An IT genius who just surrendered to the Common.

He’s scared. Why else would he come running to us? I bet he’s read every incriminating piece of communication Roth has ever sent or received.

With an adrenaline-fueled pep in my step, I hop into my driver’s seat, downright giddy to hear the engine thrum.

“Right, where to?” I ask my copilot, peeling out onto the road.

Did Blaise stash the kid in the Council Room, the War Room, the Tower?

“The hospital,” Blaise says.

“Um, wait . . . what?” I gasp, my eyes whipping from the mobbed streets to Blaise.

That can’t be good.

“Yeah, I forgot to mention . . . ,” he states, all nonchalant. “The Whiz Kid’s kind of unconscious.”

MIRA

I used to believe so many things in this world were impossible.

Once, I thought it impossible Ava and I would ever make it out of Texas alive. That we would even reach the first safe house on our father’s map.

But we made it all the way to Canada, and back.

And so, it seems, did Lucía.

She was the first person I could truly call a friend, the first who knew of my existence and accepted me for who, and what, I am. The last time Ava and I saw her, we said our goodbyes in an underground safe house in the west Texas desert, certain our paths would never cross again.

We were all three of us unwanted and hunted, trying to achieve the unthinkable.

Come with us, I asked Lucía. But hers was a different journey.

“¿Encontraste a tu madre y hermano?” I ask her now. Did you find your mother and brother?

Lucía smiles. She’s nearly unrecognizable. In the months since we parted, her thin, angular face and rawboned figure have rounded and softened, but that earnest gaze I so remember her for, that invariable tenacity in her eyes, remains the same. If anything, it’s sharper. More seasoned. Ready for the new danger she sees ahead.

“Viajé por cinco estados y busqué veinte casas de seguridad . . . ,” Lucía answers. I traveled across five states and searched twenty safe houses . . .

She brushes back the thick veil of her dark hair. “But I found them,” Lucía continues in English, her accent making her voice sound labored, like she’s speaking from the back of her throat. She must have picked up a bit of the language on her trek north. “They were in North Dakota. Waiting for me.”

Relief floods through me. Ava smiles at this heart-soaring news. It’s a novel sight, and I take a mental snapshot to carry with me for later.

Good news, I have a feeling, will only become rarer.

“We found the Common in Canada,” Lucía reveals. “At a safe house in Winnipeg. Named Paramount Suites.”

One of Ciro’s hotels.

“But why . . . ,” Ava asks, her voice trailing off in bewilderment.

“¿Por qué te irías?” I clarify. Why would you leave?

Knowing what it took for my sister and me to make it across the northern border and back, I can only imagine how difficult her own travels with her family must have been.

Hers was a greater journey, longer and crueler, traversing three countries, beginning in a notoriously unstable region of central Mexico. Climate change spared no mercy for Lucía’s homeland. There, the war for life’s most precious resource has been brutal and unending. Where in the States, governors rule, capos seized control in the southern republic. Water lords.

When I first laid eyes on Lucía, I thought it impossible that she had made it through the impenetrable Big Fence that guards the border between Texas and Mexico. It was an extraordinary feat. An amazing risk. Whatever would bring her back here to Texas—to us—must be equally extraordinary.

Why else would she risk being sent back to where she began?

“Aquí no,” Lucía whispers. Not here.

She eyes the Guard standing watch beside the back entrance of the Governor’s Mansion, lit by the dim yellow glow of emergency lights. Not the Governor’s Mansion, I catch myself. It’s now the Common’s headquarters. Despite the fact that I currently live and sleep in the building, I still feel unsettled and unaccustomed to walking its once-corrupted halls, moving freely among the Guards beside my twin.

Judging from the pistol on Lucía’s hip, on full display, it appears her deep-seated caution of others has endured, like mine.

“The gardens,” Ava says, nodding toward a pathway walled with columned-shaped hedges, ten feet high. Perfect privacy.

Only moonlight illuminates the vast maze that forms the backyard of the mansion. The governor’s gardens were once the green envy of all, styled after the luxuriant grounds of Versailles.

Howard Roth once boasted that he was a man with enough power to build an Eden in the middle of a wasteland. Now his spectacle of countless groves of rare trees and precisely pruned shrubbery is withered, dying, and bare.

Ava leads us left, then right, farther into the labyrinth, down a tunnel made of arched trellises wrapped in wilted ivy and clematis vines. Past a row of overgrown boxwoods, she motions to a metal bench beside a dried-up fountain, the wide mouths of the ornate water jets empty and silent.

“Here,” she says.

Lucía shrugs off her rucksack and takes a seat at the center of the wrought-iron bench, which is still warm from a sun that set hours ago. Immediately settling at her left side, I briefly wonder how she trekked the thousands of miles it took to get here. Did she cover the distance on foot, the way we crossed Texas together? If so, she doesn’t look it. Her vest and trousers, both the color of desert sand, and her black combat boots, Velcroed up to her midcalf, all appear new and unsullied. Cutting-edge, even. It almost looks as if she’s wrapped in a suit of body armor.

Like she’s primed for a mission.

Sweat clings to me like my nerves. Overstrung and restless, Ava paces the short distance beside the bench, her boots crunching the pebbles of the pathway as she waits for Lucía to speak.

Though the power is out all over our massive state, there’s an electricity here. I feel it. Ava feels it too.

Change is in the air.

Lucía deftly cranes her neck toward the night sky, then over her shoulder, scanning for any unwanted eyes or ears. Satisfied, she grasps my hand and then reaches out for Ava’s, pulling her close. Turning her head from my sister to me, she keeps her voice low, softer than a whisper.

“I came here to fight.”

“¿Pero por qué te meterías en nuestra batalla?” I interject. But why would you throw yourself into our battle?

“I can’t lose another friend,” Ava murmurs, shaking her head.

Lucía presses her lips tight, her fingers working the wooden beads of a rosary. “Ahora se ha convertido en la batalla de todos.” It’s become everyone’s battle now.

In the center of the garden, no sounds from the sleepless downtown streets reach us. No distant wail of sirens. I hear only my heart pounding and my heavy breaths.

“I know where your governor hides,” Lucía tells us.

My head spins. I don’t know how Ava stays standing.

I gape at Lucía, transfixed. She stares back, bold and sure. “Roth is in Mexico.”

It’s so implausible—inconceivable—it’s ludicrous. Roth, fleeing into the territory of his greatest foe? Across his own impassable fence and into the southern lands he vehemently sowed so much bad blood and hostility against?