“The cartel men were your marks!” Alexander rebukes, shaking his head at Barend and Kano like they’re amateurs. “If he called us in . . .”

“We took out both of them!” Kano insists, gesturing to the bodies on the pavement.

“A woman,” Barend reports. “In the south tower. She’s in plain clothes. No confirmation of a weapon.”

Kano starts to move toward the bridge, but Lucía grabs his arm. “No, let me,” she says.

It takes two seconds for Kano to get the message in English, and he nods, holstering his gun.

Lucía looks up to Haven. “A brick, please. Quick.”

Haven descends the ladder, passing Lucía a bar worth a whole year’s tuition at Strake.

“I’ll meet you across the bridge,” Lucía tells me, and sets off at a sprint.

“Our tactics are to pay for silence now?” Alexander admonishes under his breath, before barking orders for the group to scale the ladder and squeeze into the truck’s tank.

But Haven leads Ava and me to the front. “There’s room for two in the cab. Stay together.”

We nod and she helps us clamber through the high door to cram ourselves on the floor below the navigation panels.

As my sister and I sit inside the immobile truck, I count every excruciating second of the five minutes it takes the tanker’s battery to recharge.

When the wheels finally start turning, I grip Ava’s hand. This is it.

Our view is marred by the truck in front of us, but I imagine the south gate is about to open as scheduled, allowing the first of our line to pass through without complication.

Step five.

The illuminated tower comes up fast on our right.

We made it across the bridge.

And we’re gaining speed.

“Do you see Lucía?” Ava asks urgently, crouching beside me. “We can’t leave her!”

“Ten o’clock,” I say, pointing out my window to the blur of white running south from the border wall. I see a flash of the golden brick clutched between two hands.

It’s the civilian woman Barend spotted in the tower.

Not Lucía.

“I don’t see her!” Ava says, panic punching every word.

“We have to stop the truck!” I yell, scouring the panels for how the hell to halt an autonomous convoy.

Then a bang! outside Ava’s door.

Lucía’s face slams against the glass as she struggles to gain ahold of something—anything. Ava flies to the door and from a selection of bright neon buttons, manages to choose the right one. The window lowers and I lunge to help Ava pull Lucía into the cab.

Exhaustion weighs down my legs and arms and we all lie where we fall, listening to the screaming wind.

There’s barely room to move. But we don’t have to. The trucks are doing that for us.

“The woman will stay quiet,” Lucía whispers, and I believe her.

The less death we can leave behind the better.

I don’t know if giving the woman the gold was a bribe or a mercy. Who knows what led her to this isolated border crossing.

All I know is the plan worked.

Step six.

We made it into Mexico.

AVA

We fly down Mexican Federal Highway 85 at eighty miles an hour, straight as a bullet fired toward Monterrey, smuggled inside the final tanker truck in a line of five.

We’re surrounded by a blanket of darkness—the trucks’ headlights cut off the moment we left US soil. There’s not even the gleam of the stars or moon to light our way tonight.

Mira, Lucía, and I huddle around our autonomous vehicle’s intricate dashboard, studying the ultraprecise, high-definition Live Map. We’re taking full advantage of the high-tech navigational system before it’s back to strictly paper maps as our guide. For the last hour, it’s been just small towns and sweeping deserts with low mountain ranges edging the desolate highway.

Wearing tactical gloves, Lucía uses her thumb and forefinger to zoom out on the digital map, looking ahead to our destination—a small town forty miles outside Monterrey. The headquarters of the People’s Militia.

Lucía sought shelter there with her mother and brother for six months until the Salazars’ sicarios found them and they were forced to flee again. I wonder how she gained the militia’s trust, given that Salazar blood runs through her veins. How did she prove she wasn’t a falcon sent by the cartel to take the unruly rebel group down? Whatever the case, I’m piecing together that not only did they believe her, they accepted her into their ranks.

She points to the town on the Live Map, chin lifted, shoulders strong and straight in her sleek charcoal-black uniform.

“The People’s Militia will join us on our mission,” she says steadfastly, her words translated through my ear cuff in English, making her vow feel all the weightier with the repetition.

And if they refuse?

They won’t. Lucía will make sure of it.

Mira opens a small window that divides the truck cabin from the cargo hold. “Fifteen minutes,” she says to Haven, crouched on the other side.

“Fifteen minutes,” I hear Haven echo to the others cramped in the back among the bags filled with gold.

Dirty money Roth stole from his own state.

Lucía’s finger moves farther south, hovering over Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León, Mexico. Are memories flooding her mind? Thoughts of her family, her upbringing?

The industrial city lies in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental and, according to the map, isn’t choked with skyscrapers. In a different time, when I didn’t have eyes only for completing my mission, I would have loved to tour Lucía’s hometown streets and see how she lived.

Lucía ran from her city just like we ran from Dallas. Monterrey can’t be that much different from our hometown. Violence, class warfare, not enough of anything to go around.

She just had better views.

“Trouble,” I say, alarmed, pointing to a series of blinking red dots that just appeared out of nowhere on the map. They converge right where the highway exits the long roadcut we’re driving through, blocking our path.

“An ambush!” Lucía warns the team through our ear cuffs. “A rival cartel who dares to raid a Salazar transport.”

The worry that creases her brow tells me she didn’t foresee this happening. Who would risk challenging the most powerful cartel in Mexico? The payback would be unimaginable.

“I thought no one could stop the trucks once the transport was underway?” Barend shouts from the cargo hold.

As if to answer Barend’s question, the autonomous machine guns atop all five tanker trucks suddenly open fire. Bam, bam, bam! Rapid and ruthless.

“The vehicles are programmed to never stop, yes,” Lucía says. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t those who will try to make them.”

The cache of gold and biofuel in these trucks is enough to change the lives of entire cities—whole regions—if stolen by the right person. But the rival cartel will most likely use it to further their own violent means.

I feel an angry vein bulge in my neck, matching the one on Mira’s.

“Uh, team, what’s happening?” Kano calls out from the back of the truck.