She must be exhausted. We all are. Sleep pulls at my eyes, my body desperate to tell me I’ve been up for twenty-one hours and it’s had enough.

“Goodwins,” Skye says from the back seat, stinging my nerves to high alert. I whip my chair around toward the back windshield—panicked she spotted a vehicle, soldier, anything—but find only Skye and Lucía locked in a glaring match.

“Could you tell your friend to stop eyeing me like I’m one of those falcons?” Skye says, a sharp edge to her request.

Lucía shakes her head, raking back her sweaty bangs. “¿Dices que esta chica es una asesina? Los asesinos trabajan solos. ¿Jugará bien en un equipo?” You say this girl is an assassin? Assassins work alone. Will she play nice on a team?

“What, are you afraid to insult me in English?” Skye bites back at her. “You’re right to be scared of me, but not because I’m a spy.”

Before I can answer and pacify either of them, Haven shouts the word every one of us has been dreading.

“Lights!”

My aunt points to the horizon behind us, seconds before two headlights crest a slope.

“Ava, a vehicle, six o’clock,” I whisper to my sister, much calmer than I feel. “Two hundred yards. I can’t tell yet if it’s theirs or ours.”

There really is no “their side” or “ours” anymore. Not with this unauthorized mission.

Ava looks to me. We can’t let anyone stop us.

“Faster!” Lucía shouts, slapping Ava’s headrest to spur her on.

Skye throws off her seat belt, crawling toward the rear glass for a closer view. “How fast can this thing go?!”

We’re about to find out.

Ava steps on the gas as I twist my chair forward, buckling myself in. The bright-blue numbers on the LCD speedometer rise quicker than I can blink. Eighty, ninety, one hundred and one. Ava fastens her eyes straight forward, unflinching and single-minded. If this comes down to a chase, we’re going to win.

My instinct to shout for Ava to cut Duke’s lights and use the darkness as cover is difficult to bite back. At this speed, and with only the faint glow of the moon to guide our path, Ava would never be able to navigate this minefield of a road without crashing.

But we’re like a lighthouse. A damn beacon. A moving flare that signals We’re right here, no matter how much distance we put between our pursuers and us.

“They are closer,” Haven says, leaning forward in her seat, her hot breath on my ear. “We must do something.”

“An exit, one mile!” I direct Ava, nodding toward the off-ramp. “Let’s see if the car follows.”

Earlier on the drive, I counted eleven cars dumped along the side of the highway like roadkill. Overheated batteries and engines that couldn’t take the scorching sun. Nighttime travel seems paramount with these sweltering temperatures. So I cling to a quiet hope that the vehicle trailing us may just be a water truck en route to its deliveries, or an early morning commuter aiming to avoid the heat.

No luck. Not that I’ve ever believed in fortune. As Ava flies off the highway, veering onto the access lane, the spotlights of the stalking vehicle grow bigger and brighter, mimicking Ava’s every move.

“It’s a Guard SUV!” Skye yells from the back. “It must be going a hundred fifty, because it’s coming at us like a rocket!”

“¿Cómo podemos perderlos?” Lucía asks, drawing her gun from its holster. How can we lose them?

“Up there!” Ava shouts, and I immediately see her plan.

I can just make out the shadowy silhouette of a giant five-level freeway interchange a few miles ahead. The massive structure looks like a neglected Texas-sized rollercoaster in the center of nowhere, with its fifty-mile-high loops and stacked roads.

It’s dangerous enough to merely pass beneath these deteriorating interchanges. A piece of concrete as small as a fingernail could break off and kill someone from that height—no less the threat of the entire structure itself collapsing down on our roof.

But to go up on one of those decaying bridges, hundreds of feet into the sky? It’s difficult to believe even a vehicle such as Duke could save us from the fall.

Rayla’s voice cuts through my fear. I won’t tell you to be careful, because you need to be fearless.

It’s the only way to outrace them.

“Do it,” I tell Ava. And she guns it.

We speed onto an on-ramp at 120 miles per hour, a curved two-lane road that takes us up and left.

“They’re still after us,” Skye reports, climbing back into her middle seat, strapping her safety belt over her shoulders. She eyes Lucía’s gun. “Do I get a pistol?”

Lucía ignores her. With a seasoned swiftness, she checks the chamber of her handgun. “La pelea comienza antes de lo que pensábamos.” The fight is starting sooner than we thought.

My fingers itch for the security of my own gun, but that would be admitting we might lose the chase. I turn my focus forward, out the windshield, to what’s ahead.

What I see drops my stomach to my feet. Brake! Every instinct in my body screams. Brake!

A gap—an enormous chunk of missing pavement—cuts off our upcoming road. The empty space, a black hole, looks fifteen yards wide but it might as well be a mile. It’s a death trap. A losing game. And it’s thirty seconds away.

So is our tail.

“No way,” Skye says, incredulous. “How the hell did they catch up?”

Then the Guard SUV is suddenly right behind Duke, bumper to bumper, flashing its brights at us like strobe lights. It’s blinding, disorienting. Driving me mad.

We’re going to crash any second.

Twenty seconds, to be precise, before we meet the black hole.

Ava doesn’t hesitate. “We can make it,” she says, as even as her speed.

We’re going to jump.

We’re going to make it.

“Not a bad way to die!” Skye shouts, the most animated I’ve ever seen her. “Better than a prison cell.”

“¡Sin miedo!” Lucía cries. No fear!

Lucía and Skye let loose harmonizing roars, not from alarm, but pure lusty adrenaline.

The SUV’s horns start blaring. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

I wait for their bullets to start peppering the shatterproof glass.

Fifteen seconds.

I turn back to Haven, grabbing hold of her hand, as if our link could protect us if we plummet to the earth.

Ten seconds.

It’s then I catch sight of the flicker of yellow. Like a flare, a small flag of truce waving above the SUV’s roof.

Haven must see the color reflected in my eyes. She whips her head around while squeezing my fingers, hard. “Ciro?”

His buzzed blonde head appears above the hatch as the SUV skids to the side of the road, his long flagpole arms swinging desperately in the air for us to pull over.

“Ava, it’s Ciro!” I relay, uncertain if this information will make her brake. Or if I even want her to brake.

We can’t let anyone stop us.

For a brief moment I think she’s going to go for it and vault us over the gaping divide, but in the final seconds, she slams the brakes, and somehow Duke comes to a screeching halt inches from the saw-toothed edge.