It can’t all be over now.

“Ava, look,” Mira gasps, pointing out the windshield.

What now?

Battle tanks. Four of them.

Each sixty-ton armored vehicle flies a flag marked by slate-gray skulls and has a gun big enough to fire either high-explosive anti-tank rounds or a guided missile.

And they’re all pointed directly at our transport.

Dread washes over me, raising the fine hairs on the back of my neck. Our tanker trucks can’t bulldoze their way through this blockade.

Maybe I was wrong about the bandits. Maybe their intention is to eliminate the trucks, not steal them.

If they can’t get their hands on the goods, then neither will the Salazar capo.

Just as I’m about to grab Mira’s hand, thinking all might be lost, each truck in our transport simultaneously discharges missiles into the blockade. Before the tanks can retaliate, the trucks make a unanimous hard right, careering into the desert.

Is the cartel going to give chase?

“Keep trying!” Mira cries, spurring me back into action.

She takes the butt of her pistol and starts ramming it into the control panel. I take out my own gun and thrash the right side of the panel while she takes the left, ignoring the deep ache each blow sends across my battered body.

It doesn’t work. The doors are still sealed shut.

My God, what now?

Suddenly the red lights stop flashing. There are two panicked seconds filled with nothing happening, then both doors of the cabin slide open. My heart soars. “We did it!”

The transport slows, moving in a snake pattern across the pitted desert floor, making us a harder target. We can do this.

Mira and I approach the passenger door and wait for the truck to swerve left, away from our landing zone. The harsh wind whips the tips of our hair against our faces as we stare out into blackness. We’ll have to jump blind.

“Remember to tuck and roll,” I say, squeezing her hand.

I feel Mira nod beside me. “You first,” she says, pressing back. “I’ll follow after you.”

Just like we came into this world, I think as I cross my arms over my chest and leap from the vehicle, backward.

I push my legs up, my body forming a tight ball, aiming for the center of my back to take the hit on the ground. Right when I feel impact, I roll, dissipating the force of the fall.

Something large and sharp stops my frenzied spinning.

A cactus. The padding on the uniform Ciro gifted me took most of the spikes, but an exposed part of my neck stings like a legion of assassins threw tiny daggers into my soft flesh.

“Aeron, where are you?” I hear Mira call out my code name, twenty yards away in the dark, somewhere to my left. She sounds more anxious than hurt.

“I’m here,” I answer, breathing fast and hard as I shift into a crouch position. “Keep talking.”

I follow the sound of my sister’s low voice, careful to scan our surroundings for any pursuing cartel men or signs of our separated teammates. I find nothing of either.

“Are you injured?” I ask when I reach Mira, thinking of the sprained ankle she suffered when she jumped out of our bedroom window back at Trinity Heights a lifetime ago.

“I’m good,” Mira says hurriedly as I help lift her to her feet. “You?”

“I just lost a fight with a cactus, but I’m fine,” I answer, slipping my night vision goggles onto my face.

All at once I can see in the dark. My field of vision is flooded with hyperrealistic images, all tinted green, the color the human eye is most sensitive to. The goggles’ image-enhancement tech collects all available light—including infrared that isn’t visible to the naked eye—and amplifies it, allowing me to easily see what’s happening in a four-hundred-yard radius around me.

Which, right now, is nothing but stoic cacti and mountains standing their ground.

“It could take until sunrise to find the others. Even with the goggles,” Mira assesses our situation, fast. “We could be miles from their jumping point.”

Before setting off on our border-crossing operation, the team agreed that if someone got lost or separated, we would all meet inside the church at the People’s Militia’s headquarters.

I pull out my paper map from my waistband. Mira pulls out a simple compass from her vest pocket. Apart from my night vision goggles—Mira’s dangle broken around her neck—and our guns, they’re our only survival supplies.

We left our packs in the back of the water truck.

My stomach sinks—Mira’s birthday present was in mine.

There are more important things to worry about right now.

Like staying alive while traversing a hostile Mexican desert with no food or water.

Two minutes out of the vehicle and I’m already cold and thirsty. Without the searing sun, the nighttime temperature has dropped drastically. How long can we last in these conditions?

My best estimate is that we’ll need to withstand at least ten miles.

Oh God, is that even possible?

“We’ve got at least a three-hour walk ahead of us to the town,” I inform Mira, keeping the worry from my voice.

Through my goggles, I see Mira’s green arm lift a compass and point it south, toward a huge expanse of barren wilderness.

“Maybe more, factoring in the rough terrain,” I add, thinking about the cactus-strewn desert floor. My neck feels swollen, the little barbs I couldn’t pull out myself still lodged painfully in my skin.

And what about accounting for other dangers? Sicarios? Exposure? Wild animals? The possibility that we just screwed up our mission and ruined our last shot at getting to Roth?

You both must focus on the task at hand. My grandmother’s words come rushing back to me, all the way out here in no-one’s-land.

And what is the task at hand? Mira replied angrily to Rayla in the Montana grasslands on our way north to Canada.

Making it across this prairie.

I take a deep, powerful breath.

Focus on making it across the first mile, Rayla tells me now.

“Task at hand, Ava,” Mira says beside me in the dark. Rayla’s giving her strength too.

“Task at hand,” I repeat.

Side by side, we set off into the night, hoping to beat the sunrise.

OWEN

Since awakening from his semivegetable status, the Whiz has become somewhat of a motormouth. Sure, it’s a victory that Blaise and I even got the kid talking, but the issue is, he just keeps rattling away the same mind-numbing pleas from the back seat of the car.

“Let me go! . . . They’re going to find me! . . . They’ll kill us! . . . They will slice you open!”

“If you’d tell us the location,” I hiss through gritted teeth, “we could all keep our throats and guts intact!”

My patience is thin. Tightrope thin. It’s only hour two of our mission, and I already feel like I’m about to fall and crack before the Whiz does.

Tell us where you stashed the drive, you crufty runt! I open my mouth to shout. But I bite my tongue. Blaise and I are playing good Guard, bad Guard, and I’m supposed to be the one with honeyed words.

I take a few deep breaths, like I’ve seen Ava do in moments that seriously try her patience.

“There’s a reason you came running to the Common in the first place,” I say, switching Duke into autonomous mode so I can turn my chair around to have a little heart-to-heart. “You trusted us. And now, we’re trusting you. Help us end this.”