The outburst causes Lucía’s eyes to dart out the cracked window. On high alert, she edges to the corner and shuts the glass, making an already-overheated room straight-up suffocating. She then zeros in on Alexander, releasing a series of words in Spanish that doesn’t sound promising.

“Don’t shout. You’ll ruin us before we even begin,” Blaise whisper translates for me, his voice more stilted than usual, like an agent relaying top-secret information. “The capo and governor will have falcons everywhere.”

Falcons? I question with a look.

“Spies,” Blaise clarifies for me.

Immediately, I snap my attention to Ava, but she won’t turn my way. She has that serious, faraway look she gets when she’s here but not here, like she’s already off forging through the southern terrain.

“And if they learn we’re coming for them,” Blaise translates Lucía’s next statement, “you can be certain they will find us first.”

In an ominous gesture, Lucía covers her throat with her hand, and on reflex I follow suit.

You don’t even have to traverse the deep Dark Web to read the crazy stories detailing how the Salazar cartel’s enemies meet their end. No matter the elaborate, gruesome mode of death, one particular is always the same: their signature throat slitting, from ear to ear. That’s how they silence their enemies.

“And why should I trust that she isn’t one of those falcons?” Alexander accuses, scrutinizing Lucía. “Or a sicario, even? Sent here to lure us back to her family’s slaughterhouse.”

“Lucía isn’t a hitwoman,” Mira snaps. “She escaped her family and went north, just like you.” She cracks all ten of her knuckles and bites back a mumbled curse. “Lucía left behind a great deal in Canada to come here and do what is right.”

“Oh, don’t give me that bullshit,” Alexander bulldozes. “I did what you wanted of me, didn’t I? I offered up my son and gave you a stage to publicly condemn my father. I did what was right.”

Alexander shifts his black eyes to Mira for the first time, in a complete stare-down. Neither of them blinks. “The last time I listened to you, Theo was stolen from me,” he says. “So forgive me if I don’t trust anything you or your Salazar friend have to say.”

Mira’s poker face collapses, exposing all her raw hurt and rage, and it suddenly feels pivotal that a barrier should be put between them, posthaste. I make a move, but Ava gets there first. She whispers something short in her sister’s ear, causing Mira’s eyes to shoot to her wristwatch, then toward the door. Without another word, the trio heads for the exit.

“Ava, wait!” I shout, earning an impatient glare from Blaise. He pulls his hood lower, tiptoeing to the thirtieth floor window like real falcons could be out there in the sky, listening.

I wouldn’t put it past the Salazar cartel, actually—

“What, Owen?” Ava cuts in on my roving thoughts, fingers on the door handle. She finally meets my eye, and I spot that flash of disappointment again before she cements back into her inscrutable self. “I think you’ve said enough.”

Which is next to nothing, and therein lies the rub. A huge part of me knows I should have already offered to go with her. But the smallest—and loudest—part keeps my boots glued to the floor.

There’s not enough evidence—Emery would never sign off on a mission like this. And after defying her orders in the control room, I’m on thin ice. One more slip and it’s goodbye inner circle for me.

“The Whiz Kid,” I say, pointing to the comatose boy on the gurney everyone has managed to ignore these past few minutes.

“Keep it in layman’s terms,” Blaise encourages from across the room.

I take a big breath and let out all my thoughts in one go. “If Roth is bolting off to Mexico, do you think he could just show up unannounced? Yeah, the bastard has proved pretty unkillable so far, but he wouldn’t last a single day in Salazar territory without some serious help. The runaway governor would have to send out a bevy of secret messages . . . plans . . . to someone. There has to be a designated meet-up spot he’s heading for, and we can discover exactly where that spot is on the Whiz Kid’s servers.”

Ava’s fingers slide off the door handle. She cocks her head slightly to one side, like she does when she’s really listening.

“I know he doesn’t look it,” I continue, glancing at the Whiz, seeing what they must see. A boy with a body as narrow as a needle, his exposed wrists so thin they look like the small bones of a chicken’s wing. “But this kid’s the mastermind of the most sophisticated encrypted messaging system in the world. Entrusted to protect every single message and ghost call the ex-governor and the Salazars have ever sent or received and wanted no one to see . . .”

Like, for example, whatever the Salazar cartel has that Roth wants . . . A weapon? A mercenary army to take back Texas?

The servers could prove to be a greater gold mine than even Blaise and I first thought. As all good hackers know, information is power—whatever we find can be weaponized, put to spectacular use against Roth. A wave of jitters rushes over me, head to toe.

“When the kid wakes up—”

“If—” Blaise unhelpfully adds.

“When the Whiz Kid wakes up,” I continue, “he can lead us to the servers—”

“How do you even know the kid still has the servers?” Mira interrupts.

Fair point. But something tells me a coder’s gut feeling won’t fly with her or Ava.

“Okay, if he still has the servers and when he wakes up, the Whiz Kid can give us our smoking gun. Hard evidence that pins down exactly all the whos, whats, whys, and wheres. Then we can go after the son of a bastard with no more guessing, no more failures, no lives wasted.”

I hold Ava’s eyes, but her fingers twitch like she’s itching to throw open that door and set off to the heart of danger.

“I’m just asking you to wait,” I say to her.

“You’re asking me to wait on a kid that’s in a coma,” Ava replies, still skeptical.

“He’s not in a coma coma—” I start to set the record straight, when the comatose kid himself proves me right.

Out of nowhere he catapults up from the bed like a possessed demon child arisen from a long sleep, cursing and screaming, “They’re going to find me! They’re going to kill me!”

No one in the room even flinches at the zero-to-one-hundred resurrection. We’re all way too battle hardened.

The monitors start beeping like a crash warning and the door flies open, a disgruntled-looking nurse charging in, syringe in hand. “What is going on in here? This boy needs rest!”

Mira and Lucía have already disappeared into the hall, but Ava hovers for a beat, shaking her head at me before she yanks on her baggy hood. “Do what you think is right,” she says. “See you soon.”

Then she’s gone, and the kid finally closes his very loud trap, and is back to being passed out, all angelic and silent, lost in sweet, numb oblivion. And I’m left with Blaise and Alexander, the latter shooing out the nurse, barricading the door after him with a chair. My chair.

“That went well,” Blaise says evenly. My exceptional radar for sarcasm is subpar tonight, and I decide I’m way too wiped to spar.