As an adult, Jack kept in touch with him and Sumil—the busy billionaire in his office on Sand Hill Road—always took his calls.

Always.

Whenever they caught up in person, Sumil would thank Jack for defending him that day in the schoolyard.

Jack would just smile and say, ‘I knew even then, Sumil, that you had something to give the world. What I could do then was take a punch. So by taking those punches, I figured I was helping the world.’

Third Test of Worth: The City-maze

The Endless Tunnel

27 December, 0606 hours (local time)

Two days till Omega

Jack and Lily still stood at the junction in the Endless Tunnel, with Easton and Smiley behind them.

Jack frowned. ‘Two choices.’

‘Yeah, but the consequences of making the wrong choice are severe,’ Lily said. ‘It could set us back hours, days even, and we don’t have that time.’

Jack scanned the floor of both passageways, searching for evidence of which way their competitors—Sphinx, Ezekiel and Rastor—had taken.

But he saw nothing: no bootprints or disturbed dust.

‘Wait.’ He looked up. ‘Imhotep’s skull guided us into this tunnel when it talked about those images of Ningizzida. Didn’t it also say something about—’

He hurriedly pulled out the mummified skull of the ancient Egyptian genius.

‘Can you read the inscriptions that referred to the Endless Tunnel again?’

‘Sure.’ Lily scanned the skull. ‘Okay. The first one says: To find the endless tunnel, take the doorway below the image of Ningizzida. Then it says: In the tunnel, always to take the sinister fork.’

Jack turned back to face the intersection. ‘The sinister fork. It could work. Some mazes work that way . . .’ he said aloud.

Easton said, ‘Excuse me, but what does Captain Jack mean?’

Jack nodded at the intersection. ‘We take the left fork. The sinister fork is the left-hand one.’

‘Oh, of course,’ Lily said, realising.

Jack saw her get it. ‘You may have a natural-born gift for languages, but your old man still knows a thing or two.’

Lily turned to Easton to explain. ‘In languages all over the world, from German and Vietnamese to Chinese and Polish, the word for right or right-handed also means correct, better or lawful, while the word for left or left-handed means evil, sinful or unlawful. Our modern word sinister, which we associate with wickedness, actually derives from a much older word, sinistra, which means left.’

Jack said, ‘This reference from Imhotep isn’t a riddle. It’s a simple instruction. We just take the left fork. Indeed, to get safely through this maze of tunnels, at every junction we must always take the left fork.’

And so they stepped down the left-hand fork, venturing further into the darkness.

They walked for another six hours.

The tunnel maintained its steady downward slope.

They encountered three more forks and at each of those they turned left.