She ate a handful of old, tinned fruit cake, washed down with a cup of metallic-tasting water. She was deep inside Blackstone’s territory, and could not afford the luxury of hot food or a camp light. Hunkered down in an empty house near the edge of Fort Hood, she had to be very careful about attracting attention to herself. It was possible, she had discovered, to move about the town during the day, but it was best to maintain the appearance of a dutiful servant running an errand. Having spent just enough time walking the streets of Killeen to build up a mental map of the place that she could relate to the actual maps she carried with her, Sofia preferred to remain in hiding. And this small, suburban bungalow, just one in a street that had been reclaimed from the Disappeared, was an excellent hiding place. The Texas settlement authorities were more organised than Seattle’s, and the entire street, and half of the subdivision in the streets around it, stood ready to accept the next wave of arrivals and settlers to Blackstone’s kingdom. There was no electricity yet, not that she would have used it. But water ran freely from the faucet and, praise be to God, it ran hot, thanks to the solar panels up on the roof. Even in winter they produced deliciously hot water at the turn of a tap. The first thing she’d done after breaking in and securing her new camp site, was to run a deep, steaming bath.

‘And I’d like the rest of you to think about that too,’ continued Kipper. ‘We have better things to be doing than fighting among each other.’

Here it comes, thought Sofia. The weekly sermon about everybody just getting on together. She could take no more of it. She was tired from the effort of sneaking herself out of Temple and into Killeen. If only she’d been able to take Cindy’s advice and catch the shuttle bus that ran between the two settlements, but little Mexican girls toting survival packs and their own artillery support were better off making their transport arrangements privately.

Camped now on the western edge of town, she couldn’t see the military base, but she knew it to be only ten minutes past the empty school over the road, and the golf course behind it. The golf links had grown wild in the years since the Wave and were surrounded by a high chain-link fence, from which signs hung promising that the course would reopen by the end of 2010. That was years away yet and Sofia was grateful for the lack of progress towards the goal. The wild grass and thick stands of trees would provide her with ample cover for when she needed to approach the fort.