‘What’s this?’ Lily asked as she and Easton stopped beside Jack on the step just above the water’s surface.

Jack said, ‘The Labyrinth is making sure that only someone with the mark can proceed.’

His eyes darted upward, scanning the ceiling.

‘Wait a second,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a trap like this. In that chamber in Santorini—there.’

He pointed up at them.

Arrayed in a pattern around a single crimson orb in the ceiling were a dozen small greystone pellets. They jutted out a centimetre or two from the otherwise flush surface of the ceiling.

‘Greystone pellets?’ Lily whispered.

‘Exactly,’ Jack said. ‘This is just like what I saw in Santorini. Something in here triggers an inflow of water. So this lower section of tunnel—let’s call it an under-tunnel—fills with water. When the rising water reaches the ceiling, it touches the greystone pellets and turns the whole flooded under-tunnel to solid stone.’

‘Sealing it off completely,’ Lily said. ‘Plugging it.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So what triggers the inflow of water?’

Jack jerked his chin at the floorstones under the water. ‘I’m guessing one of those floorstones is a trigger stone. Looks to me like at least one set of our rivals came through here. They triggered the water, but placed their palm on that pedestal and stopped it. If we want to pass through, I figure we have to do the same. Stay here, I’m going first this time.’

Jack stepped cautiously into the shin-deep water.

No sooner had his boot hit the first submerged floorstone than five gushing streams of water blasted out of circular holes in the walls of the under-tunnel.

The water level rose fast.

Jack sloshed forward through it and slammed his palm down on the handprint on the pedestal.

The inflow of water stopped.

Jack smiled at Lily and Easton. ‘Come on.’

They hurried through the under-tunnel, followed by Smiley, but when they rose up the steps at its far end, they stopped dead in their tracks, for a shadowy figure stood in the darkness before them, blocking the way.

Jack whipped out his gun, gunslinger-style.

The man in the tunnel didn’t move.

He just stood in the dead centre of the passageway, on a podium of some kind, bathed in the dim glow of the crimson orbs lining the ceiling.

He was broad-shouldered and tall. His head almost touched the eight-foot-high ceiling.

But the figure still didn’t move.

Jack exhaled with relief.

It wasn’t a person.

It was a statue. On a pedestal.

Jack edged toward it.

There were some objects on the floor on the other side of it, low mounds in the darkness.

As he came closer, Jack saw what they were.

A body and . . . something else.

The body wore tan combat gear and lay face-down on the floorstones, dead.

The ‘something else’ had, well, once been a pair of bronzemen.