The three palemen battled the silverman, grabbing its arms and struggling with it as Jack and Zoe kept firing and the water kept trickling down the bridge, steadily filling it.

Lily and Easton worked their way down the gutter. Once they were past the fighting, they swung back up onto the bridge, now only twenty metres from the doorway set into the central skyscraper.

Once she was back up on the bridge, Lily looked hesitantly at Jack.

‘Keep going!’ Jack called. ‘We’ll catch up!’

With reluctant nods, Lily and Easton dashed into the doorway at the end of the bridge, passing two tall man-shaped stone statues that flanked it.

Jack and Zoe were still separated from that doorway by the fight between the three palemen and the silverman, when suddenly the silverman threw one of the palemen off the bridge and he went plummeting into the abyss.

‘No!’ Zoe shouted, just as Jack got a clear line at the silverman and fired a round right into the indentation his very first shot had made.

This had an effect.

The silverman went instantly still, suddenly freezing, as if its power had been shut off.

It dropped to a kneeling position in the ankle-deep water, its head bowing, its arms falling limp.

Jack saw the opening and said to Zoe, ‘Go! Get past it!’

Guarded by Smiley, the two of them edged around the fallen silverman, their feet splashing in the shallow water, followed by the other two palemen.

They now had a clear path to the doorway set into the skyscraper.

‘Great work!’ Jack said. ‘Now, let’s—’

Plop.

Plop.

Jack turned . . .

. . . in time to see the leftover ripples from two greystone pellets that had dropped into the water.

Then he spotted a third pellet drop from one of the mini-pyramids in the ceiling and, with a plop, splash into the rising shin-deep water on the bridge.

‘Run!’ he yelled to Zoe. ‘Get off the bridge! Before the water hardens into stone!’

Jack and Zoe bolted up the length of the bridge, sloshing through the water, accompanied by their three remaining palemen, leaving the silverman behind them, still frozen on its knees in the water.

The water around their feet began to darken, turning grey and then black: the telltale sign that it would soon turn to stone.

As he ran, Jack saw the trapezoidal doorway up ahead, with the two stone statues on either side of it.

He, Zoe and the three palemen reached the end of the bridge and jumped through the doorway, over a low rim and under the water spout, into the skyscraper . . .

. . . just as all the water that filled the length of the bridge turned to stone, solidifying around the kneeling silverman.

And then the silverman raised its head.

It isn’t dead, Jack thought ominously.

It tried to stand. But it couldn’t. Its knees and feet were embedded in the cement-like greystone.

‘It’s trapped in the stone,’ Zoe breathed.