She was unwilling to go into any greater detail. If French found out what had happened to her family down in Mexico, or even what had happened to her father more recently, she would call the police immediately. There could be no good reason why somebody like Sofia would want to return to a place that was the source of so much misery. Best let the woman’s imagination fill in the gaps for herself.

‘That would explain your accent,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard some mighty strange ones the last couple of years, pushing eighteen wheels all over the country. Yours sounds like you don’t really come from anywhere. Or maybe that you come from everywhere.’

It seemed a rather rude thing to say, but she refused to bristle in response. Perhaps Cindy was simply teasing her, trying to get on her nerves, to see how she would react. It was quite obvious she was intrigued, possibly even suspicious.

‘My voice sounds normal to me,’ Sofia replied with a shrug. ‘But what is normal? You are right, we hear many voices these days. In my class at school, there are people from twenty-six different countries. We have all of our flags pinned up on the wall.’

‘So, you’re at school here, then?’

Madre de dios . . . She cursed herself for having given away such a crucial piece of information. School children no longer lived the sheltered lives they had in the past. A typical school day ran until lunch, then everyone went off to their respective jobs, such as hers at the hospital. They were all expected to work, in the gardens, in the salvage efforts, in any position that needed filling, even if it happened to be shovelling the remains out of the reclamation zones. And as she had found out down in the Mandate, even to risk their lives on the frontier.

But there was no good reason why a schoolgirl would be in the Corrington Road truckers’ diner looking for a ride down to Texas, particularly not a schoolgirl like her. A Mexican. She might well have had a job washing dishes here until two o’clock in the morning, of course, but there was no way she should’ve been this far south, sticking her thumb out by the highway. She tried to cover the total ignorance of what to say next by filling her mouth with more potato.

The clink of knives and forks around them seemed much louder than it had just a minute ago. Cindy’s cutlery was crossed perfectly on her plate. The woman said nothing more, apparently content to wait on an answer. When the silence became difficult to endure, Sofia spoke up again.

‘I said I went to school here,’ she muttered, unable to keep a petulant tone out of her voice.