So the little bitch was dead. Good. Liz felt no regret on that score, except for not drowning the useless whore at birth. Would’ve saved them a wealth of grief. Her boys would still be alive, if not for Judas Jess.

Ellie must have thought to carry the girl away, but Jess belonged to Thursdale and the Hollows: she belonged to Them. And They might have been cheated of everything else, but They wouldn’t be cheated of this.

Or the blood of the one who’d cheated Them: Ellie fucking bastard Cheetham, who now lay dazed and weaponless, without a chance of escape.

Liz took aim, and her finger tightened on the trigger.

Ellie lay, dazed and mesmerised, waiting for the axe to fall.

Liz Harper barely looked human. Her ragged bloody clothes were like an old skin she was about to shed; her face, half-seared to the bone, looked halfway through the same process. There was neither mercy nor sanity in that lone baneful eye: only fury, hatred, vengeance. And then she pulled the trigger –

A blur flew screaming up the hummock of bones and cannoned into her. Liz shrieked and fell backwards; the shotgun roared, and the two figures tumbled out of sight behind the bone-heap.

Charlotte, Ellie realised. That was who’d flown at Liz. She got to her feet and scrambled round the hummock, fumbling for the flare pistol.

But she didn’t need it. When she reached the other side only one of the fallen shapes was moving: the other lay silent and still. Charlotte Famuyiwa screamed and cursed and her clenched fists rose and fell, rose and fell, slamming down into Liz’s face, chest, and throat. Liz’s face was covered in blood; her other eye was gone.

Ellie pulled Charlotte away. A bloody clasp-knife with a handle made from an old shotgun cartridge clattered to the floor; the kind Tony Harper had used to make. It might even have been the same one Jess had fought Paul with.

Liz Harper coughed blood. Her torn hacked lips moved. Blood frothed from her nose and through her shattered teeth. “Tony,” she said – at least, Ellie thought that’s what she said – then shuddered and was still.

The cavern was silent then, except for the desperate groans of the tortured earth below, the cries of whatever inhabited it, and the raging screams of the creatures coming after them.

Ellie pulled Charlotte to her feet; they stumbled back towards Madeleine Lowe.

Madeleine blinked, resurfacing from the shadows she’d been sinking into. Wasn’t her task done yet? She’d guided them out again; what could possibly remain?

“Madeleine!” she heard Ellie shout. “Mad! Your backpack. Quick!”

Madeleine unbuckled it and set it down. Ellie dragged it to a point between the two clear tunnel entrances. Madeleine heard a faint hiss, then the sharp smell of gas. “Get out of here, both of you,” she said.