Ryan dropped to his knees beside the body, careful, even in shock, not to kneel in the slowly expanding pool of blood around its head.

The person's head was facing away from him, and he could see brain remnants through the mess of a hole in the back of the skull. Small fragments of bone were scattered in the blood. Some still had hair stuck to them.

Ryan didn't feel nauseous. He wasn't repulsed. He was simply shocked. There had been no one and nowhere there. Now, there was. He'd been in the room the whole time. If the cabinets had moved, he'd have heard it. If someone had brought a body in, or shot someone, he'd definitely have heard it. Had it been there the whole time and he'd somehow missed it?

No. Not a chance.

He should turn the body over. See who it was. Check it for identification or a weapon. He wouldn't know the person, but they deserved to be seen. This random, brutal murder was the result of the machinations of Bradley. It should not go unnoticed. They'd been killed for his benefit, he was sure. If so, that meant it was his fault. He didn't believe that, not really, but couldn't help the unpleasant sting of guilt. OK, then.

He placed a hand on the corpse's shoulder and pulled. With a sickening slurp as congealing blood was drawn apart, the body rolled over.

Ryan was staring at himself.

Suddenly, all the doubts about what he was told and what he was disappeared. His head felt as if it was about to explode with the cascade of realisation, coupled with knowledge. Not everything. There were still gaps. Areas of darkness blacker than the permanent night of the cells. Fractures concealing important memories he now accepted might never return. That was incidental, however. Bradley had been telling the truth. He'd seen her shoot herself and now he was looking at himself, killed in exactly the same way.

The dead Ryan's eyes were, thankfully, closed. He couldn't bear to look into them, knowing they would be lifeless. The hole in the centre of the forehead was small. It had a blackened rim and seemed too perfectly round to have any connection to the expansive exit wound. The face was definitely his. He recognised the shape of the nose and the thinness of the lips. He knew the scar just under the left eye where a mole had been for years before his old boss told him he thought it was growing, so it had been cut away.

He laid his hand on the chest. There wouldn't be a heart beat or any movement of the chest from the inflation or deflation of lungs. Still, he had a brief burst of futile hope.

"Bang, bang, you're dead," Clara said, laughing.

Ryan stood abruptly and turned on her, but she was no longer in residence. She'd returned to the floating voice form, haunting him. Mocking him.

"Fuck off," he said.

"I think it's about time you do," she replied.

Her voice was hovering over Ryan's body. Gritting his teeth, he said:

"You first."

"I can't go anywhere. I'm a part of you, Daddy."

"I'm not your 'daddy'. You're not my daughter."

"THEN FUCK OFF! IT'S NOT SAFE!"

"I know! But where the hell do I...?"

Shit. How had he missed that? The mystery of who had actioned the appearing of him would have to wait. His turning of the body had revealed something it had been covering. Still without any feelings of disgust, he took a hold of his doppelganger's ankles and pulled.

Once moved, he let go of the ankles. They dropped heavily, hitting the floor loudly. He ignored the sound. It wasn't him, not really. He was him. This was an earlier version, or perhaps a later one prematurely dispatched. Either way, there was a necessary mental distance. An enforced envisioning of the dead version being nothing more than a mannequin.

He crouched at a rectangle etched into the floor and ran his fingers around the tightly inset line. It took a second turn for him to detect a shallow indent. He pressed down on it and the rectangle dropped and slid to the side.

An opening. Darkness within. Of course. An open mouth waiting to swallow him whole. Well, he had little choice other than to offer himself up for lunch.

The light from the room only reached a short distance into the hole. It gave no indication of how deep it was, or what lay within. Ryan knew it was his only available path, whatever he might meet. A rattling of the door he entered through gave him the nudge he needed, though the sudden attempt at entry did seem too coincidental. Immediately upon finding the exit? Scare him into diving in?

Yeah. He wasn't fooled, but had to acquiesce. He sat on the edge of the pit, for it could easily have been that. Rolling over onto his stomach, he eased himself down. He was at waist level when his feet found purchase. It seemed a solid base that was comfortably taking his weight, so he knelt, bending enough to look inside.

It was still too dark to discern any details. He felt around, hoping doing so would reveal something his eyes could not. It was narrow and, apparently, long. Longer than his arms could reach without touching anything, anyway. The door was now being pounded on, and he could hear shouts from the other side, though the words were intelligible. The tunnel beneath the floor was clearly more inviting than being caught, despite the knowledge he was being directed to enter it by the convenient threat of capture. They wanted him to find something. They wanted him to feel it was his own discovery. They probably weren't aware he knew this. So, play along.

Once he had fully slid down, he bent awkwardly to push the cover back in place. It wouldn't deter his pursuers, but it gave him the sense he was blocking their path, however ineffectively.

Ryan had seen enough films for his new location to be familiar, if not recognisable, thanks to his still mushy memory.

"Yippey-kay-yay," he whispered.

Ah.

He hadn't envisioned his next move. The vent ran both forwards and backwards, the designation of each dependant on the direction he faced. He preferred not to slink back, unable to see what was waiting for him, which left moving ahead. If it was wrong, they'd capture him and he'd be cycled again. Considering he was still alive, albeit it for the umpteenth time, the prospect didn't seem too horrendous. He'd just try again. According to Clara, this wasn't his first rodeo.

He had a little more room to move than he'd expected. Thankfully, he didn't seem to be claustrophobic, so could make fairly swift progress, and it wasn't quite pitch black. A faint light was coming from the walls, as if beyond them was so bright, they couldn't keep the glow at bay. Trying to keep noise to a minimum, and mostly succeeding, he crawled in the only direction possible. His crawl was more of a squirm or shimmy. He had to drag himself by his elbows and push with his feet, an uncomfortable but efficient mode of transport.

At a junction, he mentally flipped a coin. Heads for left, tails for right.

Heads.

Except, right didn't feel right. So, left.

Getting around the corner took effort. The angle was sharp and the width narrowed in the new passageway. Ryan had to turn onto his side and use the floor and ceiling to help pull himself around. Once he'd straightened again, he continued, more slowly thanks to the tighter confines.

"Yippey-kay-fucking-yay!" he snarled. There was something else. A finishing word that kicked home the phrase. He just couldn't quite... it was on the tip... Nope. It was gone.

Maybe it would have been better to stay in the Records Room. They could have allowed him time to search and listen to other recordings. Perhaps, they'd give him longer. They might even have left him to stew, and eventually die, in there.

No, they wouldn't. They'd have grown impatient. They'd be angry their little plaything wasn't participating. Instead, he was doing not only what was expected, but what was required, like a good little boy.

He hated himself for it. How many times had he crawled this very way? Clara told him the Records room was as far as he'd managed, which meant he was telling himself. What if that, itself, was a lie? Fuck it. Second guessing his second guesses was a waste of time. Even if this was his fourteenth time in the vent, it was still his only option. If it wasn't, then wasn't that just Life's great adventure? Death's too, it seemed.

The space was continuing to narrow, and Ryan was beginning to think he might become trapped if he continued much further. The inclination to stop and reverse direction nagged at him, but he ignored it. It would serve them right if he did get stuck. He should make sure it happens and rot there. He'd stink the place out and make it a very messy job of retrieval. That'd teach them.

Of course, even though he grinned with the potential of malicious revenge, he hoped it wouldn't come to that. It made sense that the metal tunnels would be made large enough to crawl through, didn't it? Even if only just? Repairs would have to be made. Dead rats would need to be retrieved. Rotting corpses cleaned out, that sort of thing. He could be way off the mark, and the passageway could easily slim down to the size of his wrist. That would be a struggle indeed.

When it had reached the point where he was practically worming his way along, the width stopped going down and the height went up a touch. It wasn't by much, but there was enough extra space – though still not as much as when he entered – for the not very well subdued bubblings of panic to recede. Ryan could feel the vent had started to slope downwards slightly. Hope and the distant cousin of dread prickled his nerves. Though the incline could be meaningless, it could also indicate an oncoming termination. There'd be a welcoming committee, ready to put a bullet through his brain. There would be a new Ryan waiting in the wings to take up his baton. He wasn't as indispensable to them as he was to himself, with more queuing up to step into his cell.

And there it was. The exit.

A grill.

The final word of the movie line came to him,and he was about to utter it when the sight of what lay beyond slapped hismouth shut.