It was now late afternoon and Brompton Cemetery was quiet. Streams of light cut through knotty old trees, bouncing off row after row of ornate tombstones. Bennett’s final destination stood just ahead of her, but she had another stop to make first. She turned off the wide central avenue and followed one of the smaller paths down towards the grand colonnades and catacombs that dominated the lower half of the cemetery. She weaved through the graves, following a route that almost entirely hid her from view behind tall headstones. She paused briefly at the top of one of the sloped catacomb entrances before walking down into the cool shadows.

Three bricks up from the ground to the left of the large, locked gate at the bottom of the slope, there was a wide gap in the mortar—wide enough for something to be wedged inside. Bennett eased a dull metal case out of its hiding place, adding to the scrapes that ran along its sides. The case was a dead drop. It was also an early warning system, and a trap. She opened the thin lid and checked that the small piece of paper she’d left inside weeks ago was still there. It was. If it hadn’t been, she’d know that someone was watching her as closely as she was watching Knox. And whoever it was would have come into possession of something that looked like a long string of code but which, after hours spent trying to decrypt it, would reveal itself to be completely meaningless.

She put the case back, walked up into the warm sun, and headed through the cemetery to the sandstone cross that stood just inside the northern entrance. The headstone had weathered over the years, but the inscription on it was still legible. It read:

In loving memory of Emmeline Pankhurst, wife of RM Pankhurst LLD, in rest June 14th 1928.

People tend to latch on to the heroes they discover when they’re young, but Bennett was probably the only child in the history of Kansas who had chosen to idolise a British suffragette. The other children of Lakin had their choice of brave pioneers and nation builders to look up to. Bennett, however, had been denied access to this pantheon, because she was half Native American. And, because she was also half white, she’d been just as shunned by the community that could have shared hundreds of years of stories about ancestors roaming the Great Plains with her. So, whenever she could she’d take the bus to the nearest big town to Lakin—the ironically named Garden City—and sit in the public library for hours on end, searching through book after book for her own heroes.