Without another word, Jace gestured ahead with his free hand, his other deftly holstering his pistol and reaching for the SA80 on his back. In an instant, he'd gone from witty conversationalist to highly-skilled-soldier mode, the look in his eyes like an impermeable wall of iron and steel. Light-hearted Jace was only ever a disguise for the man he really was underneath. This was who he was now. This was what the Greys had turned him into. A self-trained warrior of the New World. Cold. Merciless. Lethal.

Anyone else would have walked away from this. Hell, they would have run. But not Jace.

And not me, because I recognised the sound and knew instinctively that it wasn't just a Grey.

It was a Grey in pain.

I'd heard it enough by now to know what it was. From the very first time two years ago, to just a few weeks before today, when Jace and I had managed to turn the tide on one which had given chase and had unwittingly gotten itself separated from its patrol unit. Its end had been violent and bloody and, if truth be told, I think we'd both enjoyed it a little too much.

Sometimes I couldn't help but wonder if we brought out the best in each other, or the worst.

It was darker in this part of the Gallery and I did the same as Jace, choosing my own rifle over the pistol so that we could use the torchlight to guide us.

I moved to the doorway on the right, Jace heading to the one on the left, covering me as I shifted my back against the doorframe. I quickly scanned the room beyond, finding it empty apart from a couple of Vemeer and Schalcken portraits that had been hacked at until the canvas hung from the frames in garish, intestinal ribbons. Shaking my head at Jace, we both instantly moved to the large rectangular-shaped room on the left, which housed mostly 16thcentury Venetian paintings and which also led through to the Salisbury Wing on the right-hand side.

The beams from the torches picked up an alarming streak of blood which swept half the length of the room, as if someone had been dragged across the tiles and through the doorway at the opposite end.

I tightened my grip on my SA80, a knot twisting in my stomach. I knew that room and it was a room full of memories and ghosts, and now, it seemed, something else.

A nightmare, maybe. A monster.

Creeping stealthily inside the entrance, we separated, Jace covering one side, me on the other as we made our way through. I stopped briefly to scan where the bloodied pathway began – a platter-sized pool of blood beneath where The Adoration of the Kings by Paolo Veronese hung on the wall. Fresh handprints plastered the base of the canvas, almost as if someone had tried to desperately cling on to the frame to stop themselves from being dragged away. Leaning closer, I studied the prints and looked over at Jace, motioning with two fingers and mouthing silently on my findings.

There were two different kind of prints here: Grey and human.

Jace nodded his acknowledgment, his mouth set in a grim line. The possibility of what we might find in the next room had changed, not now just an injured Grey, but maybe human casualties too. Steeling myself for the worst, I continued, stepping carefully over the streak of blood, glistening slick and slippery on the tiled floor.

By now, the pained clicking of the as-yet-unseen Grey was getting faster and louder, an edge of panic in the sound. It knew it wasn't alone and it knew that whatever was coming its way, wasn't here to help. The closer we got, the more I could hear its tortured breathing. Short, shallow gasps of air punctuated the clicking, and a sound like flesh slapping against a watery surface echoed sharply through the doorway. I got a kick from the sound of its fear, feeding off it, letting it envelop me in an adrenalin high that crushed the trepidation I had about walking into this room again.

Jace glanced back in the direction from which we'd come.

I knew what he was thinking. This could have been a trap. After all, it wouldn't have been the first time the Greys would have used a supposedly-injured one of their own to lure us in, yet there was something about this that seemed different. The excessive amount of blood, for starters. Plus, it would have meant they'd have gone to a Hell of a lot of trouble to stage this, just to lure in two humans and that didn't seem right. Small pickings really wasn't their style. They wanted more. Always more. Why take two when you can take twenty? Why take twenty when you can take two thousand?

Why take a city when you can take a whole world?

With one final look at Jace, who nodded in response - seemingly satisfied no one was about to ambush us - we met again on opposites sides of the doorway, our backs against the wall, weapons poised and ready. Jace silently counted to three, and we both moved on the final count, my heart racing with that all-too-familiar mix of fear and exhilaration.

'Holy fuck,' I whispered, my hands dropping just a fraction, before I remembered to keep my guard up and raised them again, holding my arms steady and the gun aimed directly ahead.

'You have got to be kidding me.' Jace reiterated my stunned reaction with his own, breaking off his wide-eyed gaze to sweep the room, before moving very slowly inside.

The human and Grey handprints made sense to me now.

Slumped on the floor at the base of a large framed canvas, was the injured Grey; stuck halfway between its alien andits human form, except this one's human form was someone I knew only too well.

As if in response, my injured shoulder throbbed painfully.

Rico 'Rick' Cabineiri.

I stared at the creature with a sick curiosity that both nauseated me and kept me strangely enthralled. I'd never seen one like this before, not even with Tom. The transformation then had been so quick and so sudden and, I suppose, I'd been lost so much in the horror of what was happening, I hadn't paid that much attention to the changes that the Grey was going through until it had turned to look at me, having stolen the face and body of the man I loved. This mutated mix of both species was disturbing, and my mind instantly regurgitated images of Rico attempting to assault me, only this time, the hands that held me down were that of a Grey, alien fingers fumbling at my belt buckle.

Click-click-click.

A patchwork of alien flesh showed through the human disguise; slick, silvery skin blending with Rico's tanned tones. The face was human – God, how I'd seen that face in my head too many times since getting caught in Shaftsbury Theatre - but now with the oil-black eyes of a Grey, unblinking despite the glare of the torch beams. One bloodied hand was human. The other hand, with long slender digits twice the length of our own, was slapping in the pool of blood around his body, as he desperately tried to drag himself along, almost as if he imagined he had any chance of getting away. His feet flailed uselessly against the wet tiles. Rico's shirt was torn open, most of the buttons missing, and there was a wide laceration across his lower abdomen that I was sure had spewed most of the blood, but it wasn't that which held my captive gaze.

Someone had gone to great effort to carve a crudely-drawn symbol on Rico's scrawny chest, covering much of his breastbone, all the way down to his stomach.

Crop circles had become something of a joke over the years. Duplicated by hoaxers and even turned into a kind of artform, with the creators trying to fashion the most beautiful and bizarre designs, there wasn't many who believed they were ever true evidence of extra-terrestrial life on Earth. Yet, somewhere in there, somewhere lost in the sea of imposter art and pranks, there was a symbol that had been generated many times over the years and it was the one thing – the only thing – of the Greys that had been in plain sight all the time.

When the Final Wave hit and their ships reached our atmosphere, mammoth, terrifying crafts that were like nothing our science fiction films and novels had ever dreamt up, we saw that symbol again and knew once more that we had been duped spectacularly. Duped so many times like the mindless, dim-witted idiots we had become, brainwashed by our smartphones and devices, brainwashed by the news that only the media outlets wanted us to see, brainwashed by governments already infiltrated by our enemy.

That symbol – circular, with six Cthulu-style tentacles reaching out from the centre and connecting at the edges – was now etched onto Rico's flesh, the blood from each tentacle, dripping down his body. This had taken time. The Grey's mark wasn't made of fluid lines, but of many much smaller circles, each with a little tail, almost like miniature tadpoles, all connected together. Whoever the artist was, they hadn't quite encapsulated the intricacy of the same design, but it was unmistakable, nevertheless.

I took a step forward and stopped, my gaze drifting to the painting on the wall underneath which the Rico-Grey was slumped, the light picking up something I hadn't initially noticed in the gloom.

Scrawled across the surface of the canvas were two words, written in blood.

'Maria Luisa,' I read in a whisper.

I was there in an instant. As if reading those two words had transported me to another place, another time. As if everything was gone – Jace, Rico, this room – and I could see nothing but him.

Tom.

'You okay?'

I blinked Jace's features back into focus, seeing his brow furrow as he looked at me with concern.

'I can deal with this,' he said, keeping his voice low. 'If you don't want to?'

Jace knew what the incident with Rico had done to me. He knew how, after every awful moment I had witnessed and experienced since the Final Wave, those few desperate minutes lost and alone on the stage - a performance to an empty theatre - had been the one thing that had almost broken me. In pain and wasted on bottle of booze that Abby had swiped from the underground store, my confession to Jace had been far more raw than I expected it to be, as if my slurred and honest words had sliced flesh right from the bone, leaving me nothing but an empty, skeletal shell. I'd buried it afterwards, of course, shoving it down deep inside, but once I'd said it, once I'd told Jace of a fear that had felt like a parasite scratching about under my skin, I knew that he'd felt it too and understood it only too well.

He thought my hesitancy now was because of Rico. But it wasn't. It was because of Tom and a room filled, not with a monster, but of him and a life I thought I'd buried, just like I buried everything else that threatened my resolve to survive in the New World.

Swallowing, I shook my head. 'No, really, it's fine.'

Whatever Jace saw in my eyes seemed to fool him enough to make him nod in acceptance. Angling slightly so that the Rico-Grey couldn't see his face, he leaned in closer.

'You think it's been Rico all this time? Or did it take him recently?' he said. 'It could explain why Lena's crew have disappeared. Maybe they were all taken?'

I looked past his shoulder at the creature, which had pushed its back against the wall as if it hoped it could force itself into the brick just to get away from us.

'No,' I said. 'No, I think it's been Rico all this time. I think that's what that symbol is about.'

'You think it was Lena then? Maybe Rico set them all up and she somehow managed to capture him and did this as a warning to any of the Greys that would find him?'

I dragged my gaze away from Rico to look at Jace, hoping that I looked convincing. Hell, I'd had enough practice of looking convincing to last me an eternity.

'Sure,' I shrugged. 'It's possible. I don't see who else it could be?'

We both turned our attention back to Rico.

I knew that whatever the Grey had learned from cloning Rico had come from straight from the twisted, fucked-up mind of Rico himself, but the thought of the alien continuing to satiate Rico's sick fantasies afterthe cellular transformation just offended me even more. I wasn't naïve about their capabilities. They'd lived among us for so long that I knew they'd had to duplicate everything about their human victims – and that meant continuing any relationships their human had taken part in – but this seemed like a role-play too far.

Shuddering internally, I exhaled a shaky breath and lowered my gun.

'You've been a hard man to find, Rico,' I said, as I walked towards him. 'Just when I thought you'd crawled back down into the sewers like the putrid fucking rat you are, suddenly you turn up. Although it looks as if someone else was lucky enough to get to you first.'

The Rico-Grey's fearful stare jerked to the drenched gauze taped to my shoulder, under the strap of my vest top. I stopped just a couple of metres in front of him, watching his pathetic form struggle in the pool of his own blood.

'I've got to be honest, you're not looking too hot, Rico.' I smiled. 'What do you think, Jace?'

Jace cocked his head to one side. 'To be fair, Rico's never been blessed with movie star looks, though eh? Seems like you have a new tattoo there, Ricardo. That must have stung like a bitch.'

He took a step forward and Rico flailed more frantically, somehow mustering some lingering traces of energy to shift his weight. I stared at his alien hand, and Jace caught the direction of my sickened gaze. Relaxing his rifle and shifting it round to his back again, he unsheathed the knife from the belt that rested on his hips. Rico's breath quickened, the clicking resounding furiously in terror.

'The thing is, Rico, Evie here tells me that you put your hands somewhere they shouldn't have gone and let's face it, now that we know what you really are, we're obviously going to finish the outstanding job whoever it was started, but I'm thinking it would be really fucking lapse of me if I didn't tell you just how unhappy I am about what you did. Now, anyone else would cut off both your hands, but I can see you've been in the wars a bit and I'm willing to show a little bit of leniency.'

He twirled the blade in his hand, crouching down in front of the creature.

'So, I'm proposing to cut off just one of your hands,' he said. 'The question is, which one would you prefer to lose? The human one or that pretty grey one of yours?'

Rico opened his mouth to speak, his throat undulating as if he was struggling to recall how to form human words. Gagging, a small bubble of blood popped from the corner of his mouth, before he swallowed, the action seeming to pain him.

'I-I couldn't help it...' he croaked, Rico's reedy, high-pitched tone grating on me instantly. 'The human... the cloning...' He swallowed again, opening his mouth only to emit a juddering volley of clicks, snapping his lips shut trying to mute the noise. When he spoke again, his breathing was shallow, but slower. 'I couldn't control it. It took over... I swear, I couldn't... couldn't help it.'

'You're trying to tell us that your human-form was in control?' I glared at him, hating him even more for his pathetic attempt to absolve himself of any responsibility. Typical of Rico, trying to squirm his way out of trouble. 'That's not the way it works. You think we've learned nothing in two years? You are always in control. You assume our identities, our appearance, our memories, our abilities. It's still you though. It's still you, hiding under our skin, pretending to be something that you're not. It's still you doing everything. This identity you have stolen - or what's left of it in your case – is just a mask, nothing more.'

Rico leant his head back and coughed, his chest heaving violently, more blood bubbling from his mouth and drooling down his chin.

'No,' he said. 'No. Something is happening... we have been here too long... too long now. We cannot control...'

'Shut the fuck up,' I shouted, stepping forward and pressing the butt of the rifle against his forehead and pushing his head against the wall. 'Say one more word of this bullshit and I'll shoot you in your fucking shrivelled-up balls, I swear to fucking God, I will.'

Rico's lips curled up at the corners, a hoarse laugh wheezing from his mouth.

'I am dying anyway... he did a good job, yes?'

I stiffened and pulled back.

'He?' questioned Jace. 'So, this wasn't Lena? There can't possibly be anyone who hates you more than we do, surely? I mean, I know even the corpses you fuck aren't exactly fans of yours, but still... this is something else. Who did this, Rico?'

Rico's black gaze turned towards me then and I was swallowed whole by it, feeling myself slip easily into the dark pools of his eyes, drowning, drowning, until I could barely breathe.

I needed to breathe.

Breathe.

I aimed.

Pulled the trigger.

Rico's face exploded, a shower of blood and bone and brain spraying outwards, his now-lifeless body collapsing into a heap.

Jace fell backwards onto his arse, the knife slipping from his grasp. Rico's blood was splattered over his face. 'Jesus. Evie, what the fuck?'

I was breathing now. Violent, hard breaths wracked my chest as I stared, stricken, at the dead Grey. The silent Grey.

'Evie?' Jace staggered to his feet, his eyes darting to where I still aimed the gun, my arms shaking. 'Evie, it's okay.' He held his palms out, trying to calm me. 'Relax, yeah? Relax.'

Cautiously, he reached for the rifle and I let him pry it from my grip, the torch light arcing upwards as he angled it away from us.

'I'm s-sorry,' I stammered. 'I couldn't... I don't know what happened. Jace, I lost it...' I trailed off; my voice too shaky to continue.

Jace stared at me and I knew he wanted to say something else, some rebuke at what I had done. I could see the words turning in his mind, desperate to be heard. I'd blown it. I'd blown our one chance of finding out what had happened to Lena and her crew and of extracting any more information out of Rico before we killed him.

Finally, he looked back down at the dead Grey, regret twitching in his cheek muscles, before exhaling long and hard, blowing it out between pursed lips in a whistle of breath. 'Hey, look, it's okay. It's no surprise you lost it really, not after what he tried to do to you. He's dead. It's dead and I won't mourn that sick bastard one little bit.'

Raising my rifle, he let the torchlight come to rest on the painting on the wall.

'I wonder who Maria Luisa is anyway?' Jace dragged his teeth over his lower lip and arched a puzzled brow. 'Maybe one of his victims? Maybe someone close to whoever killed him?  I guess whoever did this really wanted to make Rico pay for something.'

I nodded numbly, hardly daring to look again at the bold, bloody graffiti daubed across the canvas and yet unable to stop my eyes from being drawn to it. Goosebumps prickled my skin. A coldness crept into my chest.

Jace was wrong. Maria Luisa wasn't one of Rico's victims or even a person, but Maria Luisa was dead. Maria Luisa was a memory reaching out from beyond the grave and the only other person in this world, the only one who could possibly know what it meant, was my husband. Or, more to the point, my husband's murderer.

What had happened to Rico hadn't been random.

It was a message.

A message intended only for me, and that meant not only had my sighting of Tom's killer been no coincidence at all, but that the Grey was following me, watching me, and now, it had handed Rico to me on a bloodied plate.

'Come on,' Jace said, finally handing me back my gun and retrieving his knife. 'Let's get out of here, yeah?'

I began to follow, coming to a halt next to him as he stopped in the doorway.

'Just out of interest, what's it called?' he said, thumbing a gesture.

'What?'

'The painting, Lara,' he said, rolling his eyes. 'You're the art boffin. What painting just got a new coat of colour courtesy of Rico's brains?'

I looked back to where the bloodied words were scrawled across the painting, covering the face of Jesus, who raised his hand above the man wrapped in his white burial shroud.

'The Raising of Lazarus,' I whispered.