To the eyes of Sammi more than two years ago, before everything in her life had changed, this might have been a desolate, forbidding, unwelcoming landscape. But Sammi today saw it as something amazing. No efforts appeared to have been made to prepare the valley for flooding, other than the construction of the dam. Many trees remained standing, stripped of all branches and bark and remaining now as pale, sodden fingers pointing skyward. Old woodland that had once been lush and rich now consisted of acres of these peculiar sculptures to the past, many of them already darkening as they dried, dead wood flesh growing brittle beneath the sunlight they had not seen for decades. In weeks or months they would probably degrade and crumble, falling if touched, blowing down and away in the slightest breeze. Countless other trees had already fallen beneath the water, roots undermined and their trunks driven over by the softest of currents. There were piles of broken wood and tattered trunks spread across the valley floor close to Longford, carried there by the last of the water as it had found its own level and drifted towards the broken earth dam.

Everything was covered in silt, a fine coating as if a light grey mist had descended across the world. Where the sun had baked it dry it had crumbled from many of the landscape’s features or fallen away beneath the slightest breeze. Elsewhere it remained, making ghosts of whatever it touched. These were memories of trees, echoes of rocks, recollections of old tumbled walls known only to those spirits that remained.

Because there were remnants. Sammi felt them deep in her bones, in places where she had never felt anything before. That was another aspect of the change settling over her, as the grey dust of ages had descended across this valley. She sensed a presence there in the dead old town, something old, like the echo of a breath exhaled many years before. Deep inside, she heard that breath.

It was pained, and that was troubling.

She glanced at Angela and Lilou, wondering if they felt the same. Angela wore her normal frown, an expression Sammi had come to know but which she believed hadn’t been there a couple of years before. Her aunt had told her the story of how she and Vince had become involved with the Kin, and with the gangster Fat Frederick Meloy, and she made no secret of the fact that she resented what it had done to their happiness. Amazing though they were, the Kin were also responsible for the destruction of the comfortable, happy life she’d been leading. So much that she’d planned had changed. So many ambitions had been trodden beneath the feet, hooves and claws of creatures that mostly did not care. Whether or not Angela sensed the sadness that Sammi felt here, she knew that her aunt would be expecting trouble.