Tim put his head in his hands and screamed. “Yeah, dipshit, I know you’re not. We’re gonna drown the bitch and then shoot you, making it look like a suicide. I thought you were meant to be smart. But we’ve been watching you throughout all this, and the whole thing has been an incredibly poor showing on your part.”

Robin didn’t have time to process it, and even if he did, he didn’t want to, so he moved on. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

And then suddenly, another figure came into view, carrying the two bits of metal sheeting that had been the doors to the Monster’s lair. “Got the evidence.” Amber. It was Amber. But she was almost a different person from the one he knew. Her voice seemed different and she held herself differently. She propped the two sheets against the far side of the tunnel and Robin saw that she was carrying a gun.

“Is that everything?”

“I don’t know. Looks like it.”

“Can you be sure?”

“I think so. Take them back to the engineer.”

Robin looked from Amber to Tim. Tim didn’t react to that. “Prudence?” Tim wheeled around to him at the mention of her name. “She’s alive too?”

Tim looked unstable, like he was battling with himself. “They all are.”

“But how did you do it?”

“Well,” Tim said, “we didn’t use the opening in this tunnel you happened to find. If we’d known about that, we wouldn’t have had to go through all the pomp and circumstance. We really were kicking ourselves when we heard about it.”

“If you didn’t use the opening, the crack in the tunnel, what did you do? How did you do it? Don’t you at least owe me that?”

Tim laughed, looked at Amber, and she laughed too. “We don’t owe you shit. You have been an incredible pain in the arse to us. You and your oozing friend.”

Robin changed tack. He just wanted to keep Tim talking, because he didn’t want to get to what was next. Maybe if he had time to think, he could come up with a way out of this, but right now, he couldn’t see any. Tim would be a lot faster than him, and that wasn’t even taking into account that he’d have to carry Sally. And Amber had a gun.

“You got Matthew too, didn’t you?” Robin said. “Loamfield said... I thought he was saying that Matthew caused the crash. But he meant you, didn’t he?”

Tim didn’t say anything.

“And your sister? Where’s your sister, Tim?”

Tim grabbed Robin by the neck in a swift motion. He gripped hard so all the air left Robin’s throat. He choked. “Shut up.”