She checked her ticket – seat 20A – and was relieved to find herself sitting next to a young woman who smiled nervously at her approach, before putting her head back inside a fantasy novel the size of a house brick. Jules nodded brusquely, establishing the precedent of not talking to anyone. She stowed her bag in the luggage rack over the seat in front of her where she could keep an eye on it, and tried not to regret the six months rent she had paid in advance on her bed-sit in The Rocks. The rental market was so tight, with the city full of refugees, that if she hadn’t been able to stump up the cash she’d have had no chance of securing her digs. That deposit siphoned off a good deal of her liquid funds. And now she’d had to abandon the place, to get out of the city where she’d been tracked, and run north to the only people she could trust in this country, or possibly the whole bloody world.

‘Come on honey, it’ll be a great adventure.’

‘No it won’t. This sucks. This whole country sucks. I just want to go home.’

American voices. There was no escaping them. Maybe a third of the passengers travelling north were displaced Americans. The unlucky ones, those who arrived without capital or connections. They were probably heading north for the fruit-picking season, although they would probably be a month too late to score the best jobs. That’s why they were on this bus, like Julianne. Because they were losers.

The father and daughter, the angry princess who just wanted to go home, wrestled their heavy backpacks past her on their way to the rear of the bus. The bags looked way too heavy for carry-on luggage, leading Jules to suspect they probably contained most of the worldly goods of this woebegone pair. She’d seen it so often in the last couple of years, people moving around with everything they owned strapped to their backs. There was nothing unusual about that, of course. People had been living like that for thousands of years. But not white, middle-class Americans.

And she was in no position to look down on them. Not fleeing the city with her little go bag and her fake ID.

The big metal doors of the Greyhound’s luggage compartment slammed closed outside as the last of the passengers shuffled in and claimed their seats. She sent a silent prayer of thanks up to the God she didn’t believe in that the morbidly obese man with the apocalyptic body odour who got on last was not her seat buddy. Stealing a quick glance at the Tolkien fan next to her she smiled. The young woman had obviously had exactly the same thought at just that moment. They shared a conspiratorial smile.