Sheer and perfectly vertical, the shaft shot down through the spine of the skyscraper before it ended at a hole at the very bottom that opened onto nothing but the yawning abyss.

The shaft must have been sixty metres deep.

Whoever had passed through here earlier had affixed some faded yellow glowsticks to its wall. From Lily’s vantage point at the upper rim, they got smaller and smaller as they receded downward.

By the light of the glowsticks, she could see a vertical line of ancient ladder-like hand-rungs cut into one side of the shaft, leading down to a doorway cut into the wall about forty metres below.

‘Looks like there’s a side exit down there,’ she said. ‘I guess we climb—’

Easton was bowled over, crash-tackled from behind by a streaking blur.

Lily whirled to see him go sprawling to the ground, almost sliding into the shaft.

Easton sat up—

—to find himself staring into the snarling, blood-smeared face of a Vandal.

Lily spun just as the second Vandal from the other bridge sprang out from its tunnel and leapt at her with its fangs bared.

Lily caught the leaping man, pivoted and hip-tossed him right into the well-shaft.

She landed at the shaft’s edge and watched as the Vandal fell down it, screaming, before—

—the falling figure was sliced into multiple pieces as he fell through some kind of crisscrossing wire array that Lily hadn’t seen when she’d looked down the shaft before.

‘What the hell?’

And then she realised what it was. It was—

The grunts of Easton’s struggle with the other Vandal made her spin and she rushed to his aid.

The Vandal was on top of Easton, slashing maniacally with its clawed fingernails, but Easton managed to reach up and jam his pistol—complete with its barrel-mounted flashlight—into the little man’s fanged mouth and he fired, blowing out the back of his skull.

The Vandal dropped to the floor, limp, dead.

‘Vandals,’ he gasped. ‘Very nasty.’

‘Sure are,’ Lily said. ‘A quick tip, Easton: don’t fall. There’s something crisscrossing the shaft below the side exit, an ancient kind of wire, some sort of filament. I saw it once before, at the headquarters of the Knights of the Golden Eight; they had a handheld weapon made of that filament. It’s wickedly sharp. Dion used it to cut off Alby’s hand.’

Easton nodded.

‘Let’s go,’ Lily said.

And into the well-shaft they went.

Tethered to a rope gripped by two of his Knights at the top of the same well-shaft, Sphinx climbed slowly and carefully down it, high above the drop and the glistening web of filament wires spanning it.

Another Knight had already made his way down the shaft, attaching yellow glowsticks to the wall to light his boss’s way.

Sphinx stepped easily into the side exit and continued onward.