Lilou was unreadable. She felt Sammi looking at her—her stance changed, the way she held herself—but she didn’t acknowledge it. I think I could make her tell us what she’s hiding, Sammi thought. But not yet. I’ll give her the chance to come clean on her own.

How she could make her, Sammi didn’t know for sure. The change didn’t tell her that much.

“Longford,” Lilou said, pointing past a tumble of trees and rocks to a more regular-shaped mound.

“Is that a building?” Angela asked.

“What’s left of one,” Lilou said.

Much of what had once made this building a home was gone. If it had once been two storeys, there was no evidence of that now, with the walls reaching barely to shoulder height. Patches had been scoured clear of silt by wind or had simply fallen away once revealed to sunlight, and the old brick peered through. Tired, crumbled, still it held on even after decades submerged beneath the reservoir. Walls stood straight, holed here and there where windows and doors had fallen or rotted away. The ground level was at least two feet higher than it had been pre-flood, giving the house the look of a shrunken thing, or a dwelling for little people. But the floor plan was quite clear, and the structure close by could only have been a garage.

“Anyone home?” Lilou said, but she didn’t call too loudly, and her chuckle sounded nervous.

“Let’s look,” Angela said.

“It might be dangerous,” Lilou said.

Angela glanced at her. “You wanted us to come.” She approached the old home and Sammi went with her.

There was nothing within the walls that might have identified it as a house. No furniture or belongings, no internal structures. Just the outside walls, encasing a layer of flat silt that was cracking beneath the sunlight.

“Maybe they moved all the people and furniture out,” Sammi said.

“It looks... sad,” Angela said. “Like it’s been forgotten.”

“Mostly.” Lilou was beside them now, and she leaned through an opening in the wall to peer closer. “Wow. Look at that.”

At first glance Sammi thought it was the body of an unknown animal, strange ribs exposed in a twisting ribbon. Kin! she thought, and her breath quickened, her heart beat faster. Then she saw that it was not the remains of anything that had lived. It was a keyboard, warped and with many keys missing, but still settled into the shell of a decayed wooden piano. It was slumped in one corner of the room on broken legs, half buried, a useless thing.