The gunshot rang out, cracking open the sky and sending them all reeling backwards. Nene found herself on her bottom on the ground, her hands in the sawdust as she braced from falling further, her eyes somehow pinned on Juan. He had spun backwards in the instant the bullet hit, turning a full revolution like a drunken dancer until he came back to where he had begun. He swayed for a moment, his head beginning to loll, the men around him all cowering on the ground, their hands over their heads.

Nene looked in horror back at her brothers – Vale and Señor Martin on the steps; Montez still on his horse with the rifle aimed level at Juan’s head. For a moment she was too terrified even to gasp, knowing there was another cartridge in the barrel, seeing how her brother’s finger twitched at the trigger.

She heard screams – shrill white sounds that shredded the air – and it was several full moments before she realized they were coming from her; that her feet were moving and she was scrambling up again, hurtling forwards and launching herself towards the slowly toppling figure of her best friend’s father.

‘Nene!’ Vale barked, looking shocked and then furious. ‘Get away from here!’

‘What have you done?’ she screamed, ragging her vocal cords as Juan Esperanza’s knees buckled and his full weight – though meagre for a man, still far more than hers – toppled forwards. She fell awkwardly, one leg pinned beneath her as she tried to grapple with him, to stop the hot blood flow that was now pumping onto her, the ground, everywhere.

Vale was there in a flash, throwing the dying man off her and roughly dragging her out as though the spectacle was unseemly. She thrashed and fought him, but even through her flailing arms and whip-crack hair, she saw Juan Esperanza on his back, one leg bent at a hideous angle, his breath coming in shallow rasps, his eyes fixed on an unseen point in the beautiful bruised sky.

Santi. What would she tell Santi? Who would tell him? He was in Oviedo still, working with his uncle, sending home the money his father had not been able to earn here. She had not seen him in four years and communication had been almost impossible, but they had exchanged a few letters, thanks to the help of a few men from his district when they travelled north for the harvest. In the last one, he had promised to place his beloved shark tooth in their secret hiding place as the signal he was back, and every day she checked it, and every day her loneliness grew. And now . . . Now the tears raged down her cheeks as she thought of his mother alone in their tiny shack in the pueblo blanco, waiting for her husband to return. She kicked and bit harder against her brother’s vice-like grip, knowing she had to go to her and tell her herself; his mother had to hear it from her – that she was sorry she hadn’t stopped it, sorry she hadn’t saved him, sorry she was a Mendoza.