Her knuckles still hurt from that last one, a foolish situation that she cursed herself for now. She should never have hit that asshole at school the way she did. No, she should’ve whacked him with a hammer fist, breaking his jaw with the hard, callused edge of her hand; like someone pounding their fist on a table to make a point, the way her father and Trudi Jessup had taught her to punch when they’d all been running from the road agents.

It was a terrible thing, but in some ways she missed those days. Not the madness of it, nor the raw anguish of having lost everyone in her family except for Papa.

Mama, Grandma Ana. Little Maya and her brothers. Her uncles and aunts. She would gladly have cut her arm off to avoid having to live through that. In fact, she knew she would have given her own life to spare them – the trail had taught her that. God had given her life, had given all of his children life, to be lived, and if necessary to be spent, for others. But standing here, witless with tedium, feeling as though she had been imprisoned within these walls, Sofia missed the hard freedom of that horrific time.

It was the same in school. Within a minute or two of sitting down at her desk at Northtown High, she would find her mind wandering. She had killed people. Shot them down as they raged and ran about during the gunfight at the Hy Top Club in Crockett. She had watched on as her father gutted two men, and she’d felt nothing bad about it. So it was just too much to ask, to expect her to sit indoors with a classroom full of drones and assholes, listening to the same old shit, day after day. And so much of it about a world that was gone. Gone. When were people going to get over it?

The glass fogged up again. Her breath had come hot and fast as she’d grown agitated, thinking about the kid who was responsible for her being locked up like this.

Scotty Malleson. A jerk. He had been on her case for days.

Malleson was like that. He’d decide to get on someone’s case and then simply wouldn’t give up. He just rode them and rode them into the ground. And everyone had to put up with it, of course, because his father was on the North Kansas City Council and an even bigger asshole than little Scott. From what Sofia had heard, if you got on the wrong side of Councillor Malleson, you’d find yourself kicked out of your cosy government-approved apartment or house. Your easy eight-to-six job in an office somewhere could just disappear, overnight. And then you were suddenly living in one of the emergency shelters or migrant camps, shovelling dead-people goo out of whatever suburb the city had decided to reclaim next.