The summer sun was low and already hot as they passed from green to grey and started down the gentle slope of the old reservoir bed towards the valley floor. Lilou took the lead, while Sammi and Angela followed close behind.

“We should have brought more water,” Angela said.

“We’re walking through a reservoir.”

“Ha! Yes. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, fish were swimming around our heads.”

“The ground’s hardening under the sun,” Sammi said, “but there are still lots of damp areas, puddles and pools. You can see the sun shining from them down in the valley.”

“No way I’m drinking from them,” Angela said. She didn’t elaborate on why, but Sammi silently agreed. They’ll be contaminated, she thought, with whatever makes this place so strange. And there are all those bodies buried down there.

Lilou was a woman of mysteries. She came to see them now and then, but she rarely told them much about where she’d been or what she had been doing. Angela knew her from London, and just sometimes a tension formed between the two of them that Sammi could cut with a knife. Neither had said, but she was pretty sure it was to do with Vince. Lilou was a nymph, and Sammi had sometimes felt the effect—a deep attraction, a beguiling allure. Maybe she’d had the same effect on Vince in London. Maybe something had happened.

Sammi didn’t ask and didn’t wish to know. The more she felt the change within herself growing, the more attractive Lilou’s exotic origins became to her. She told Angela she was fine living isolated in the cabin in the woods, but there would come a time soon when that was not enough. At least now she could escape into the trees and explore her new talents, the bright shining potential she felt blooming deep inside.

Coming here was another escape. She could see that Lilou believed it too, because the nymph moved with a cautious enthusiasm, eyes wide and her usual defences slipping now and then so that she exuded that naked animal magnetism that seemed to set the air around her aflame. Sammi only wished Angela could welcome the chance to escape.

She’s only human, Sammi thought, and she let out an unconscious giggle.

“What’s up?” Angela asked.

“Just enjoying being out doing something different,” Sammi said, and it wasn’t a lie. Angela smiled and it touched her eyes. Maybe somewhere beneath her fears for the future and bad memories of the past remained a sense of adventure.

The drying reservoir bed was not as smooth as Sammi might have expected, and they followed several shallow depressions that led down towards the remains of the settlement. As the slope decreased and they neared the outskirts of what had once been a thriving small town, Sammi began to pick out more details of what the flooding of the valley had left behind.