She was still numbed by the drugs the nurses had given her. Not physically. As soon as she’d started moving around, in fact, she had quickly recovered her equilibrium, and tonight’s brutal wind chill sort of helped too. The Siberian Express, having sharpened itself on the frozen wastes of the Missouri River Valley, had sliced through her when she left the building, honing all of her senses.

Sofia’s psyche, however, was numb, allowing her to reflect on her father’s death as well as the idea of poor Maive Aronson plugged via a tangle of tubes into the life-support machines in intensive care. She wished she’d been able to say goodbye to Maive. But she could afford no regrets.

Sofia Pieraro was not a stupid girl. She realised that something far worse than regret lay ahead for her. She knew that howling grief and loss and a feeling of tumbling end over end into a pitch-black chasm all awaited her soon enough.

At fifteen, she was not the simple farm girl she would surely have grown up to be had the Wave not arrived to sweep destruction across the globe. She would cope with whatever came, because she always had. She remembered very little else in her life. Sofia Pieraro had escaped the first moments of la colapso when Acapulco fell into madness. She had sailed halfway around the world, battling pirates. She had worked on the refugee farms in Australia, and gone to school there with children whose stories were every bit as fantastic as her own. She had helped make the family farm in Texas, the one the federales had told them would be theirs forever one day, into a great success. She had seen that promise snatched away by Blackstone’s road agents. She had seen her family murdered. She had trekked over a thousand miles with her father and Maive and her people. She had survived more banditry on the way, and the great flood, constant deprivation, and once even an attack from a giant pack of wolves on the outskirts of Tulsa. Sofia Pieraro might have appeared to be nothing more than a young girl to somebody like this taxi driver, but she had lived and learned enough for four or five lifetimes in the last four or five years alone.

She would survive her grief. But Jackson Blackstone would not survive her determination to settle with him.

*

The cab struggled down Highway 210, west towards Interstate 435. The driver took his own sweet time, saying he was fearful that the snow-clotted roads might pitch him into the median, where they could run out of gas and freeze to death. Sofia shrugged. She’d heard that freezing to death was not a bad way to go if you had to go.