"Well, that's not a surprise," said Ianto staring at the door in front of him. "The room must be in another part of the hospital."

Jack stared at the door marked '494' then back to the last door. It was numbered '492'. On the opposite side of the corridor was the blank wall so there was no chance of misunderstanding the sequence. "What's the next one?" he asked with a growing suspicion.

Ianto walked the few steps to the next door. "Four Nine Five. They must have renumbered at some point or merged the rooms and used the number somewhere else. Could your lady caller have got the wrong number? It didn't sound like she was from round here."

Jack walked back to 492, but stopped halfway along the wall. "Or maybe something else?" he said.

Ianto walked back to look at the wall. "The most sensible thing to assume is that the bloody Health Service got the numbering messed up," he said. "Your alternative is that, in a bizarre coincidence, someone else has also cloaked one of the rooms not five hundred metres from our own cloaked room?" He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

Jack turned to face him. "I always enjoy it more when the correct answer to a question is 'bizarre coincidence'." He tapped the wall. It responded like the tiled wall it appeared to be.

"I don't actually endorse bureaucratic ignorance, but it answers most of life's mysteries." He reached in his pocket for the modified pager and showed the little display that showed the field signal. "There could be something in your theory though."

Jack tried not to look too pleased with himself. "Now. Press your buttons and make the door appear."

Ianto pointed to himself in surprise. "Me? The cloak on Tosh's room was only a bit of fun really; something I made up with bits lying around the workshop. This could be a hundred times more sophisticated." He leaned forward to make his point. "Some kind of alien shielding. Technology from the future. Anything."

Jack smiled. "Just press the damn button and get us in that room."

"'Please' would have worked just as well," said Ianto. He pressed the little 'menu' button and scrolled to the 'off' option. There was a sharp brush of air on their cheeks and a feeling of spinning as the wall tilted fractionally away from them then tilted back. But the door was there with the number '493' looking very obvious and very uninteresting..

"Okay," Ianto conceded. "Amateur hour at the mad-house." He was a little disappointed.

Jack grinned. "What are we waiting for? You first." He gestured at the ordinary looking door.

"Get out of it," Ianto sniffed. "You're the knight in shining armor."

"Always," Jack nodded. "Step aside." He put his hand gently on Ianto's chest and pressed him back. He took hold of the loose metal handle and tried to not to make too much noise.

"Room service?" suggested Ianto as the door opened and the heat and the smell from within struck him.

:::

McGill gripped Tosh's arm. "Don't hold so tight," she joked. "We hardly know each other."

"Why is the floor so wet?" he asked tilting his head up and down.

Tosh looked down at the blood and mush on the polished floor surface. "It's difficult to say why. Perhaps best not to worry about it for now."

"Why didn't they wait outside the door?" he asked, stumbling on a wet patch. "All hell breaks loose and your colleagues run away."

Tosh stopped and turned. She thumped him on his shoulder. "We don't run at Torchwood. Sometimes we just need a bit of time to ourselves." She was surprised at her own display of anger. Maybe she had had too much medication. Or maybe it was all wearing off.

"If your friends need a bit of a kiss and a cuddle, they can do it on their own time," he said bitterly.

"They are on their own time. This was just a courtesy trip. And besides, what we do is indefinable. We don't exactly have time cards to check-in," she rebuked, even though they did have ID cards which tracked everything they did that could be tracked.

"How do you know where they've gone anyway? Shouldn't we just ask the staff to call security."

Tosh looked down at the streaks on the floor. "There are footprints. They all lead this way. I think if there were any staff down here they would have called for help already." She also wondered if they were in any condition to call for help.

The door numbers were increasing. 474, 475. As they turned a curved bend, the lights dipped in the already gloomy corridor.

"I can tell the lights went down," whispered McGill in Tosh's ear. "Is everything alright, Tosh?" He reached forward to where she had been a second before. "Tosh?"

Tosh pressed the carefully trimmed nail of her right hand index finger onto his mouth. She turned back to the corridor and the shadows at the end without saying anything further. The dark flickering shapes could be Jack and Ianto, but the movements were too low and bulky and eerily quiet. Or she was still randomly medicated.

She leaned stiffly around the curve of the corridor and quickly glanced at the shapes. But they were only shadows, and quiet shadows too. She pulled on McGill's shirt to persuade him to follow again. The red footprints led severally to one of the nondescript doors ahead. From behind the glass there was only a deep kind of darkness.

"I think we're here," she said as quietly as possible. "This is where they went."

"They?" McGill snorted. "My acquaintances? Or yours?"

Tosh turned back to McGill. She held his head as soothingly as possible between her palms. "They all went this way. They might have escaped thru some other exit. But they all went into that room. Are you ready to come with me?"

"No," he said. "I think both of us can call for backup." There was a rush of air at their feet.

The corridor went dark, the door was opened from within and the room inside seemed to light up again.