From the day Estella was born, some twenty years earlier, in the small southern town of Chocan, many things were preordained. That she would be poor, that she would have straight black hair. That she would press perfect tortillas by the age of six and that when it came to crossing into the US in search of whatever brand of American dream she might be chasing, the Sonoran Desert, hottest and most desolate of the four deserts of south-western America, would be her entry point. To be fair, this was less a question of fate, and more one of geography. The Sonoran Desert was simply the closest. That she chose to cross it in summer with the ground temperature peaking at 115 degrees was naivety. The rest was just plain bad luck.

Half a mile from the base of the mountain, not far from where Estella is winding her way north, the rainfall is now much less intense. Already the inch is down to a lousy centimetre which soon dwindles to a pathetic millimetre until the downpour is represented by nothing more than a smell, the wistful aftermath of moisture in the air. The rain had fallen so close – just not close enough. In the way that a speeding bullet has the velocity to tear through the heart of one man, but will drop harmlessly at the foot of the next, so too does the rain peter out just before it can be any use to Estella or the three men she is travelling with.