The water had been down for three days when I found her, and the mud still held the cold of the reservoir like a held breath. I had come down the maintenance stair at first light, the way I did every morning of the drawdown, with a lantern in one hand and the ledger of gate readings in the other. The stair was iron and slick with green, forty-two steps down the face of the dam, and at the bottom the valley opened out the way it always did when the water let go of it. The church first. Then the chapel roof, gray slate and a crooked cross. Then the street, a long crooked line of it running east toward the pack house, and the pack house itself at the end of that line, its chimneys standing up out of the mud like fingers. Ten years I had been coming down those stairs. I knew the valley better than I knew my own face. I knew which stones came loose after rain, I knew where the old road ran under the silt, I knew that the mud in the eastern quarter was soft enough to swallow a boot. I had mapped the whole drowned place in my head with the patience of a man who has nothing else to do with his nights. What I did not know was that a woman would be standing in the middle of it. She was fifty yards out, east of the church, where the street widened into what had once been a square. She had a satchel over one shoulder and a coat the color of wet slate, and her hair caught the first light the way copper wire catches a lamp. She was turning slowly on the spot, one arm out, the way people do when they are trying to get their bearings, and her boots were sunk to the ankle in the mud. My lantern went up before my sense did. "You. Stay where you are." She turned. Green eyes, very direct. A face that had not expected to be shouted at and did not care for it. "And you are?" "Rhys. I run the dam." I came down the last steps and started across the basin toward her, and the mud pulled at my boots with every stride. "You are standing on a construction site. Nobody is supposed to be down here during drawdown." "I know." She did not move. "I am the one who wrote the safety notice." That stopped me for a moment. "You are Elin." "Dr. Elin, yes." She pulled one boot free with a wet sound and set it down again. "I sent the letter about the inspection. You are the foreman." "I am the foreman." I got close enough to see her properly. The copper hair was not a trick of the light; it was the real color, thick and a little wild from the wind on the dam crest. Her coat was good wool but old, the elbows shiny. There was mud on her cheek already, a streak of it, and she had not noticed. "The letter said you would arrive on Friday." "It is Friday." "It is Tuesday." She looked at me the way a doctor looks at a man who has misread his own chart. "It is Tuesday. I came early. I wanted to walk the basin before anyone could tidy it up for me." She looked past me at the street. "Nobody told me there was a village down here." There it was. The question I had spent ten years learning to answer badly, and now it had arrived in a slate coat with copper hair. "There is always a village under a reservoir," I said. "That is what a reservoir is. A village with a lake put on top of it." "I know what a reservoir is." She said it without heat. "I have inspected nine of them. None of them had a street this long, or a church that size, or that." She pointed with her chin, and I did not need to follow the gesture to know what she meant. The pack house. Three stories, stone, the front porch gone but the door still shut. The door was always shut. "That is a farmhouse," I said. "That is a manor." She pulled a notebook from her satchel and flipped it open, and the wind took the pages and she caught them with her thumb. "The 1902 ordnance survey shows a single farmstead here. One building. Not a street, not a chapel, not a village square." She looked up. "Either the survey is wrong or someone has been building down here." "The survey is wrong." "And the villagers?" "They left before the flood. 1924. There is a plaque in the town hall with all their names." She wrote something down. She wrote it slowly, and I watched her pen move and thought about how many people had stood in this mud over the years and asked me nothing at all. The truth was the water had come in 1924 and taken a village the county had written down as two farms and a mill. The truth was that three hundred wolves had lived in that street and the flood had been arranged to hide them, and my father's name was on the paper that arranged it. I did not say any of that. I said, "You should not be down here alone. The ground is bad. There are voids under the eastern quarter." "I noticed." She stamped one boot, and the mud gave a wet sigh. "That is why I am here. Your dam has a settlement problem, Mr. Rhys. I read it in the last three survey reports. Whoever has been filing them has been very careful with the language." "Careful is what they pay me for." "Careful is what they pay me to catch." She closed the notebook. "Show me the crack." "Which crack?" "The one on the eastern buttress. The one your reports describe as cosmetic." She started walking before I answered, heading east along the drowned street with the confidence of a woman who had read a map in her hotel room and memorized it. I fell in beside her because there was nothing else to do. Her boots made a sucking rhythm in the mud, and mine answered it, and the church passed on our left with its door hanging open on the dark. "You are from the university," I said. "The water board. I am on loan from the university." She stepped over a fallen lintel without looking down. "I grew up in the town, actually. Downriver. My grandmother had a house on the old road." I kept my face still. The old road. My old road. "Which road?" "The one that runs along the valley floor. It is under the water now, of course. She used to tell me stories about it." Elin smiled at the mud ahead of her, a private smile. "She said the valley had a village in it before the flood, and that the village had a name nobody used anymore. She said the name was not on any map." "What name?" "She never told me. She said I would find it myself one day." Elin glanced at me. "I was six. I thought she was being mysterious. Now I think she was being careful, which is a different thing." We had reached the buttress. The dam wall stood over us, gray and immense, and the crack ran down it from the crest like a scratch in a table, narrow at the top and wider at the base. I had been watching that crack for six years. I had put my hand in it in 1968 and found the wall cold and sound behind it. I had put my hand in it again last winter and found it a finger wider, and I had written cosmetic in the report and sent it up the chain and slept badly for a month. Elin ran her fingers along it. "This is not cosmetic." "It is surface." "This is a shear plane. Someone has been cutting." She pressed her palm flat against the wall on one side of the crack, then the other, and frowned. "The stone is dressed on this side. Look at the tool marks. This is not a fracture. This is a doorway that somebody filled in and then tried to hide by calling it damage." The wind came up the basin and brought the smell of the mud with it, and under the mud there was something else, something old and familiar, and my jaw ached at the hinge. I looked at the crack and I looked at her hand on the stone, and I thought, she is going to find it. Ten years, and she has been down here three days and she has already found the door. "You have a good eye," I said. "I have a good education. There is a difference." She stepped back and took out her notebook again. "I am going to recommend a full structural review. I am going to recommend it in writing, today, to the water board and the county and anyone else who will read it. If this dam is unsound, there are four thousand people downstream who need to know." "Four thousand people need the dam to hold." "Those are the same thing." She looked at me then, and her green eyes were steady and tired and not unkind. "You have been filing reports on this wall for years. Did you really think a crack like this was cosmetic?" I did not answer that. I was looking past her. She had set her satchel down on a stone while she examined the wall, and the flap had fallen open, and inside it, on top of the notebooks and the pencil case and the folding ruler, there was a brass compass. It was old. The brass was worn to gold at the edges where thumbs had worried it for a hundred years, and the glass was clouded, and the needle was not pointing north. The needle was pointing at the pack house. I know a compass needle when it points at a thing it should not. The pack house lay southeast of us, and the needle lay southeast, and the north mark on the dial was turned a full quarter away from the ridge. It was a survey compass with a rotating bezel. Somebody had set the bezel wrong on purpose. "Where did you get that?" My voice came out lower than I meant it to. Elin followed my look and then looked back at me, and for the first time she seemed uncertain. "It was my grandmother's. She left it to me. Why?" "Compasses do not point at houses." "This one does." She picked it up and held it flat on her palm, and the needle swung a little and settled again, and it settled pointing southeast, at the pack house, at the shut door and the three chimneys. "It has always done that. My grandmother said it points home." She turned it in her hand. "I thought it was broken for years. Then I got it repaired in Cardiff and the man said the mechanism was perfect. It is a very good compass, Mr. Rhys. It just does not want to go north." The mud under my boots seemed to tilt. Ten years, and the needle had been pointing at the pack house since before I was born, since before the flood, since the night my father signed the paper that put the water over the valley. A compass that points home. A grandmother with a house on the old road. A village whose name was not on any map. "Your grandmother," I said. "What was her name?" "Gwen." Elin said it lightly. "Gwen Pryce. She died last spring." The wind stopped. I do not mean it dropped; I mean it stopped, the way a sound stops, and in the silence I heard the water in the reservoir above us settle against the dam with a long low groan, and somewhere far off in the drowned street a door banged shut. The pack house door. Three hundred yards away, shut tight for fifty years, and it banged once like a fist on wood. Elin heard it. Her head came up. "What was that?" I was already moving, my boots tearing out of the mud, my hand out to push her back toward the stairs. "Up the wall. Now. Go." "That was a door. There is nobody down here but us." "Go up the stairs, Dr. Elin." She did not go. She stood her ground in the mud with the compass in her hand, and the needle was trembling now, trembling and swinging, and it did not point at the pack house anymore. It pointed at me. "I am not going anywhere," she said, "until you tell me why your eyes just went yellow."

Yellow, she said. My eyes had gone yellow. I turned my face away from her and looked at the dam wall, at the crack, at anything that was not a pair of green eyes reading me like a survey report. The wind had come back and it was cold off the water above, and I let it cool the back of my neck and I counted the gate readings in my head the way I counted them every morning. Twenty-two on the eastern sluice. Fourteen on the west. The reservoir was at thirty-one percent and falling, and a woman with a brass compass had just watched my eyes change color in the mud. "The lamp," I said. "You are looking at the lamp." "The lamp is in your hand and it is pointing at the ground." Her voice was steady. Steadier than mine. "I have been looking at eyes for six years through a theodolite. They do not go yellow from lamplight." "The silt in the air down here. It gets in your eyes and they water, and the light catches it." I turned back to her and I made myself look at her the way I looked at the county inspectors, calm and boring and slightly tired. "You should have that seen to. Both of us should. It is why we wear goggles on the crest." She did not blink. "My eyes are fine. Yours were yellow for two seconds and then they were blue again, and the door at the end of the street banged shut with nobody near it, and I would like to know what is going on in this valley." The door. Of course she had heard it. I had heard it too, and I had felt it, a pull in my chest like a hook behind the ribs, the pack house calling through fifty years of water. The door had been shut since 1924. I had tried it a hundred times. It did not open. It did not bang. "There is a pressure void under the eastern quarter," I said. "I told you. When the water drops, the air gets in and the ground shifts, and old doors move. That is all this is. You heard a door move because the ground moved." "That is not how doors work." "That is exactly how doors work when the ground under them moves." I stepped between her and the street and spread my hands, and I made my voice the voice I used on the county men when they came up from the town with their clipboards. "Dr. Elin. You are standing in a drained reservoir basin. The mud is unstable, the voids are unmapped, and I have a work crew coming down that stair in forty minutes with a pump and a load of timber. If they find a civilian down here I lose my permit and you lose your inspection. So I am going to ask you one more time to walk up those stairs." She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked past me at the street, and at the pack house at the end of it, and I saw her make a decision. It was the wrong decision, but she made it without flinching. "All right," she said. "I will go up. On one condition. You let me take a sample of the crack before I do, and you give me the original gate logs. Not the summaries. The raw logs." "The raw logs are in the office." "Then I will read them in the office." She crouched and set the compass on a flat stone and took a small brass trowel and a paper sample bag from her satchel, and I watched her scrape a curl of mortar out of the crack and fold it into the bag. Her hands were quick and sure and there was a smear of gray dust on her wrist. "You can stand there and look at the sky if you like. I am not going to run off into the mud." I did not look at the sky. I looked at her hands. That was my mistake. She finished and stood and brushed her palms on her coat, and she picked up the compass and her satchel, and then she held out her right hand to me. "Truce. You get me up the stairs and I do not put the words unstable void in my report until I have read your logs." I took her hand. The world went white and then it went very quiet. Her palm was cold from the mud and then it was not cold at all; it was warm, warmer than a hand should be, and where our skin met there was a snap like a struck match, a jolt that ran up my arm and into my chest and set the hook behind my ribs alight. My wolf came up out of the dark of me all at once, ears flat, nose full, and he did not growl. He made a sound I had never heard him make. He made a sound like a wolf greeting something he had waited his whole life to find. Her scent hit me then, and it was not the smell of mud or wool or the reservoir. It was pine and clean water and something like warm bread, and under that, faint and impossible, the particular smell of the drowned church at midnight, my church, the one I had swum down to every full moon for ten years. She smelled like home. She smelled like the valley before the flood. Elin made a small sound and pulled her hand back, and she looked at her palm and then at me, and her face had lost all its professional calm. "What was that?" "Static," I said. My voice came out ruined. "Wool coat. Dry air. It happens." "That was not static." She was rubbing her palm on her sleeve, and her breath was fast. "That went up my arm. It is still going up my arm." "Mine too," I said, and then I wished I had not, because it was the first true thing I had said to her all morning and it was the wrong thing to be true. The dam bell rang. It was not the alarm bell. The alarm bell was a great iron thing on the crest that we tested at noon every Wednesday and that could be heard in the town. This was the small bell, the old handbell that hung in the gatehouse above the eastern sluice, and nobody had rung it in my lifetime. It was a relic from the building of the dam, kept for the opening ceremony of 1924, and it had been silent for fifty years. It rang once, and the note went down the valley and came back off the dam wall, and the mud under our boots shivered. The compass in her hand spun wild and then stopped dead, pointing at the stair. At the gatehouse. At the bell. "Up," I said. "Now. Both of us." She ran. I will give her that. She did not argue and she did not stop to pack her trowel; she turned and ran for the maintenance stair with her satchel banging on her hip, and I ran behind her with the lantern swinging, and the bell rang again, and a third time, and the mud pulled at us the whole way and the water above the dam made a low grinding sound that I had heard only twice before, both times in nightmares. We were halfway up the stair when the sluice gate opened. I heard it. I knew the sound the way I knew my own heartbeat, the long hydraulic groan of the eastern gate lifting when the pressure behind it moved. It should not have lifted. The control handle in the gatehouse was locked with a padlock and the padlock key was in my pocket. But the gate opened, and the water came down the basin in a wall, a brown wall with a white edge, and it hit the drowned street where we had been standing a minute before and filled it to the rooftops. We reached the crest and I hauled her over the top rail and we fell together onto the grass in the rain, and she lay there on her back looking at the sky with her hair spread out and her green eyes wide, and I lay beside her with my heart hammering against my ribs and my wolf howling in a way I had not let him howl since my father died. "Your eyes are yellow again," she said, to the sky. I turned my head. The gatehouse door was open. The padlock was on the hasp, unlocked, hanging by its shackle, and the brass key was still in my pocket. Inside the gatehouse, where nobody was standing, the small bell rocked on its hook. "I know what I saw," she said. She sat up slowly and pushed her copper hair off her face, and her hands were shaking now, the way they had not shaken in the mud. "I am a scientist. I do not get to unsee things. The door, the compass, the eyes, that bell. I would like to hear your explanation." "The gate was old," I said. "The bell is old. The pressure found a way through." "That is not an explanation. That is a sentence with the word pressure in it." She got to her feet and looked down at me, and her jaw was set. "I am going to write my report. I am going to write that the dam is unsound and that the foreman is lying to me about something, and then I am going to come back down here with an engineer from Cardiff and a court order if I have to, and I am going to find out what is in that valley." She turned and walked toward the site office, and I got up off the grass and stood by the rail with the rain on my face. The basin below was full again, the church gone under, the street gone, the pack house gone, and the water was still rising, brown and patient, and somewhere under it a door was open. Then the office door banged open and Elin came back out with a paper in her hand and her face white. "The drawdown schedule," she said. "It is on the wall in your office. The water is not supposed to come back until Thursday. It is Tuesday." She held the paper up against the wind, and the rain spotted it. "Why is the reservoir filling on the wrong day, Mr. Rhys?" I looked at the sheet, at the dates typed in the county's neat black font, and then at the water, and I felt the hook behind my ribs pull taut toward her again, toward her warm scent and her shaking hands. "Because somebody opened the gate," I said, "and I do not think it was me."

The rain stopped at nine and the county men arrived at ten, and I spent the rest of the morning explaining a gate that had opened by itself. The county men were called Gareth and Owen and they had been inspecting this dam since before I was born, and they walked the crest with their collars up and their notebooks out and they did not look at the water. They looked at the padlock, and at the key in my pocket, and at the control handle in the gatehouse, which was at the raised position with the safety pin still in it. A gate cannot lift with the safety pin in. I had put that pin in myself the night before. I told them so, and Gareth wrote it down, and Owen looked at the water and said the pressure must have done it, and Gareth wrote that down too. Elin stood at the rail the whole time with her satchel against her chest. She did not say a word to them about yellow eyes or a compass that pointed south. She answered their questions about the crack in short, careful sentences and she said she would have her recommendation in writing by Friday, and then she watched them drive away down the dam road and she turned to me. "The safety pin," she said. "What about it?" "It was in. You said so. A gate does not lift itself with a pin in." "Then somebody pulled the pin." "Who has the key to the gatehouse?" "Me. Gareth. Owen. The county keeps a spare in the town hall." I counted them off on my fingers the way I had counted them a hundred times in my head already that morning. "The spare has not moved since 1968. I checked it last year when the intake screens were cleaned." She looked at me with those green eyes and did not say what she was thinking, which was that the list of people with a key was short and I was on it and so was she, now, because I had left her alone in the gatehouse for four minutes while I checked the sluice readings. "I am going back to the hotel," she said. "I am going to write my report and I am going to have a very long bath. And tomorrow I am coming back with my own padlock." "Bring two," I said. That was the last thing I said to her that day that was not a lie. The afternoon went the way afternoons go on a dam. I walked the crest twice. I checked the intake screens and pulled a branch out of the west sluice with a boat hook. I sat in the site office and wrote out the gate readings in the ledger in my best hand, and I looked at the wall where the drawdown schedule was pinned, and I thought about the dates typed in county black, and I thought about the fact that the water had come back on the wrong day and the bell had rung and the compass had pointed at my house. At six the day shift went home. At seven the evening watch came on, a man called Tomos who sat in the gatehouse with a thermos and a transistor radio and who did not walk the crest unless something exploded. At eight I went home to the foreman's cottage, which is a small stone box on the western shoulder of the dam with two windows and a slate roof and a kitchen that smells of coal. I ate bread and cheese standing up. I listened to the radio for the shipping forecast. I washed my plate and put it on the rack, and then I stood at the kitchen window in the dark and looked at the reservoir, and the water looked back at me, black and flat and full of everything I had put under it. At ten I went out. The path down the western shoulder is not on any map of the dam. It is a sheep track that the county never bothered to close, and it drops through a stand of pines to a concrete apron above the old west sluice, the one that was decommissioned in 1931 and walled up in 1952. The county thinks the wall is solid. The county has never stood on the apron at night with a crowbar. I levered the third stone out of the wall, the way I had levered it out every month for ten years. Behind it was a wheel about the size of a dinner plate, red with rust, and I put both hands on it and turned it the way my father had taught me to turn it, left then right then left, and the hidden sluice opened with a sound like a man clearing his throat. The water began to go down. It took four hours. I sat on the apron with my back to the wall and listened to it go, and the reservoir dropped a foot every hour, and at two in the morning the church roof came up out of the black the way a whale comes up, slow and wet and impossible. The rain had stopped and the moon was a day off full, low and white over the ridge, and the valley lay under it in the mud and the water in long silver strips like the veins of a leaf. I took off my boots and my coat and my shirt and I folded them on the apron. I took the old key from the string around my neck, the iron key with the teeth worn down to stubs, and I held it in my fist and I walked into the water. The cold hit me at the knees and then at the waist and then at the chest, and my wolf came up the way he always came up at the water, eager and unhappy, and I let him come. The shift is not a pleasant thing. It is a folding and a stretching, a breaking of bones that knit as they break, and the first time it happens to you it takes twenty minutes and the second time it takes five and by the hundredth time you are on four feet before you have finished your breath. I went down onto my paws in the shallows and shook the water out of my dark blond fur, and the world opened up the way it only ever opens for a wolf. The reservoir smelled of mud and old iron. Under the mud it smelled of the church, of candle wax and wet stone and the particular dust of a place that has been shut a long time. Under that it smelled of the pack, of my pack, three hundred wolves gone into the water fifty years ago and their scent still in the walls, faint as a pressed flower. And under all of it there was a new smell, small and sharp, the smell of a hand I had held that morning. Pine and clean water and warm bread. I ran the drowned street with the mud pulling at my paws and the moon on my back and the pack house growing at the end of it, three stories of wet gray stone with the chimneys standing up against the sky. The front door was shut. The front door was always shut. I had tried it in wolf form and in human form and with a crowbar, and it had never given an inch, and the pack house had stood in the mud with its mouth closed for ten years while I swam down to it every month and sat on its steps and talked to my father through the door. I did not try the door tonight. I did what I always did. I went around to the east side where the garden had been, and I found the flat stone under the old pear tree, and I dug it out with my paws, and I took the trowel I kept there and I scraped the mud off my father's grave. The grave is not a grave. My father was not buried here. He died in the town in 1948 with a heart that had given out and a mouth that had never told me what he had signed, and they buried him in the churchyard up the hill where the water has never reached. But this is where I keep him. A flat stone under a dead pear tree, with his name cut into it in my own hand, Owen Rhys, 1898 to 1948, and under the name the words my father said to me the night before he died, which were: keep the water down, boy. Keep the water down and the pack sleeps safe. Ten years I had kept the water down. Ten years of hidden sluices and forged readings and nights in the mud with a trowel, and no one had ever asked me why the reservoir was always at thirty-one percent in the spring, and no one had ever come down the basin and found a village. I lay down beside the stone with my chin on my paws and I looked at the pack house door across the drowned garden, and the door was open. Not shut. Open. Six inches, then a foot, the black gap between the door and the frame widening while I watched, and the smell that came out of the pack house was not the smell of a place that had been shut for fifty years. It was candle wax and fresh water and a smell I knew from the tunnels under the chapel, the smell of the old Alpha's study and of my mother's hands. And in the doorway, low down, there was a wolf. It was small and gray and old, gray the way Megan's hair is gray, and it stood in the gap with its head down and its eyes on me, and I knew it. I knew it the way I knew my own paws. It was the old Alpha's wolf, the one that had gone into the water with him in 1924 and never come out, and it was standing in the open door of my pack house with the moon on its back. I got to my feet. I made a sound, not a howl, something lower and more questioning, and the gray wolf looked at me and then it turned its head and looked back into the dark of the house. The door opened wider. Something moved in the dark behind it. Something tall. I shifted where I stood, and the pain of it went through me and I did not care, and I stood up in the mud of the drowned garden as a man with no clothes and no boots and the water running off me, and I looked into the open door of the pack house that I had never once got inside of. "Da?" I said. The thing in the dark took a step forward. It was not my father. It was a woman, gray-haired and straight-backed, with a face I had seen in the photographs in the chapel and a coat the color of old blood. She stood in the doorway of the pack house with the moon behind her and the gray wolf at her knee, and she looked at me for a long moment, and then she said, in a voice like a door opening on a cold room: "You are late, Rhys. The water has been down for three days. What kept you?"