“Leave the boy alone now, Thaddeus,” the Inspectre said. He turned to me. “Shall we?”

I stepped over to the well and looked down. The shaft plunged into darkness, and I got a sense of disorienting vertigo from the difference of its depth compared to the shallowness of the showroom floor. With little effort, Julius helped lift me up onto the edge of it and then handed me the winch rope to secure around my waist. I pulled off my gloves and tied the rope around myself. Julius gave it a tug.

“Too tight?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It does make me feel like a giant yo-yo, though.”

Connor laughed. “No arguments here, kid.”

“Would you rather go down there?”

“Been there,” he said, backing up, hands raised, “passed that.”

The Inspectre stepped forward. “Enough horsing around,” he said. His face was serious and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen, my boy. Keep your wits about you and you’ll do fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But remember. While many regular Department members have washed out in the Oubliette before, no member of the Fraternal Order of Goodness ever has.”

Nothing like a little last-minute pressure to get the heart going. Before the Inspectre could say anything further to unnerve me, I pushed myself off the edge of the well and began my descent into the Oubliette.

I focused my mind on everything Jane and I had gone over together. Right now I was in the forty-foot shaft that would eventually open into a large, circular, stone-clad pit. I’d have to watch out for a central hole in the floor, a pit within this pit, the lower one traditionally used for excrement and dead prisoners—at least in nonmagical Oubliettes out there in the world.

After about twenty seconds of being winched slowly downward, I looked back up the stone-walled shaft. Three heads were peering down from above.