“Of course,” Markus says, glancing aside, and Mallian thinks, Already there’s scheming going on inside his tiny mind.

“You’ll tell everyone what I did?” Markus asks.

“Everyone will know.”

The mongrel nods once. Then he pushes his long, sharp tongue out beneath his teeth, stares Mallian in the eye, and bites down hard.

10

10

Next morning, after a restless night in a cheap motel, they stood looking out across a desolate landscape.

Angela had never seen anything like it. It took her breath away. It looked as if an artist had swept a broad grey brush across the valley. Both apocalyptic and strangely beautiful, the landscape before her was almost leached of colour, tinted only with light and dark greys and varying shades of beige. Where they stood, high on the hillside—above the level of the old reservoir—they were surrounded by lush trees, shrubs and grasses, colourful blooms speckled the view, and even the dawn sky above them seemed deeper and bluer than it was above the grey valley. Such vibrant colours made the contrast all the more striking. Even more startling was the stark dividing line between normal landscape and colourless valley, reality and bland, unreal monotone. The reservoir levels must have been consistent over the years, and now the water was gone its bed was revealed, drying and cracking in the sun. Lower down near the valley floor some dirty brown pools remained, reflecting nothing of the clear blue sky. A winding river flowed through the basin, a dark band of filthy water that continued until it met and flowed through the ruin of the dam further down the valley.

The blasted landscape, and the river, pools and puddles, bereft of colour and sun, might have been part of another world.

“It looks like the moon,” Sammi said.

“Sort of beautiful,” Lilou said.

“It’s like we’re looking back in time,” Angela said. Sammi raised a questioning eyebrow. “Like old black and white TV pictures.”

“I’m too young to remember.” Sammi smirked.

“Sort of beautiful, but frightening as well.” Lilou took a few steps forward, and seeing the nymph set against the vast greyness, Angela thought the whole scene looked even more alien. The view made her dizzy. The revealed reservoir bed was two miles across, and stretched maybe four miles from the ruptured dam and back into the foothills. Somewhere down there, buried beneath decades of silt, lay the remains of the small town of Longford. The scope was staggering.

It was so far apart from the world she knew that it made her think of Vince.