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triumphant cry echoed from the stone all around them and up and down the stairwell.
    Shoe gave an exultant hoot and kissed his fellow-criminal wetly on the cheek.
    “Piss off, you pervert,” protested Pennyworth, laughing and pushing him away.
    The staircase wound straight down into the ground, dimly lit by more of glowing cubes, to a depth equivalent to four or five storeys. There was single landing half way down. But none of these details were of any interest to the two thieves, for down at the bottom of the stairs they’d seen just what they’d been hoping for: another well, like the one they’d uncovered at the archaeological dig at Last Resort. Even from five storeys up they could see the same mysterious absence within it, neither a surface nor a gap: neither light nor dark, neither rough nor smooth.
    Shoe smiled broadly.
    “Lead on my friend,” he said.
    “We did it!” shouted Pennyworth gleefully, setting off down the stairs at a run. “We are the best, you know that, Shoe? We found a way out of Last Resort, and now we’ve found a way out of this dump too. We are the best.”
    “Where do you think it’ll take us this time?” asked Shoe.
    “Who gives a shit? As long as it’s somewhere that’s not here.”
    “Yeah,” said Shoe, “or back in Boringsville on Last Resort.”

    But on the landing halfway down, deep below the surface of wherever this empty planet was, he stopped and grabbed Pennyworth by the arm.
    “What?” demanded Pennyworth impatiently, wincing at the sound of his own voice echoing up and down the stairwell.
    They had been surrounded by silence ever since they arrived on that chequered platform, had heard literally nothing at all in their whole time here except for the sounds they made themselves. But down here, where every breath and footstep echoed and re-echoed from the silent stone, the stillness seemed even more intense. You really had to make yourself speak, for it felt dangerous to break that stillness with the rough echoey self-conscious sound of a human voice.
    “Look,” said Shoe, “a door.”
    “What?”
    Pennyworth glanced, without curiosity, at an archway that led off the landing into a corridor. It had writing over it in the old, cursive script, quite different from the spiky letters that shouted from billboards and illuminated signs in the city where they grew up.
    “You ran straight past it,” Shoe said.
    Pennyworth looked at him incredulously.
    “Of course I bloody ran straight past it, Shoe! There’s one of those well things at the bottom, remember? Who gives a shit about anything else?”
    “May as well check this out while we’re here, surely?”
    “Why? What’s the point?”
    “There might be something here we want. We’d be nuts not to have a look.”
    “I guess,” Pennyworth reluctantly acknowledged, rubbing his bald head. “I don’t like this place though. It’s like… Well, it’s like people were here a long time ago and…”
    Shoe laughed mockingly.
    “Afraid of ghosts, Pennyworth my old mate?”
    “Nah, of course not. It’s just that…”
    “Well okay then,” Shoe interrupted and he passed through the arch. The corridor was cut into the rock rather more roughly than the hall or the stairwell so it had something of the quality of a mine tunnel, and it was lit at intervals with the same glowing pinkish cubes as the stairs. The time was clearly approaching when all these underground structures would sink back into total darkness. Every fifth or sixth cube here was already guttering or entirely extinguished, and one of them gave a final flicker and expired just as they were walking past it.
    After ten metres or so, a large chamber opened up on the right. Its whole floor space was stacked with plastic boxes, piled untidily on top of each other, perhaps put there by someone in a hurry, or perhaps disordered by previous intruders rummaging through them.
    Short, plump Pennyworth immediately ran forward to check them out.
    “Holy shit!”