There was very little traffic on Front Street, mostly large trucks like Cindy’s, some of them pulling two trailer beds, reminding her of the massive articulated road trains she’d seen down in Australia. That’s what they called them – ‘road trains’. An evocative phrase, but accurate too. As best she could tell, none of the trucks in her convoy were pulling more than one trailer.

Her eyelids grew heavy and began to droop as Mary Lou ate up the miles. She had imagined Cindy would want to talk, but the trucker seemed content to concentrate on the drive, as if she understood that her passenger needed to rest. With a belly full of warm, heavy food, and snug in the fleecy cocoon of her new coat, Sofia wanted nothing more than to slip into a deep slumber. Yet she found it impossible to get any rest. Every time she closed her eyes, Cindy’s rig would slam into yet another pothole, bouncing her head against the side window. Pothole repair was near the bottom of the city’s list of priorities. The post-Wave firestorms may have spared KC, but at times it seemed as though it might just fall apart anyway.

‘Sorry, hon,’ Cindy said. ‘The roads are shit in this town. Always have been, even before the troubles. It’ll be better once we hit 35. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t just knock it all down and start from scratch.’

Once they’d pulled onto the Downtown Loop, the ride smoothed out. The dark shadows of the snow shrouded the world outside as they made their way around the loop until arriving on the I-35 southbound. They were rolling through parts of Kansas City she had never seen, past the West Side, where the city’s original Latino population lived. Now it was crammed with the latest generation of migrants. Indians, some Chinese mixed in with arrivals from a dozen other countries. Some of her friends at school lived down here, in the West Bottoms.

Friends. Did she really have friends? She wouldn’t miss anyone from KC, that much was certain.

She was vaguely aware of Cindy flicking off the citizens’ band radio, to allow her to get some rest, just before her eyes closed for the last time in Kansas City.

20

DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

‘Don’t patronise me, Jed,’ warned Kip. ‘Whenever you tell me I’m doing something admirable, I get a lecture about how I’m also being stupid and need to accept changed realities, or the situation on the ground, or some crap like that. Not this time.’

James Kipper folded his arms, creating a barrier between them.

‘I agree you’re onto something,’ he went on. ‘But the way we do this is by the book. You turn it over to the FBI . . .’

‘Oh, please, not the feebs . . .’

‘Yes. The FBI. And you let them run the investigation. If they agree there is enough to go on.’