Only people with choice but to ride the wastes alone told stories of meeting them and surviving. People like me.

With a sigh, I climb off the mule. I have no intention of lingering, not with an unconscious and murderous child bound and hidden on my vehicle. Another dose of the sedative sent her under when she began to kick and twitch at dusk. I didn’t like it, but neither did I want my throat cut.

The post is already ringed with vehicles; dirt mules in far better condition than my own, old delivery quads and charabancs, even a battered ex-army transport painted silver and black, the words VALDOSTA’S VIPERS emblazoned on the side. A travelling sideshow, no doubt. At least people will be distracted.

I whistle. The shadows move and a shape comes forwards: a teenager with a bald, patchy head, wearing huge, tattered gauntlets.

‘I will be an hour,’ I say, digging beneath my clothes for a bead. ‘I want the mule guarded well.’

The boy nods and drags a piece of gristle from a pouch to hold up in the air. A skeletal vulture sails down from the veiled sky to land on the front of the mule. I leave the boy securing the bird to the handlebars, while it stabs, oblivious, at its payment. Shouldering my pack, I hope that – for the sake of her eyes – the girl-child doesn’t wake.

Hat down, I duck between the sheet metal gates and into the trade post compound. It’s the dinner hour, and pungent century smoke mingles with the hot smack of planchas, and the odour of boiled onion powder and protein cooked in whatever sort of fat can be spared.

Folk sit in tight groups around the food station, smoking or chewing, picking crickets’ legs out of their teeth and gawking at each other’s plates to check they haven’t been cheated on their meal. The sight of the food, basic as it is, is enough to make my stomach yawn with hunger, after weeks of old field rations.

But business first. Glancing over my shoulder, I approach the door of Sorry Damovitch’s place.

Inside, it’s quiet, just those who can’t afford to eat and instead pummel their guts with mezcal. Sorry himself is at the edge of the room, shoving leaf fibres about the floor with his foot in an attempt to clean up some spill.

As I walk to the bar, one of the drinkers looks up: a large individual with a mottled pink face that speaks of hard drinking. Their straw-coloured hair is dark with grease, in a military cut short enough to show the three-dotted tattoo of a private of the Accord. As I pass, they push their stool back to stop me. Their expression turns sour as they take in my hat and the scarves that wrap the length of my throat.