Clair threw the photo back onto the table. She'd been staring at it for the last forty minutes "I can't think of anything" she said, trying to hide the desperation and frustration that was undoubtedly starting to notice in her voice.

She looked around the room again while she waited for them to say something. Nothing had changed, everything was exactly the same as the moment she'd woken up. A simple metal table bolted to the floor, the single metal chair she been dumped in, also bolted to the floor she'd discovered. Pale gray walls, gray floor, gray door (locked) and gray ceiling sporting two florescent strip lights in gray housings. The only notable feature in the room apart from the table and chair was directly opposite her. A large mirror (obviously one of those one way interrogation room windows) set into the wall, behind which no doubt, were the people responsible for drugging her, kidnapping her and bringing her here to this ominous and depressingly decorated room. There would be a long pause before they said anything, there always was. She'd lost count of how many times she'd explained that she had no idea what they wanted from her.

She stared at herself in the mirror while she waited. Her long black hair was a mess, which was hardly surprising. She tried to tidy it as best she could, but soon gave up on what seemed an impossible task.

Sure enough after a while there was a small click from the intercom and then the electronically disguised voice of her captors spoke again.

"Please look at the photograph and tell us what you see, if you cooperate we will return you home soon". Exactly the same thing they had said last time.

"I've told you a dozen times what I see", she raved. It's just a photo of a man in a suit, walking through what looks like Parliament Square in London. There is a statue to one side, I think it is Winston Churchill, but you can't see the face. That's all there is. Perhaps if you told me what I was supposed to be looking for, maybe I'd be able to bloody see it". She'd given up trying to control her anger, she knew it would make no difference.

Another long silence dragged out and she decided to stretch her legs. Since waking, she'd pretty much been left to her own devices in the room. She'd spent the first twenty minutes just banging and kicking on the door, but that had proven both pointless and exhausting. She hadn't seen anyone, they'd just repeated the same message over and over through the intercom… 'look at the photograph, tell us what you see'.

She began slowly pacing up and down in front of the mirror trying to stare down those beyond its surface. No wonder the chair was bolted down she thought, if it wasn't she'd have picked it up and thrown it through the bloody mirror by now.

The now familiar click indicated that whoever it was that was running this show, was about to speak again.

"Please look at the photograph and tell us what you see, if you cooperate we will return you home soon". She'd had enough. She strode back to the table and snatched up the photograph and waved it at the people she knew were hiding behind the mirror.

"I've told you a dozen bloody times, I don’t see anything unusual", she held it up and looked at it again. "There's not even that much in the photo to… look… at". Her words trailed off because she'd finally seen something odd… "Hang on, I think I see it…, has this photo been altered?… Is that it?". There was another long pause, but not as long as previously.

"Please tell us how you think the photograph has been altered". It was hard to tell but she was almost certain that she'd detected a hint of emotion this time, excitement perhaps. She realized that for the first time that she at last had something tangible that they wanted, something she might be able use as leverage.

"I'll tell you what I've seen, if let me out of here right now" she wondered if she sounded as scared than she felt. If she told them what she'd noticed about the photo now, they might let her go… but then again they might just get rid of her as she was no longer of any use to them. What she still couldn't understand was why they had picked her in the first place. She looked at the photograph again and now realized that once you'd noticed the alteration, it was impossible not to notice it, it stuck out like a sore thumb. Why would they need her to tell them that anyway, she wasn't a photography expert or anything, she was a barmaid, why on earth would they want her?

The intercom clicked back into life. "Tell us what you see and we will release you shortly". Well it was worth a try she thought. She didn't fancy holding out on them with any real determination, she'd seen enough movies to know how that ended.

"Ok, but you promise to let me go?" She realized how silly she sounded the moment the words passed her lips. What did she expect them to say? Surprisingly that response came quickly.

"We promise".

"Well ok then", she realized that she really had no option but to trust them. "Well it's pretty obvious really once you've noticed it". She held the photo up to the mirror and pointed to the top right portion of it. "Big Ben should be standing right about there, but it's been erased from the picture, I didn't noticed before because I was concentrating on the man and the statue, but Big Ben and the houses of parliament should have been visible from that angle I think… someone's deleted it".

There was another of the characteristic pauses but then instead of the intercom click she heard a low hissing sound. It took her a few moments to realize where it was coming from. A misty white gas was being pumped into the room from a small vent in the ceiling, she began to panic but there was nowhere to run and nothing she could do. Within seconds it had overcome her and as she faded down into unconsciousness she rather oddly realized that the gas smelled quite pleasant, almost like almonds. Less than one minute later she was dead.

Behind the mirror Agent Philips lifted his finger from the control that had released the deadly gas into the room. He turned around and exchanged looks with his four colleagues. All of them were sitting patiently in the darkened control room, two wore lab coats the others dark blue suits, identical to his own.

"She was fast, how long was that?" he asked. One of the doctors checked his watch.

"Just under an hour, that's one of the quickest responses we've had. I'd like to examine her body as soon as possible". Philips didn't like the doctors, the way they talked about people in cold detachment, it made him uncomfortable. He'd been with the program from the start and as their mandate had changed over the years he'd become increasingly sickened by what they were doing. In the beginning, most of their efforts were expended in simply finding people like the young woman now laying dead on the other side of the glass, people with the gift. He'd felt like they were doing something positive, something good, something that could one day make a difference to everyone. But after the incident in New York, things had changed. He wasn't sure he was happy about being a part of this anymore.

He activated the extractor fans that would purge the room of the deadly gas. It wasn’t the first time he'd done this today and no doubt it wouldn't be the last. He called for a pair of orderlies and told them to take the woman's body down to the labs.

Reluctant to get back to his work he wandered around and entered the gray room where so many people had died never knowing why. He picked up the photo from the desk and looked at it. He'd never really studied this one much himself. He knew it obviously, it was one of the proscribed images. It clearly showed a man walking across Parliament Square towards Big Ben and rest of the houses of parliament which were clearly visible.

At some point something terrible was obviously going to happen. Something that would lead to the destruction of those buildings. That's what those with the gift saw, tiny crystal clear glimpses of the future. It was one of only a dozen photographs they currently had that exhibited demonstrably differences between reality and the potential reality observable by those with the gift. He remembered another photo he'd seen in New York, in a facility just like this one.

He'd been there when a boy of no more than fifteen had noticed that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were missing in one of the hundreds of photographs they used to screen back then. He'd seen it almost six weeks before the terrorists had struck, leaving the New York skyline altered forever. Over three thousand people had died that day and if the program had been worth anything, it would have been able to stop the disaster, it could have saved those people… but it hadn't.

The predictions that the program had managed to collect had all turned out to be useless, so general in their scope, so vague as to when and how a disaster would strike that there was nothing that could be done to alter the outcome, without causing mass civil upheaval. When those in power realized that the only real outcome of revealing the predictions of those with the gift would be panic and mass hysteria, the program changed in nature. It stopped being about finding people with the ability and it started being about finding them and hiding them. But even that wasn't enough. Eventually the order filtered down that they should start eliminating those they found with the gift. Just rub them out of existence because they represented potential chaos. What these people knew could cause a disaster of a different kind. If they knew, the public would stop going to the places where these disasters might one day be going to happen, they would stop spending their money, eventually as more predictions came true the people would start to stay home more and more and they would drive the economy into an irrecoverable nose dive. The loss of those few hundreds or even thousands of people who die as a result of doing nothing was a small price to pay to avoid the potential economic disaster that would follow a revelation of these predictions.

He dropped the photo back on to the table and left the gray room. In the corridor a technician was refilling the gas tanks. He looked up as Philips approached. "You guys are sure getting through this stuff this week, this is the third refill I've had to do. How many more you got to process?".

"You don't want to know", he replied and then slowly walked back to the control room. A buzzer sounded somewhere in the depths of the facility indicating that a new arrival was being brought down to the gray room. Sometimes he truly wished he was more like the technician, totally ignorant of how many people were still on 'The Processing List’… or the death list as it really was… but he did and it was so many more than anyone would have imagined.

He closed the door and went back to work.