‘How do we know for sure that taking the left fork is the correct option?’ Lily asked at one point in their long walk.

‘We can’t know,’ Jack said. ‘We’ll only know it was the correct choice when we arrive at some grand new maze or we turn a corner and hit a dead end.’

As the hours ticked by, they passed through three more under-tunnels and crept by two more statue-like goldmen until—after almost twenty-three hours of steady trudging—Jack turned a stone-walled corner and suddenly the tunnel in front of him plunged dramatically downward in a dead-straight and very steep decline.

‘This is new,’ Lily said.

‘We must be close to the next maze,’ Jack said.

They increased their pace, hurrying down the superlong, supersteep descent.

At the bottom, they passed through an arch and abruptly the walls of the tunnel around them changed.

No longer were they made of uneven carved stone.

Now they were smooth and made of concrete-like greystone.

Jack touched one of the walls. ‘Someone built this. We’ve entered a structure of some kind.’

A few metres later, their tunnel ended at a blank grey wall—a dead end—and Jack’s heart fell at the thought that he’d made a terrible mistake, that they had come all this way for almost a whole day only to—

‘Look!’ Easton pointed up at the ceiling above the end of the tunnel.

In the flat stone ceiling above the dead end, a narrow shaft shot upward into darkness. Hand- and footholds lined it.

Jack exhaled with relief.

‘I think we just reached the end of the Endless Tunnel,’ he said.

And so up they went, straight up.

They climbed close together, with Jack in the lead followed by Lily, Easton, then Smiley.

Looking ahead of him, Jack became aware that the shaft narrowed gradually as they rose, as if they were climbing up the inside of a giant telescope. He could also see a dim glow at the very top of the shaft, one that looked like reflected daylight.

After about ten minutes of climbing, they came to a horizontal passageway that, to Jack’s great surprise, led to a square stone doorway at the end of which was, indeed, sunlight.

Jack froze.

Something lay beyond the doorway.

Three somethings: three slumped human figures, out in the sunlight, flanked by two obelisks.

It looked like they were lying on a stone rooftop of some sort and beyond that rooftop, Jack saw a wider sunlit space with lots of other stone roofs.

Jack edged closer to the door, gun up, with Lily, Easton and Smiley behind him.

As he came nearer to them, Jack saw that the slumped figures were more dead bodies: two of Rastor’s grey-clad Serbian troopers and, a little farther out, a smaller body with a red face, a Vandal.

Intrigued, Easton stepped past Jack, out through the doorway to examine the dead Serbian soldiers—