She was alone in the world. Everybody she had ever loved had been taken from her. Not by the cosmic dice roll of something like the Disappearance, which would have been bad enough. No, she had lost everyone and everything to the evil of one man’s ambitions. She’d watched her beloved father hollowed out by his impotence, by his complete inability to do anything about what had happened to their family. It was almost as though having delivered her to Kansas City, he had suffered a moral collapse, and could find within himself none of the resources needed to turn around and do what he’d promised to do on the day those road agents attacked the homestead. Instead, he had tried to content himself with the idea that the federales could be trusted to bring the killers to justice, and that his responsibilities had contracted to the altogether more humble end of seeing that she, Sofia, made it to school every day, passed her exams, and didn’t get into any sort of trouble so trifling it was barely worthy of the word.

Oh, Papa . . .

Her feelings about her father roared and rushed around her like the swift and deadly waters of the flash flood that had destroyed their party and the Mormons’ cattle in northern Texas. She felt torn one way and then the other, as likely to be dashed on the submerged rocks of her anger with him as she was to be lifted up and thrown free of danger by all that he had done for her.

She wasn’t sure how long she lay on the bed, curled into a foetal ball, racked by violent sorrow. She checked her watch and found it was well after one o’clock when this particular episode of unrestrained anguish finally abated. Fifteen minutes may have passed, perhaps as much as an hour. Undeniably though, she felt much better for having allowed it to run its course. Almost rested, in fact.

Sofia dried her eyes and rubbed her face with the sleeve of her hooded sweatshirt. She took in a deep breath, held it, before letting it go slowly, like an athlete recovering from a hard race. She shivered once, and then it was all over. She was able to return to cleaning her pistol. She methodically worked through the remainder of the process with the Magnum, before putting it aside to study the other weapons she had taken from JM Firearms.