For a second, there was nothing but silence on the other end of the radio. Then a voice called out, tersely: "Identify yourself."

Zubair dropped the mic on the desk. The heat had softened the plastic enough that it kissed the wood and left a wet mark.

Anselmo watched him do it, then looked past Zubair through the door slit toward Sera. "You don’t need bridges," he told her as if Zubair wasn’t there. "Men will carry you. Men will die for you. Why would you stay with these four?"

Sera’s laughter reached them on the river wind, short and bright.

Zubair’s temper uncoiled another inch.

He put his palm on Anselmo’s holster and pushed heat down through leather into metal until the pistol body squealed and slumped.

The belt buckle’s shine dulled. Anselmo’s breath came a little sharper then, not from pain, from understanding.

"You’re going to burn it," Anselmo said. "The bridge. The road. The map."

Zubair met his eyes and shook his head once. "No." He nodded toward the lane. "We’re taking it."

Alexei stepped around Zubair and touched the edge of the ledger with two fingers.

"General," he said lightly, reading the neat three-letter mark in the margin of a page where columns added and subtracted people like they were corn. "He must love your penmanship."

"He pays for results," Anselmo said.

"And you pay in bodies," Alexei returned. His smile didn’t reach anything in his face that could hold warmth. He closed the ledger with a soft slap and slid it into his jacket. "We’ll invoice you."

Outside, one of the near-bank chains found a hidden weakness and snapped with a gunshot crack.

The collar end leapt and whiplashed into the lane. The attached stupid zombie came with it in a clatter of links and bone. It flopped twice and found traction. It made for Sera with single-minded hunger, too far away to register the threat.

Zubair turned without thinking. He stepped through the shack door, lifted both hands, and made a clean circle of heat over the road like dropping a lid on a boiling pot.

The zombie hit the edge of the circle and smoldered. It tried to crawl under and came away without face. It didn’t stop.

He held the heat steady and precise until the thing’s elbows lost their shape and the body stopped having plans.

"Left bank contained," Alexei called, already slipping ice under the next anchor like a wedge. "Mostly."

"Mostly is fine," Elias answered, firing again. Two fewer men tried to add their opinion to the conversation.

Lachlan had Pablo by the collar now. He dragged him through the van’s cutout and dropped him in the open. "Tell your friends what you saw or don’t," he told him, cheerful. "It won’t help."

Pablo coughed blood and tried to spit at Lachlan’s boots. He missed. Luci put his paw on Pablo’s chest like a paperweight and looked bored.

Anselmo stepped out of the shack behind Zubair, his hands empty.

He looked at the wrecked radio, at the heat shimmering above the lane, at Sera’s bare feet braced on warm asphalt and the grin that showed she was enjoying her afternoon.

"You started a war you don’t understand," he told her.

"The I guess we’ll just learn on the job," she replied with a dainty shrug of her shoulders, completely unaffected.

He smiled again at that—genuine this time, weary, like he had just recognized a kindred stubbornness and could almost respect it. He opened his mouth to answer.

The river threw a log against a support and made the whole span ring.

Beyond the far tree line, a faint engine answered the radio’s silence.

Elias’s head turned a hair. "We’ve got movement," he noted. "South approach."

"Cartel?" Lachlan asked, eyes lighting like a bar sign.

"Sounds like it," Elias returned. "Fast and dumb."

"Works for me," Lachlan said, stepping to the bus frame to get a better look.

Zubair felt the engine noise as a vibration through the soles of his boots before it reached his ears proper. Reinforcements. Of course. Anselmo had asked for cousins. Cousins were coming.

"Finish the line," he told Alexei without looking.

"Already finishing it," Alexei said, bored.

The water at the bank thickened into something that wasn’t quite ice, wasn’t quite mud—just enough of both to trap whatever tried to climb.

The last leash anchor groaned and slid and then settled flat, taking the fight right out of the bodies still tied to it.

Sera stepped over the dead chain like it was a rope on a gym floor and let her gaze find Zubair. That small, sharp smile again. "Don’t let him run," she said, almost kind, and tipped her chin at Anselmo.

Zubair nodded. He didn’t need the reminder. He turned back to the man in the white shirt and watched him the way fire watches dry brush.

Anselmo shook his cuffs once to cool them and lifted his empty hands. "You won here," he said. "A day, maybe two. Then the General teaches you why bridges matter."

Zubair stepped closer until Anselmo had to tilt his head a little to hold eye contact. "Feel free to come find us," he replied.

The engine on the far side got louder. Shouts carried ahead of it. Anselmo’s men—the ones who hadn’t died already—started to realize the day wasn’t done and their mouths found prayers or curses, whichever they liked better.

Zubair rolled his shoulders and felt the heat answer, steady and eager.

"Elias," he said.

"On it," Elias answered, sliding a fresh magazine into place with the simple satisfaction of a man restocking a shelf. "When they crest."

Alexei’s breath fogged in the shack’s doorway for one second; he cut the cold off again, efficient. "We should keep him," he said, tilting his head at Anselmo. "He knows where the rest of the teeth are."

"Keep me and cousins keep coming," Anselmo said. "Let me go and cousins keep coming."

"So helpful," Alexei deadpanned. "It’s almost like you want to live."

Zubair didn’t answer either of them. He watched the south approach open between the trees and felt his creature lift its head with a pleased, simple thought: protect.

He looked at Sera one more time, at the way Luci leaned into her leg and the way she had tilted her weight to her toes like she wanted to meet the next minute halfway and bite it.

Pablo tried to roll under the bus. Lachlan toed him back into the open like you do a lazy dog. "Nah," he told him, friendly. "We’re all watching now."

The first cartel truck made the turn onto the bridge road at speed, dirty light bars taped across the windshield, a welded cage over the hood.

Men stood in the bed with rifles braced on the roll-bars, mouths open, screaming to hear themselves.

Elias’s rifle barked once and the passenger-side tire gave up its air in a grunt. The truck slewed and corrected. The men in the bed wobbled and grabbed for rails.

Zubair lifted his hands.

"Let’s get to work," he smiled, and the heat answered like it had been waiting to say that all day.