“Is this a highway robbery?” Skye asks Lucía, shoving her head through the window divide.

“The trucks are under attack!” I shout, answering them both. “Get ready to jump!”

That was always the plan: when the transport slowed outside a remote Salazar territory checkpoint fifty miles from their stronghold, Haven would force open a hidden emergency door she knows exists because she once installed one herself at a Camp, then we would all jump out onto the rocky desert floor in relative safety.

I’ve escaped from a water truck before, back in Montana, on my way to the US-Canadian border. Jumping was my idea. But that autonomous truck wasn’t driving anywhere close to eighty miles per hour when I bided my time for a slow left turn.

This fall will kill us.

So will these bandits if they manage to stop the transport and find us still inside.

“We’re moving too fast!” Alexander insists.

“We know that!” Mira snaps.

“Is there some kind of Crisis Mode we can enable?” Barend asks, urgent.

Lucía listens to his question through her ear cuff, then shakes her head, rattled. “There is nothing,” she says, although I see her mind desperately racing for a solution.

A bitter thought flicks across my own mind. If Owen were here on this mission, he could have programmed the truck to stop.

“Maybe that will stop us,” Skye says forebodingly. I see the orange cloud of destruction reflected off the window’s glass before I hear the explosion.

All at once I’m slammed against the side of the cabin, hard, colliding foreheads with Mira. Lucía crashes against my stomach, knocking the air out of my lungs. My diaphragm spasms, and I groan as I struggle to breathe, my head pounding from ramming against my sister’s.

Just as Mira helps pull me to my feet, the three of us pitch forward against the windshield, smashing violently into the bulletproof glass as the truck recovers from the blast wave.

The transport continues to whirl forward.

“Lockdown Mode enabled,” an automated voice warns over and over, red lights flashing.

Every door lock on the truck seals with an audible click!

“They blew up the road!” Mira exclaims, her knee jammed into my back. “We’re penned in by the hills—will the transport turn around?”

Still painfully winded, I have to take slow deep breaths through my nose and exhale through my mouth, stretching my diaphragm, before I’m able to lift my cheek from the glass to face our latest challenge.

A mile ahead, it looks as if a huge bite—from some angry and greedy beast—has been taken out of the road. Blackened orange-red flames lick the starless sky, plumes of smoke billowing off into a windless night. Slabs of concrete from the blasted road lie strewn across our path.

But the transport does not retreat. It does the opposite.

Giant flat metal plates bust out of a compartment at the front of the armored vehicles, turning the trucks into bulldozers. The lead truck rams a busted chunk of concrete the size of a bus tire head-on, dragging it forward into the fire. Then the truck drops, disappearing from sight.

Are we driving straight into the bomb’s crater? The second truck plunges into the fiery hole, then the third.

A suicidal game of follow-the-leader.

Before the fourth truck initiates its death drop, I scream, “The cargo hold!”

The sentry guns on our roof have never stopped firing. The metal floor of the truck vibrates with each automated pull of the trigger as I make my way to the back of the cabin.

That’s when I fully notice the cartel robbers are not returning fire. Why?

The biofuel.

A small mercy. For a single rapid heartbeat, I’m relieved Roth traffics in such explosive goods.

“You first,” Mira tells Lucía, then clasps her hands together to form a ladder. Lucía quickly steps onto Mira’s palms and shoves her way through the narrow window that leads into the cargo hold.

“Hurry!” Haven shouts from the other side. She reaches out her gloved hands, urgently trying to grasp hold of us.

She needs to open the emergency door at the back of the truck. Time is running out.

“Now you,” I rasp to Mira.

But as I help lift my sister into the window opening, our truck plunges into the crater at a forty-five-degree vertical angle, sending Mira and me flying back onto the dashboard.

Somehow this latest body slam gives me my breath back.

Unable to find anything to hang on to, Mira and I slide roughly back and forth while the truck bulldozes its way across the blasted hole.

“Ava, come on!” Barend yells. He battles his way to the window and reaches out his muscle-roped arm.

But every attempt at grabbing hold of his lifeline sends me hurling to the hard floor.

Exhausted and running out of options and time, I feel the truck begin to clamber up the other side of the crater, and I know what has to be done.

I just don’t know if my aunt will let me do it.

“Haven, get everybody ready to jump, now!” I shout. “Mira and I will find another way!”

“I will not leave you!” Haven argues, pushing Barend aside. She grips the window’s edge hard for balance.

She means it, down to her very bones.

But she has to, or we will all be trapped inside this truck and the mission will die before it ever really began.

“I know a way out,” I lie as I’m thrown helter-skelter against the passenger door. “Owen taught me, in case I ever got into trouble. Now go!”

Haven’s hard-lined face pushes through the window, each deep crease around her eyes and forehead earned from a lonely life at a labor camp.

She can’t be captured by the raider cartel. She deserves a better death than that.

“Please, Haven, you have to get out,” I beg.

“We’ll be right behind you, Haven, go!” Mira urges.

“You heard them, they’re fine,” Alexander grunts, pulling Haven away from us. “The ideal time to jump is right now!”

“Let’s not get handsy,” Kano warns. He pushes Alexander, forcing him to release my aunt.

But then the truck levels out, back on solid ground, causing everyone in the cargo hold to lose their footing and tumble on top of each other.

The tanker truck has yet to accelerate after its climb. This is the slowest speed the truck will ever hit.

It’s now or never.

I pull myself to my feet, hissing with pain from the nonstop blows my body has taken.

“See you on the other side!” I shout through the window, then slam it shut, silencing further challenge.

One look to Mira, and she knows I was lying.

I don’t know a way out.

We give our team a ten-second head start, hoping that one by one, they’re leaping out of the truck’s emergency door.

Then, together, we start pounding wildly on the vehicle’s control panel. I don’t believe in luck, but maybe our frantic efforts will trigger something to happen. Maybe we’ll get lucky.

Don’t be a fool. No amount of button pushing will shut off Lockdown Mode. We’re trapped.

I watch helpless as the truck’s speed ramps back up to fifty miles per hour . . . sixty . . . seventy. Even if a door magically opened for us now, we wouldn’t survive the impact of the drop.

I smash the speedometer with my fist, crying out in frustration. “This can’t be how it ends!”