But they’re evidence I just missed a fight. Between whom?

Maintaining a wide berth from the blood broiling on the concrete—It didn’t belong to anyone I know, I tell myself—I question if my sudden appearance will scare the locals. If there still are any locals, I think, spying more dark splatters of blood.

Something tells me it takes more than a masked stranger to scare this town.

“Best to stay covered,” I say, sliding up my bandana and fixing the bill of my cap lower over my eyes. I don’t know which side I’ll run into, or if an undercover falcon will recognize me and call in sicarios or Roth’s Guards.

Either one would be seriously bad news.

I bound up the stone steps and approach the cathedral’s doorstep with zero hesitation. Churches are sanctuaries in wartime, right? That’s why Ava called it a safe house.

Forgoing the civility of knocking—because, again, we’re in wartime—I go for the old copper handle that looks like a collector’s item, but the door swings open for me.

A man, both his hands wrapped in bandages, shuffles past me without even a glance. The heavy wooden door almost slams closed, but I shoulder my way in, to the surprise of a woman in a white coat.

A doctor.

“Lucía Salazar?” I say straightaway, following the instructions Ava wrote on the map.

The doctor looks drained. She takes me in from hat to boots, and I gauge from her shaking head that I’m the last thing she wants to deal with.

She says something quick in Spanish, and my ear cuff translates instantaneously. “You’re an American with the Common.”

I nod and she shakes her head again.

The knot that’s been forming in my gut yanks tighter.

I’ve never told anyone this—especially Ava, seeing as how the medical field is her family’s profession—but I have an aversion to doctors. One too many nights spent in a hospital waiting room, I suppose, doing exactly what that room of torment is named for. Waiting. Waiting for my dad to stop complaining about how the cafeteria printers got his order wrong, just so he didn’t have to focus on why we were there. Which was waiting for the doctor to come in and tell us if mom’s breast cancer was back.

I shake it all off.

“Tell it to me straight, doc,” I state, the opposite of what my dad would say. “What’s the prognosis?”

Am I too late? Is my team gone? Did they never even make it?

I realize the doctor doesn’t speak my language, but she must understand what I’m asking. She starts moving, speed walking across the vaulted entrance hall lined with shattered stained glass. “A member of your team is here.”

“Who? Where are the others?”

She doesn’t answer, and the knot in my gut mutates into a time bomb.

I am too late.

The doctor impatiently waves for me to follow.

In an exercise I’ve never been any good at, I keep my mind blank. No speculations or pre-visions while I jog after the doctor, past a solemn file of wounded women and men waiting to be seen.

When I get to the side room the doctor vanished into, I’m not prepared to see Kano buried under wires and tubes.

They removed his uniform. His right forearm dangles from the bedsheets, looking paler than the koi fish tattooed on his wrist.

The zippy soldier, always one to grin at death and danger, is not smiling now. His colorless lips are pulled over a breathing tube, a ventilator acting as his lungs while he sleeps.

But I know he’s not just sleeping. I told the doctor I wanted the truth straight, bitter with no sugar.

“The tissue damage is severe,” the doctor says, via my ear cuff. She examines Kano’s chart. “When it’s safe at sundown, I will order that your friend be moved to a proper facility in the city.”

“Safe from who—what happened here?” I ask, forgetting our language barrier.

The bomb that’s been ticking—waiting—inside my gut finally triggers, blowing all kinds of feelings to the surface.

I feel scared. Full of dread. I feel like I failed already, and I only just got here.

I was too late.

The doctor puts her hand on my shoulder, the way Rayla would to bolster morale. “Your Common and the People’s Militia are heading for Monterrey now. If it’s your friend’s fate, his passing will be avenged.”

Roth and the capo aren’t in Monterrey!

I’m losing precious minutes just standing here.

If Ava and the others—who are the People’s Militia?—get to Monterrey before I can catch them, odds are high there will be more needless casualties in our ranks.

I can’t let that happen. We’ve all come too far.

I make myself look at Kano one last time, waiting for him to open his eyes, knowing full well they’ll stay closed.

“Gracias,” I tell the doctor, and remove myself from the room.

Before I race hell-bent for Duke, I make a quick stop in the sanctuary. Keeping my head down, I move to the altar where there’s a long table overloaded with candles.

I’ve never been one for religion, and I don’t know if this act is some sort of blasphemy, but I light one for Kano.

It’s the least I can do.

“Please don’t die,” I whisper. “We’ll get Roth, I promise. It’s all about to be over.”

I feel Rayla’s last words wash over me like a baptism.

It’s over.

I’m going to make sure that it finally will be.

THEO

“I was once an idealist like you,” Roth proclaims.

We stand alone at the railing of an extravagant balcony, the length of an Olympic-sized pool, staring out at the stronghold’s utopian grounds. The famed Salazar Reservoir is in the distance, its placid waters the crown jewel of the cartel’s holdings.

In Mexico City, water has always been a source of power. Since arriving here, I’ve learned that its ancient Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was built on an island surrounded by a vast lake system, before the city was conquered and then drained by the Spanish conquistadors.

And now, centuries later, the Salazars have found a way to control what’s left below the sinking ground, and what falls from the sky, as if it’s their divine right.

The reservoir would make a fitting stage for the grand execution, I think, suddenly inspired.

Sixty feet from the Arabian-style mansion, a long line of cartel lieutenants is positioned in front of a bed of manicured dahlias flanked by insanely tall Mexican fan palms. Valeria greets each lieutenant, her pet white tiger by her side, sufficiently drugged into compliance.

Each deputy kisses her ring, pledging their alliance to their capo.

Where’s the old capo, Valeria’s mom?

I’m guessing Valeria probably drugged her into compliance too.

“I thought all Roths are born realists,” I say, aiming to ride Governor’s suddenly talkative wave. I fiddle with the gold necklace around my neck, which was switched back on the moment I stepped foot on the capital’s soil.

Roth seems unconcerned about the cartel listening in on our conversation through our translators. But I follow his lead, eager for every morsel of information I can get.

“At your age, I was wide-eyed and callow,” Roth grumbles, staring down at all those shiny medals on his stately uniform. “Convinced that humanity as a collective could save our dying world. I believed in the power of the people. My predecessors cured me of my ignorance.”