More than anything, Jack later realised, it was psychological warfare, practised over years.

Wolf’s brainwashing of Lauren drove a wedge between her and Jack. Where once Lauren had been the caring older sister, she became critical of Jack, too.

It also had another effect: it turned Lauren against their mother, Mae.

So much so that when their parents divorced, Jack was astonished when Lauren chose to live with their father, even after the beatings he had inflicted upon Mae and Jack.

It was only years later, in their mid-twenties, after Lauren discovered who their father really was that she reconnected with Jack and they became friends again.

And then she died.

In a plane crash at the age of thirty.

She never saw Jack battle their father for the six Ramesean Stones. Never saw him fight Wolf to the death above a bottomless abyss inside Easter Island. Never saw Jack defeat him.

The upshot of it all was that, as a child, Jack spent a lot of his time at home alone and isolated within his own family.

Some folks would have said this was a bad thing, but Jack never saw it that way.

It made him realise that, in any trial, as long as he hung in there, he could emerge from the other side and prevail.

The Tunnel Beyond the Life Throne

28 December, 0006 hours

One day and five hours till Omega

Jack trudged through the long dark tunnel on the edge of exhaustion.

The ancient passage stretched for miles. It mostly went gently uphill, in broad stairways and ramps, turning in sweeping arcs and the occasional sharp corner.

After he had made it up the initial flooding stairway, the crimson orbs reappeared in the ceiling, and Jack pressed on in their dim red glow, keeping his helmet flashlight off to conserve its batteries.

He walked for hours.

He’d been awake for over twenty-four hours and his fatigue became almost painful.

He knew he’d have to sleep at some point, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it: he’d always see another corner up ahead and tell himself that he’d take a break when he reached it, but when he did, he’d just keep going.

He’d never felt so alone.

Zoe was dead. Lily and Easton had been felled in the city-maze. Even the loyal bronzeman Smiley, having stepped in front of that blast earlier, was no longer with him.

It was, in truth, much worse than he knew.

Jack didn’t know that Iolanthe, Nobody and Bertie—in their search for the Blue Bell that could wake entire populations—had last been seen entering the vault at Troy moments before a massive explosion had ripped it apart.

Or that Alby and Aloysius, huddled on their tied-down helicopter on the oil rig’s vertical helipad, had last been seen getting brutally fired upon by a newly arrived Werewolf attack chopper.

His team was in disarray.

His mission was in tatters.