His daughter led both horses over: his own and her smaller gray pony.

"Dad, is it lunchtime yet?" she asked with just a slight trace of an Australian accent, a legacy of eighteen months in the refugee camp outside Sydney that had given all his children a flat, nasal way of speaking that sounded harsh and alien to his ears. He did not bother to correct them, however, certain that within a few short years they would have adapted to the local Texan drawl. Of course that was just as foreign to Miguel, but at least it was familiar.

Not that he had anything against Australia. Life had not been so bad there, he had to admit. Certainly not as hazardous as it had been on Miss Julianne's boat. His family had shelter and food, and the children were schooled properly while the adults worked six days a week on government projects. Agricultural work mostly but also some rail construction for the army in the last couple of months. But as the world had slowly, painfully returned to… well, not to normal… as the world had settled, say, after the madness of the Disappearance, Miguel and his wife had finally begun to look beyond the end of each day, to think about the future as something more than a food handout and a cot in a refugee camp.

"Papa? Lunch?"

"Lunchtime will come and go without us noticing on this trip, biggest sister," he quipped, but the classical reference was lost on her. Sofia probably had no idea who John Wayne was. For Miguel, he was still the vaquero's vaquero.

She pulled a face at him and produced an apple from her saddlebag, crunching into it, then dramatically rolling her eyes as the pony implored her to share the good times. Miguel unhitched his mount and swung up into the saddle, taking a moment to enjoy the view across his land. Or what would be his land. There was a powerful difference, he had to admit, between laboring for a bossman and pouring your sweat into soil that you could call your own. Acres of greensward swayed in a gentle breeze, rippling downslope to fields of genetically modified spinach and silverbeet and durum wheat in the back ninety, the new strains growing at a greatly accelerated rate and for longer each year, increasing the yield of his holdings at least threefold. They could handle the harsh cold and heat of Texas far better than the pre-Wave crops could. And if there were any problems with them, Miguel had not noticed yet.

He was not much fussed about the GM crops himself. Whatever worked for his family was an unqualified good in his estimation, although he knew that the Greens in both the national Congress and the Washington statehouse were forever conniving to ban the wonder plants. He shook his head as he nudged the horse away from the old wooden fence. Why would they do that? It was madness when the country had so much trouble feeding itself now. Not through a lack of good land or seed stock but from want of experienced farmers and the-what was the word?-the infrastructures to harvest and deliver crops to market. Finding parts for the farm equipment was a hit-or-miss affair. And once the crops were harvested, moving them from the farm gate to the grain silos was often a matter of long horse-drawn convoys, which in this part of the country were liable to be set upon by bandits.

Sofia ambled up beside him, and he felt his heart swell with pride at her ease on the horse and the straightness of her back. She was a good child and would be a fine woman in a few years. He would be needing his shotgun, especially as the district filled up with more settlers, as surely it must. For now they shared the valley with just a handful of families, at least half of them, like him, hailing from abroad. He liked the Poles the best. They were quiet, hardy folk from good farming stock. The Yankees who had moved here from Seattle, in contrast, though pleasant people, were softhearted, soft-handed fools when it came to the ways of the land. They had a lot of funny ideas about the land, which they called Mother Earth or some equally silly-sounding name. Gay something or other.

They were forever at odds with the resettlement authorities over Seattle's insistence that a certain percentage of their crops be the new genetically modified strains. Instead they harangued the inspectors and overseers who came through every few months to be allowed to experiment with their crazy ideas about organic this and biodynamic that. And they were absolutely horrified by the deer hunt that had taken place on Miguel's ranch last fall, riding over to personally protest his murderous ways. When Sofia ran up, covered in blood and gore, and held up the ten-point white-tail she had bagged and dressed that day, one of the folks from Seattle actually fainted. One of the men.

Miguel did not expect them to last.

"What are you smiling about, Papa?" she asked as she finished the apple.

"Nothing," he said contentedly. He was truly at home. The ranch was coming into its own. His herds were expanding, fattened on the lush grazing lands. Even the old apple orchards back at the hacienda seemed to be doing well enough, producing a palatable cider that made Mariela's roadside watering hole very popular with the other settler families. The corn whiskey from his other crops didn't hurt matters, either.

Prosperity beckoned, he thought, patting his horse. Her ears flicked up, eyes darting skyward. She jerked at the bit, pulling at the reins in his hand.

"Easy," Miguel whispered in his native tongue. "Easy."

And then he could hear it, too, the rapid pop and crack of gunfire. A gallon of ice-cold water seemed to sluice into his stomach. The noise reminded him of hail on the tin roof of his toolshed, but he was all too familiar with the sound of weapons fire. Could the uncles be leading a practice shoot for the younger boys? They all practiced frequently with their weapons, but that was usually after dinner and the shots were controlled, designed to improve marksmanship. This was rapid, indiscriminate fire.

Trouble, he thought.

He quickly rode up the small hill blocking his view of the homestead and dismounted before the crest. Sofia followed, unable to conceal the worry on her face. She held the horses while her father inched up to the ridgeline. There were more pops, and he thought he heard screams. With a sick fear twisting in his guts, Miguel pulled the binoculars from around his neck up to his eyes. He could already see a collection of vehicles in various states of repair parked outside the hacienda. Some of them were four-wheel drives mounted on what the gringos called lift kits, giving them extra ground clearance. They were dirty, battered, and heavily burdened with a motley collection of goods. Plunder, he thought instantly. Twenty or more men had fanned out through Miguel's property, bearing military-style weapons.

There were bodies.

Miguel felt his innards clench tight as he focused the binoculars on one of the lifeless forms. Little Maya, no more than seven years old, lay on her back, staring up at the gray late-winter sky. Crimson horror flowed out of the ragged mess where her belly had been. Memories arose unbidden of him blowing tiny tummy farts for her while she squealed and laughed and complained how much his bristles were scratching her. Grandma Ana was next to the child, facedown and unmoving in the frost, a knife clutched in her hand. One of the men kicked the old woman's corpse as he nursed what looked like an injured arm.

Sofia, shaky and fearful, reached him from behind.

"What is going on, Papa?"

"Stay where you are, Sofia," he said harshly. His throat had clamped tight and did not want to work.

Screams drifted up from the hacienda: a woman's howl, his own woman. Mariela Pieraro. She screamed in her native tongue, lashing at her tormentors, who all appeared to be gringos, although most of them were so filthy that it was hard to be certain.