He didn’t know much about plants or birds, but there was nothing unusual about the ones he was seeing. The seagulls? They had seagulls in London, and the ones here looked like those. The small brown bird that the girl had disturbed? He hadn’t got a good look at it, but it wouldn’t have been out of place in a nature documentary. The grasses were blue-green, the leaves on the stunted bushes similar, and he thought he could remember a geography field trip where they’d been shown salt-adapted vegetation that resembled what he was seeing.

Perhaps they were just somewhere they ought not be, and they’d got there by some weird physics. Everything seemed disconcertingly normal. Apart from the sea-monster. What was he thinking? There was an actual sea-monster. He hadn’t imagined it. This wasn’t any place that had ever been covered by the Natural History Unit of the BBC.

A thought struck him, morbidly funny: it’d be a privilege to end his time there being chased across a primeval landscape by a pack of allosaurs.

‘What? Why are you laughing?’

Dalip coloured up, and stared firmly at the rough ground. He didn’t have much experience talking to women. His mother and grandmother, yes, though his Punjabi was frankly shocking. Teachers, yes, but there was no question of any sort of social relationship. Doing an engineering degree was not-quite-but-almost an all-male affair.

The one who’d spoken to him was just smaller than him, with a wave of black hair with reddish highlights that may or may not have been cosmetic, and the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t Anglo – he didn’t have the skills to tell from where. Her … friend? Sister? She looked similar, though she wore her hair so that it shielded her face from view when she turned.

‘Why am I laughing? Because I was wondering when the dinosaurs were going to turn up and eat us.’

She was looking at him, trying to work out whether he was serious or not. He still wouldn’t make eye contact.

‘Why dinosaurs?’

‘Because it’s as likely as anything else that’s happened.’ There didn’t seem to be any giant footprints or egg-shells the size of saucepans, but who knew? He risked a glance at her, and quickly turned away again. He couldn’t age her. Twenties, thirties, maybe. Wiry and strong. Confident. ‘Are you scared by all this?’

‘Scared?’ She wondered for a moment. ‘I do not know. I was scared, very scared in the tunnels. I thought I was going to die. And now? We might be safe, so I am less scared.’

‘But we don’t know where we are.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes it does.’

‘When you thought you were going to be burnt alive, did you think being anywhere else would be better?’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’