Plucking a torch from his belt he flicked it on and started deeper into the cave. Daylight still penetrated past him, casting his shadow ahead, and the yellow torchlight flickered from pools of water and slick mud. Shadows danced and glimmered. As the darkness grew, and the torch was his only light, his shadow filtered away to nothing.

He slopped through mud that was almost knee-deep, trying his best to make out the shape and size of the caverns. Bone so wanted to see the place as it had been before, but it was changed just as surely as the rest of the valley. Perhaps given the right equipment, he might be able to clear out the cave and restore it to something resembling the place where his father, the selkie Mohserran, had once lived with two other Kin. But he did not have the time.

As the cave opened out into a wider cavern, the stream flowing through it became more obvious. It cut through several feet of silt on the floor, running a twisting course through the cave and back down towards the entrance. There, it must disperse into the mud he’d waded through, or perhaps disappear into cracks in the land to re-emerge further down the valley side. It formed a distinct barrier through the cave, and if he wanted to reach the other side he would have to jump.

Bone scanned the light around the larger cavern. Rock protruded through the caked silt in places, mostly high up on the ceiling, where a narrow fault chimneyed up so high that the torch could not penetrate that far. Maybe it even emerged onto the valley side above the reach of the old reservoir.

They might have escaped, Bone thought. If they knew these caves so well, maybe they retreated here from those hunting them, then burrowed and crawled their way to freedom?

It seemed an unlikely idea. Though he remembered the chaos of that night, the violence, the fear in his father’s eyes and the blood on his face, he also recalled the sense that his father gave him his last breath to save his life.

But what if I was wrong?

If they had escaped, infected with whatever the military had exposed the town to, they would not have gone to ground. They’d have stalked, hunted and killed, many times over. He would have heard about them. The world would have known. He was here to ensure there was not even the smallest possibility of that happening now.

As he prepared to leap across the dip carved into the solidifying silt by the stream, Bone shone his torch down and saw something beneath him. A hand. It protruded from the mud, and seemed to claw at it, as if still seeking a way out even after all this time.