From a distance the crater almost resembled a giant foot. Coming closer, the details faded into nothing and it was just a large hole. Inside the hole, turned on its side, was a wagon that had been crushed by some immeasurable force. Its wood had snapped. Its wheels lay buried in the ground. Of the two donkeys, one was dead, flung against the side of the crater, while the other was still alive. It raised its head and looked at the clochards with large innocent eyes as they approached, and whimpered softly when Esther stroked its neck.

The sun was by then at an angle over the horizon, and the shadows cast by the clochards lengthened into blades. The wagon’s shadow was like a squashed maggot.

Beside the wagon, lying as peacefully as two rag dolls, were the corpses. They were small and rotund, their bodies wrapped in long coats. They could have been brother and sister, but really it was impossible to tell. Whatever force had come down from the heavens and pressed down on them had neatly severed their heads from their necks, and their long scarves had unravelled and fluttered on the ground in some invisible breeze.

There was no sign of the heads.

The sun was low and the shadows long and Mathieu shivered as the temperature dropped, and he took a swig from the bottle for comfort. This was the problem with scavenging, he thought. Sometimes you found things you weren’t exactly looking for.

“Search the wagon,” Davide said. He was a recent arrival to the travelling troupe. A short, compact man who seldom joined them when they went beyond the shadow-play screen to that other place.

“Search it yourself.”

The clochards sniggered. Davide shrugged, and then he went and began removing broken wood and tattered cloth, looking for what lay beneath. After a moment, Esther joined him.

They dug and dug, and Davide cursed, but soon the broken pieces of the wagon were cast in one pile, and out of the rubble they began to pull out dented old pots and pans and other useless junk, and more of the clochards drifted away, from the Escapement into rain-soaked roads and streetlights shining wetly in the night. On the Escapement, the sun dipped farther to the west.

“Hold on,” Davide said. “What’s that?”

Esther tilted her head, birdlike; listening to the hidden sounds of the dusk. Then her fingers moved, gently brushing dirt and wood chips out of the way, and a glint of gold shone through out of the dark ground. Mathieu caught his breath as a metal fin was exposed, burning gold in the dying rays of the sun.

He went to join them, skirting round their shadows. The other clochards awoke to this new discovery. With sounds like chirping birds they all joined in, digging and clearing out the rubbish, until scales were exposed, a long, heavy tail, a body, glass eyes.

It moved.