In her ‘go’ bag, Julianne had fifteen hundred dollars in local currency, two changes of clothes, a first-aid kit, and three plastic cards, two of them credit cards, one an international driver’s license, establishing her identity as ‘Julia Black’, a British woman, a resident of Florida, when the Wave removed all human life from that part of the North American continent. ‘Julia’ had been spared being turned into apocalyptic blood pudding by virtue of being on holiday in Spain with her husband. (In fact, Julia Black’s earthly remains were almost certainly staining the couch, carpet, toilet, or whatever, of her Miami home.) The sudden disappearance of more than three hundred million Americans like Mrs Black was a boon to the likes of Lady Julianne Balwyn. That is, to those individuals who, through misadventure and a certain moral flexibility, often found themselves in need of a spare identity and disinclined to let good manners prevent them from stealing one from the mysteriously departed. It wasn’t like the Disappeared were using them anymore, and of course the great majority of people lived their lives as unknowns anyway, dying in that same useful state.

Jules swung the small backpack over her shoulder as she stepped up into the Greyhound, departing the bus terminal at the city end of Oxford Street for Brisbane, a thousand miles to the north. She wished she had a gun in the bag. She wished she had more money. She really wished she wasn’t climbing on board a fucking Greyhound and riding the pooch for the next twenty-four hours in the company of fifty or so lumpen proles smelling of fast food and existential failure. But she couldn’t afford a plane ticket all the way to Darwin and at any rate security at the airports and train stations was much tougher than on the bus routes. A series of Jemaah Islamiyah suicide bombings a couple of years back had seen to that. She didn’t imagine the local wallopers would break a sweat investigating the death of a small-time crim, but she was developing a healthy paranoia about Cesky’s ability to hunt her down.