Hanging high above the abyss messed with her sense of distance and before she let go she wanted to make absolutely sure she was wholly above the ledge and not in any way short of it.

She let go of the hand-rung . . .

. . . and dropped.

Watching from the other side, Jack caught his breath.

But Lily landed safely on the balcony—turning to smile and give him the thumbs up.

Jack exhaled.

‘I’ll go next,’ Jack said to Easton. ‘Then you, then Smil—’

He was cut off by a sudden loud noise.

A gunshot.

Followed by several more.

And then panicked shouts coming from one of the other five tunnels.

‘Move, move, move! Fuck! They’re right behind us!’

‘My eyes! I can’t see!’ another voice cried.

Alone on her balcony ledge, Lily whirled as she heard them, too.

The voices had come from the tunnel right next to hers, the one with the broken-open statue shells.

Lily stared at the tunnel’s mouth in tense anticipation.

She shot a worried look over at Jack and Easton across the shaft.

‘They took the wrong tunnel,’ she whispered.

Whoever it was, they’d chosen that tunnel and evidently followed it until they realised it was the wrong one. But by the time they doubled back, the two silvermen ‘statues’ guarding the doorway had broken out of their shells and gone in to kill them.

Then a man burst out of the adjoining tunnel, staggering and stumbling, and fell flat onto his face on the balcony ledge.

He wore the jet-black battle fatigues of a Knight of the Golden Eight, but he was young. He was a Squire.

The young mercenary grunted in pain as he landed on his chest.

Trying to stand, he reached for the doorframe—feeling for it as if he were blind—and as he did so, Lily recoiled.

It looked like a length of pale string trailed from his hand, only it wasn’t string.

It was his skin.

His own melted skin.

Lily stared, stunned, at the whimpering young man.

His black battle helmet was oddly deformed. It looked like it had lost its shape under some kind of intense heat and had melted against his scalp to become one with his head.

And then Lily saw his face.

In addition to the many heat blisters on it, there was also something that was truly grotesque about it.

The young Squire had streaks of white fluid below each of his eyes. It ran down his cheeks, as if he were crying milk.

‘What the hell—?’

Then Lily realised what the liquid was.

The whites of his eyeballs had melted.

‘Jesus God in Heaven . . .’ she breathed. ‘Look not in their faces, or thine eyes will not see again,’ she quoted from the skull.

The blinded Squire managed to pull himself up using the doorframe, leaving smears of his semi-liquid skin on it.

He whimpered rapidly in his terror: ‘Oh, Momma, Mommy, please help me . . .’