He was surprised to see the cave entrance still visible. It had been submerged for decades only a handful of metres beneath the reservoir’s highest level, and though silt had built up and swallowed part of the opening, some water flow or current must have persisted to prevent the cavern from becoming totally filled with silt. He recalled a stream trickling from the cave mouth all those years ago from higher up, singing from the darkness and throwing occasional rainbows if he crept up to spy on it at just the right time in the afternoon. Maybe the stream still poured in from high up on the hillside, finding its way down between rock strata and through cracks to provide a gentle current to clear some of the persistent sediment.

He also feared that once he was into the cave mouth, all he’d find would be a wall of mud.

With the sun on his back, and keeping low and quiet so as not to attract attention, he approached the cave where his father had once lived. Then, for the first time in his life, he entered.

It was cooler inside. His boots sank into the mud. Muck clung to the walls, caked hard, forming features that almost looked like a giant creature’s insides. Stalactites of mud hung down, dripping muddy water. The floor of the cave mouth sloped towards the opening, so much of the water had drained when the reservoir flowed out through the damaged dam. Still the silt was fluid around his feet, sloppy mud that grew deeper the further in he went, until it flowed over the top of his boots. He didn’t mind.

As it grew darker, the lifelessness of the place struck him. There was no plant life here, as there should be this close to the mouth of a cave—moss on rocks, ferns, creeping plants probing in from outside. There were no insects or flies. Nothing crawled, nothing buzzed. When he breathed he could taste only dampness and mud. There were no memories of this cave carried on the air, because until recently there had been no air in here at all. Any echoes of his father and the other Kin that had lived here had been dissolved in the reservoir waters, spread through the whole lake and then let out in the constant flow that had taken it all away.

“There’s nothing alive here,” Bone said, because he felt the need to fill this place with sound. His voice was muffled, swallowed by the land and forgotten. He felt that there was a danger of it doing the same to him.