From where she sat at the back of the bus, the driver’s death was a confusing spectacle to Emily Jackson.

She had a good view down the length of the vehicle from her position, leaning against a window smeared with the finger­prints of happy children. Her seat was elevated over the rear wheel axle, so as she rode she could see youngsters jumping and crashing about the interior, playing games and teasing each other across the aisle, occasionally throwing a ball or smacking a catcher’s mitt into a rival’s head.

Half of the other parents on the bus were ignoring their children’s activity, gazing out the windows at the Nevada desert, some with AirPods in their ears and wistful looks on their faces. Others were making valiant attempts to dampen the chaos and noise: confiscat­ing water bottles, phones and toys being used as weapons, or dragging wandering toddlers back to their seats. Forty minutes of featureless sand and scrub beyond the garish structures and swirling colours of Vegas was a lot for kids to endure.

When the bus bumped over a loose rock on the narrow road to the prison, Emily saw all the other passengers bump with it, the bus and its riders synchronised parts of a unified machine.

She didn’t have to nudge her son, Tyler, as they approached the point at which Pronghorn Correctional would come into view. Tyler had been coming to the annual pre-Christmas softball game at the facility since he was a kindergartener, and had only missed one year, when his father strained his back fixing the garage door and couldn’t play second pitcher against the minimum-security inmates as he usually did. Tyler’s familiarity with the journey seemed to give him a sixth sense, and she watched as he flipped his paperback closed, shifting upwards in his seat. No landmark out there in the vastness told mother and son they were approach­ing the last gentle curve in the road. Hard, cracked land reached plainly towards the distant mountain range. Then the pair watched through the bus’s huge windshield as the collection of wide, low concrete buildings rose seemingly out of the sand…

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