‘What a pleasant surprise to find you here,’ Ezekiel said. ‘The maze ahead is long and difficult and we decided we needed to come back and regather our strength before we took it on. And look at what we find: you, on the floor, asleep and unguarded.’

Jack said nothing.

As he sat there on the ground, staring up into the barrel of the second monk’s pistol, he sighed with a deep sadness.

So this was where it ended.

He was not just out of options and friends this time, he was out of energy.

The terrible fatigue came over him again, not so much from the physical exhaustion, but from the stark fact that he was going to die here, alone, in this dark subterranean place where no-one would ever find his body.

He would just disappear.

Ezekiel saw all of these thoughts on Jack’s face.

‘Oh, Captain,’ he said mockingly. ‘This is not your time to win the day and save the world. Once, it might have been, when that old prophecy about the five greatest warriors became real. But that time was but a precursor to this, the time of times, the end of all things and the beginning of a new age. An age that, sadly, will go on without you.’

Ezekiel turned to his brother monk. ‘Kill him.’

The monk reasserted his aim at Jack’s head and from a distance of four feet, pulled the trigger, and in the tight confines of the stone tunnel, the gun boomed loudly.

The bullet pinged with a spark off the stone wall beside Jack’s right ear.

Somehow, amazingly, the shot had missed.

‘What the hell?’ Jack breathed.

‘What the fuck?’ the monk spat.

He fired three more rounds at Jack, but every bullet just veered away from Jack and ricocheted off the stone wall behind him as if he were protected by some kind of invisible force field.

The monk threw a confused look at Ezekiel—

—just as his head was knocked sideways with shocking violence by something that came shooting out of the dark tunnel to Jack’s left, from the direction of the flooded city-maze.

The object slammed into the monk’s head with terrific force and Jack heard a sickening crack as the monk’s skull fractured in an instant and he collapsed to the ground, dead.

The object that had struck him clunked to the floor and Jack recognised it instantly: the bulbous silver magnetic head of a Maghook.

Ezekiel whirled to find the source of the Maghook.

Jack did, too . . .

. . . and he blinked in astonishment when he saw who stood there.

She stood in the middle of the tunnel gripping the Maghook’s launcher like a gun, her feet planted in a perfect firing stance, wearing a sleek form-fitting black scuba suit and looking down the barrel of the launcher with deadly fucking eyes.

Zoe.

‘Hey, honey,’ she said. ‘Hello, Ezekiel.’