The priestess turned and regarded her with barely veiled contempt. She spoke, her voice having the same strange reverberation as her husband’s. Zan’s translation was tinged with nervousness; Nina guessed she had treated him with the same disdain. ‘She wants you to give her the key.’

‘She’s welcome to the damn thing,’ she replied, holding out the artefact to the giantess – who looked down at the floor as if expecting Nina to kneel at her feet before handing it over. ‘Not gonna happen,’ she muttered. Sidona’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed, but she snatched the key away, then turned and spoke to Gadreel.

He gestured at the figure in the third central coffin. For the first time, the leader’s face revealed genuine pleasure. His wife’s resurrection had been a relief; his child’s was a source of delight. The youth stirred, slowly opening his eyes. He blinked, bringing his parents into focus. All smiled as the family was reunited after one hundred and thirty millennia. Gadreel spoke, but Zan opted to let them share the moment in private.

Turel was helped out of his sarcophagus. If he were human, Nina would have guessed him to be in his mid teens, but considering the race’s extended lifespan, for all she knew he was in his fifties. He started to dress, donning a blue robe and a belt on which was hung a trikan, its blades retracted. Nina backed quietly towards the stairs, but the Nephilim leader gave a sharp command. She halted. ‘He wants you to go to the throne room,’ Zan told her.

‘That was kinda my plan,’ she said. ‘Although I meant to keep on going to the exit!’ That made her think of Colonel Wu; he had not reappeared, but with the fortress floating high above the ground, there was no way he could escape it. Where was he, and what was he doing?

She climbed the stairs. Gadreel and his son followed as Sidona checked the other sarcophagi Nina had activated. The crystal pillars in the throne room’s walls were now brightly aglow. More daylight shone in through the long windows. She glimpsed parts of the outer hull, seeing the same iridescent shimmer that had appeared on the fortress in the ice. Some other earth energy effect, but what?

Gadreel went to a window with Turel, the two men gazing across the landscape, then spoke again. ‘What’s he saying?’ Nina asked Zan.

‘I have returned to you in victory,’ the translator replied. ‘Our persecutors are no more, we have . . . outlasted? Outlived them. Now we must claim our inheritance. We will awaken our people here, then find Tartarus.’

The truth dawned as Nina heard the name. ‘The Nephilim captured by the Veteres were put in stasis in Tartarus just like Gadreel’s people here,’ she realised, ‘except the Veteres had no intention of ever reviving them. They could still all be there – and Gadreel wants to wake them!’