He says we’ve evolved beyond revenge. Witnesses at executions always leave dissatisfied, and he would know, he’s seen dozens. But it’s not about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infinity of nothing-it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on the chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.

Do you see? No, I’m not sure I do either.

I wasn’t the only one suffering. “It’s like being born under glass,” the woman from Veracruz was saying. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

The Land Rover rattled through a huge sand-filled pothole on the coyote road.

“As long as we don’t break an axle we’ll be ok,” Pedro muttered, and as if in response, the engine grumbled, stuttered, stalled, caught again. Jesus, that’s all we need. Outside of Delicias, Pedro had to start it with a hand crank. He boasted that the old Land Rovers were better than the new ones, but none of us was reassured.

I affected an unconcerned yawn and reached in the bag for my bottle, but when I took it out I saw that it was empty. The tortillas were gone, the tequila was gone, the water was gone.

The kid from Managua nodded at me. He’d been twitching in his seat for twenty minutes. Jumpy little torta. Could be a sign of anything from schoolboy nerves to an ice habit.

“Güey, what’s the matter?” he asked in slangy chingla Spanish. He had a sly, pinched face with big green handsome eyes and a throwback Elvis haircut.

My type. A dozen years ago.

“I’m out of water,” I said.

The kid nodded, reached into his own grubby backpack, and produced a bottle of tap water.