Ellie shook her head and kept going. She didn’t know how long they walked. Felt like hours; might have been minutes. Maybe it was both; maybe time worked differently, down here, to the outside world. All those legends of men and women who spent a day with the hidden folk, only to come home and find their loved ones grown old or dead. Even if they got out of here alive, there was no guessing what they’d find when they did.

You had to stop asking questions in the end, or go mad from it all. No point, anyway. Ellie wasn’t in charge. Madeleine was leading the way, and that was fine. It was good to lay her burden down. The metaphorical one, anyway, of leadership and responsibility. The one in her arms was very real and she’d be carrying it a while yet.

But for now, she could only follow. One foot in front of the other, between the ranks of sleeping monsters. The sleep of reason brings forth monsters: what was that from? A painting, wasn’t it? Goya. That was it. What then did the sleep of monsters bring?

“All right,” said Madeleine. Ellie registered vaguely that their surroundings were no longer quite so claustrophobic: the tunnel had widened into another of the dome-shaped chambers, although this one appeared disused, the wall alcoves empty, and the floor pits –

Salt and bones crunched underfoot. Some of the pits were empty, heaps of gritty rock salt strewn everywhere, while others were filled with cracked gnawed bones: some old and yellowed, others freshly stripped of meat. Torn-down cobwebs strewed the floor around the empty alcoves’ mouths. Salt. To preserve the meat. The things that had slept here had woken and fed.

“Ellie.” Charlotte touched her arm. “Ellie. You can put her down now.”

She wasn’t sure she could at first; she’d been carrying Jess so long the girl felt like a part of her, and to lay her down would almost be to mutilate herself. But then she was crouching, lowering the body – lowering Jess, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, think of her as a body and nothing else, not yet – to the floor. And then she was kneeling, and she was crying, and she couldn’t stop. But she had to stop. She had a job to do.

“Easy.” Charlotte beside her, an arm around her shoulders. “Ellie, I know.” Her eyes were red and full of pain; there were tears on her cheeks, too. “I know. But we’ve no time. We have to end this.”