Turn 4 of 7

Tell her the year is 2024 and see how she takes it

You take a breath and the air tastes of silt and cold stone. There is no good way to say it, so you say it the way you would tear a bandage — flat, clean, all at once.

"It's 2024. October." You keep your voice steady, but your hands are not.

"The valley was flooded in 1823. They built a reservoir over the village. Nether Hallow has been underwater for two hundred years, and you've been under with it."

The woman stares at you. Her face does something slow and complicated — not disbelief, not horror, but a kind of grinding refusal, the way a gear catches and will not turn. She looks down at her hands, at the blood still welling on her knuckle, at the wet wool of her sleeve. She looks at the bridge beneath her feet, solid stone, real stone, the only stone she has known for what she believes is an afternoon. Then she looks past you, at the reservoir, at the expanse of dark water where the valley should end in fields and hedgerows and the road up to the mill.

"That's not —" she starts, and stops. She takes a step back, and her boot slips on the wet stone and she catches herself on the intact parapet. Her breathing has changed. It is faster now, shallow, the breathing of someone whose body understands what her mind will not yet hold. She looks at the church tower, half-exposed, its window open and empty, and something moves behind her eyes — recognition, and then the absence of recognition, because the church she knew had a roof and a bell and a door that closed.

"Two hundred years," she repeats, and her voice has gone thin. She is not looking at you anymore. She is looking at the water, at the flat black surface of it, and her hand has gone to her throat.

"I was on the bridge. I was waiting. I — the water came very fast, I think. I remember it coming fast."

She presses her back against the parapet and the stone is wet and she does not flinch from it. Her eyes are wide and dark and full of something that is not grief yet, that will become grief, that is still the shape of fear. She looks at you like you are the only solid thing left in a world that has just dissolved around her, and she says, very quietly: "My brother. Is there — would you know. Is there anything left of him?"