."

In a tall refrigerated tube, lit with a merciless light that allowed for no shadows, hung the gutted corpse of an elf.

"If the Fae Court ever hears about this," I said.

"They'd probably find it funny," said Molly.

"True. The Fae are seriously weird. But we don't want to start giving them ideas."