“Don’t worry, we’ll stop by Intermarché and fill in the gaps. Get some sausages, buy some more beer.” Florian winks at Rat. “A bottle of champagne for the birthday girl.”

They pack their stuff in the back of Florian’s car, and leave Jérôme’s motorbike behind.

The old dynamite factory sits on the shore just south of Port Vendres, along a craggy coastline of military watchtowers. It looks more like a nineteenth-century nobleman’s estate than a factory. There are tall chained gates and a ruined gatehouse whose windows are broken, and beyond them, thirty-two hectares of land overgrown into a dense dark Mediterranean jungle of umbrella pines and eucalyptus that runs down to the sea.

There are signs posted everywhere that say Danger: Explosives! but they haven’t prevented the site from becoming a paradise for teenage raves and love-ins, a rendezvous for whatever monkey business gets smuggled back and forth across the Spanish border. There’s room enough for a whole village of miscreants each to pursue undisturbed his contraband vocation.

Rat scales the gates quickly, and goes on ahead. It’s a magical but slightly spooky place. There’s a factory chimney, a watch-tower, the remains of rail tracks. In one clearing, a spread-out sequence of long narrow buildings that could originally have served any function—laboratories, torture chambers, brothel. Prowling through the broken eviscerated rooms, she feels like the witness to a long-ago crime. Mattresses, old magazines strewn across the cement floor, plastic tubes. Pretty flowered wallpaper in what seems to be a bedroom, and a calendar on the floor. Did somebody leave in a hurry?

The main building is a huge cathedral-like structure. Now it’s a half-roofless ruin. Fig trees have spread their lofty tentacles through corners of what once was ceiling. Rat, who hates warfare, appreciates that slow Bacchic metamorphosis from dynamite to figs. As she sweeps through its high crumbling spaces, she hears music coming from the main hall and then the noise of a dog barking. A shaggy sheepdog comes to greet her, wagging its tail and barking simultaneously.

“Hello, baby,” Rat says softly. Kneels and buries her head in its golden fleece.

“Arnaque!” somebody calls. Has she heard right? Who would call their dog “Fraud”?

In the main hall, which still has its ceiling intact, there’s a group of older kids camped out. No one she’s ever seen before. One girl is lighting a stove. A boy seems to be folding laundry. The others are sitting around, reading. It looks oddly homey.

“Hi,” says Rat.

Not much answer.

Now Jérôme and Florian appear.