Which city are you searching for Roth first? I want to ask. But I don’t, of course. Not here.

“We should all get some sleep before we break off and head out,” Ava says, fiddling with the folded paper map tucked inside her waistband.

Looks like for the next few hours at least, Ava’s course and mine are headed in the same direction.

And I could definitely use a serious power nap right about now. I’m either woozy from this height, the heat, or the comedown from catching up to Ava.

A thought strikes me, not for the first time tonight.

“Hey, you were totally planning on sending Duke back to me, right?” I ask, tightening my bandana. “Maybe with a little goodbye note telling me where you were going?”

“Who has time for goodbyes?” Ava answers.

Duke’s brake lights start flashing—Mira, signaling Ava to move. Let’s go!

My next words fly from my mouth without my full authority. “You really couldn’t wait?”

Ava’s bow-shaped lips curl up into the ghost of a grin. “You always say the future waits for no one.”

And with that she disappears into my car.

The side entrance of a multistory warehouse finally opens, and a man with a stubble goatee steps out, throwing up an okay signal.

“Thank Goodwin,” I say, relieved. While the gang—which I’ve dubbed Team Takedown—has been outside resting and waiting for Haven to sway her Austin contact to help us on the quiet, I’ve been wrangling the Whiz.

I left my parents behind in Dallas only to continue my unenthusiastic role as babysitter.

Now that the kid’s awake—and whatever drugs the nurse gave him have worn off—he loves to move. I refuse to cuff him or anything like that, he’s not a prisoner, but damn, he’s trying my patience. Every time I turn my head for one second, I whip back around to find him at the riverbank twenty yards away. The Trinity River is basically all dried up, a rocky wasteland. But for some reason the kid just wants to stare down into it.

He’s either a) got ideas to throw himself off the bank or b) has some serious psychological trauma with the water lords and craves to be near it.

“Hey, kid, it’s not safe to be out in the open,” I say each time, luring him back to our hiding spot behind an old hotel high-rise. And each time he stares at me with vacant eyes, then follows me, coltish, without a word.

He’s so scary silent now I kind of wish he’d start screaming again. Not just for our sakes—he could let slip more intel—but for his own.

Haven leads the way into the building, at least I’m pretty sure that sturdy figure is hers. We’re all practically duplicates of one another with our faces cloaked in military shemaghs.

Indistinguishable is the word of the night. No one can know we’re here.

I’m the last to enter the Common’s Austin nerve center, guiding the Whiz inside and quickly down a series of window-lit hallways. When we reach a dark stairwell door, the goatee man has us line up single file.

“Follow the light,” he says.

He flicks on a solar-powered flashlight and heads down four flights of stairs, then the line stops when we reach a yellow cellar door that requires a key to open.

What do they have locked up down here? Loyalists?

Stupid question.

Haven said this building is a Common supply warehouse, and we’re currently experiencing a most inconvenient power outage. A smarter question: How did people store cold foods before there was such a thing as refrigeration?

Basements. The coolest part of a building. And the best place to sleep away the blazing daylight hours before heading back out on the road come sundown.

I’m handed a small flashlight when I get to the bottom of the rickety steps and cross the damp threshold. Yep. An unfinished basement, borderline dungeon-like, with low ceilings and a hard concrete floor, crammed full of wooden crates packed with all kinds of fruits and vegetables.

“Impressive stockpile,” I admire out loud.

But before I can snatch a super rare avocado—I haven’t had one of those in years—a sleeping bag is shoved against my chest.

“I grabbed us a spot over in the dairy section,” Blaise says. “Figured we could kind of hem the kid in with the giant waxed cheese wheels.”

Blaise and I have come a long way from being adversaries, fighting over positioning in Rayla the Slayer’s esteem, to first-class teammates. I like to think Rayla’s proud, wherever she is.

The others start dividing into bunkmate parties.

Ava, Mira, Lucía, and Kano set up camp in the opposite corner, laying out their sleeping bags next to the chest freezers. Skye opts for a solo arrangement in the middle of the room near the root vegetable boxes. Unsurprising when you think about it, since the jailbird is probably used to having only her shadow for company. Ciro and Barend roll out their sleepers side by side near the stairs, their backs to shelves of canned goods. I mentally dropkick myself when I see Alexander moving a cheese wheel to make room for his padded bag in my section.

How does it happen that Ava and I seem to always be on opposite teams lately?

Ava and her team leave for Mexico in ten hours—the basement’s lively with muffled chatter about tactical plans and still-needed supplies. The word “weapons” reaches me from Lucía’s area, “proper gear” from Ciro’s.

It’s going to be hard for everyone to fall asleep, forcing our circadian rhythms to flip their sleep-wake cycle double-quick. But from now on, both of our missions require us to travel by night—not just for stealth, but to move easier in this excessive heat.

By virtue of the Whiz, my path is leading me elsewhere. Back in the Dallas hospital room, Alexander threatened to use an AI lie detector on the kid, military interrogation style, if he didn’t spill his guts, stat. Scared for the boy—Whitman only knows what the hell that drone was programmed to do if it detected he was lying—I stepped in while Alexander left to make good on his promise, and tried my own more human method.

After thoroughly searching the kid’s clothing and person for any hint of where he ran from—dirt under his nails that might home in on a specific region, a tablet or company badge stuffed into his pockets, a microchip still imbedded inside his wrist, et cetera—I ended up finding the Whiz’s stash house location by good old process of elimination. I drained what was left of my tablet’s battery to pull up a map of Texas, and then pointed to every city in this beast of a state.

I knew I’d hit the jackpot when the kid’s amber eyes rounded bigger than two supermoons.

Turns out, the goods are hidden in some place called Enchanted Rock, a pink granite mountain ninety-five miles west of Austin. Sounds mysterious, right?

The kid must’ve copied the data from Roth’s servers onto a hard drive before he cut and ran, and then squirreled away the drive somewhere on that peak. Tonight, Blaise and I are going to play a game of high-stakes hide-and-seek.

But first I need to say a proper goodbye to Ava.

Rolling out my sleeping bag, I keep trying to catch her eye, hoping for a private moment, but she’s dead focused on scheming with Mira and Lucía. For twenty minutes, she doesn’t even glance in my direction.

I feel my window of opportunity slam shut when Haven announces, “Lights out!”

I’m more than tempted to shout Ava! before all the lanterns switch off, but I crush that knee-jerk impulse, knowing Ava would hate having the spotlight thrown on us. Plus, I’m pretty sure one glare from Mira would put a serious roadblock on a private conversation between her sister and me.