Zubair felt the ache in his forearms where he’d held the walls of invisible fire.

They didn’t feel like the screaming pain of an injury so much as the pain when a muscle is used too often.

"Let’s get our shit and go," Sera ordered, her eyes scanning all around. She was getting tired of being the prey. It wasn’t a fun feeling for either herself or her creature.

Something was going to have to give and fast.

The guys moved the way they always moved...automatically and efficiently.

Lachlan cleared the pockets of all the dead and collected the magazines and knives with happy greed. Alexei stripped the radios, earpieces, and maps wherever he could find them while Elias took any battery with a charge and put it into a canvas sack already labeled with his brain.

Zubair bent the ninth’s door wider with a palm and pulled a second map set from under the seat. He handed it to Elias without comment.

The sound of more engines coming from up the road was enough to make them work faster. They might not be close, but also not far enough away.

"Go," Elias repeated, handing maps through the passenger window to Sera as she climbed into the truck.

She collected them into her space without thinking. Almost as an after thought, she took everything out of the vehicles that she could. The batteries, the gas, if it was valuable, she wasn’t leaving it behind.

Luci vaulted into the bench and planted his bulk with the grace of a falling wardrobe.

Alexei took the radio in the rear of Zubair’s cab and cracked the window to snake the antenna back out. Lachlan hopped into the bed of the third and slapped the roof twice.

Tradition needed to be kept.

He was ready for Alexei to move.

Zubair circled the heavy rig once, assessing the burns.

The belly fire had licked but not eaten. He could keep it, but he knew well enough that it wasn’t worth the hassle.

It took a lot of heat to make a truck forget diesel.

He opened his hand, and the small flame he’d been nursing under the crossmember turned greedy. It climbed the line where oil had wept and shook itself loose.

The rig took the hint and decided to die properly. Flames walked the frame, found the hoses he hadn’t protected, and made them fail in soft sighs that sounded like forgiveness to nobody.

He turned his wrist and threw heat over the fence line like a sheet to catch any surveillance eyes that might be looking for faces.

The air did that desert shimmer trick, bending light just enough to lie. They had a minute. Maybe two.

He slid behind the wheel of the second truck. The cab smelled like dust and gun oil and the clean weight of Sera’s scent bleeding in from the truck ahead. He liked that more than was sane. He didn’t care.

"Let’s go," she called into the mic, already rolling.

He eased the clutch and tracked her bumper.

Alexei moved into place quickly, flanking Sera’s left side. In the cab with Zubair, Elias turned in his seat to watch their six with the map folded on his thigh and a loaded calm that made Zubair believe they would live through the next mile.

They hit the gate at a good pace.

Alexei’s ice had already gone to a skin under sun.

Their tires took it without complaint and gravel spat out around them.

The county road lifted in heat waves and gave them the long view—no trucks in the nearest hundred yards, dust ghosts beyond that.

Zubair put the pedal down enough to be rude and felt the engine answer like a grateful dog.

"Left at the T," Elias directed. "Two miles."

"Copy," Sera returned.

Zubair breathed once and let the yard fall off his shoulders.

He kept the heat banked under his skin where it belonged, a slow coal.

His gaze tracked treeline to treeline. The creature in him, if you wanted to name it, lifted its head and sniffed for the next threat.

He tasted something on the air he didn’t like. Not smoke. Not exhaust. The smell of someone thinking just a little too hard about something that wasn’t theirs. The way men’s minds lay out a field and decide where another man dies.

He rolled his knuckles on the wheel and let the leather creak.

"Talk to me," Alexei prodded, watching him in the mirror with the lazy attention of a cat that never actually slept.

"They weren’t trying to win," Zubair hummed. "They were trying to point us in the direction that they wanted us to go."

"Toward what?" Lachlan shouted from the bed, wind eating half the words.

"A gate we don’t open," Alexei quoted their dead captain. Dry as bones.

Sera’s brake lights flicked once—acknowledgment, not doubt. The creature in Zubair’s chest liked how she drove. She didn’t flinch, she didn’t lurch forward. Everything that she did was somewhere inbetween.

Elias tapped the map. "There’s a floodplain ahead. Road dives into it and comes out three miles south. If the bridge is gone, we pick our own line."

"Your ice," Zubair noted, glancing at Alexei through Elias’ window.

"My ice," Alexei affirmed, mouth pulling into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "Always wanted to walk a river to spite men with tolls."

"Keep your heads down for the next half mile," Elias warned, tone flattening into business. "Tree line breaks. No cover. If they’re going to mark us for the next team, that’s where they’ll try."

A hawk lifted off a fence post and wheeled over the field with lazy insult. Zubair watched its shadow cross the blacktop and vanish into grass.

Ahead, the road kicked right and slid toward a low, gleaming smear that shimmered across the horizon like a mirror laid wrong. The floodplain. Sun off water. He felt the temperature fall half a breath through the window crack; the air over big water always told the truth.

"Eyes up," Sera warned, her voice calm enough to steady a shaking table. "Something is putting Luci on edge."

Zubair lifted his hand off the wheel for just a second and flexed his fingers like a pianist about to drop into a piece. Heat woke along his bones and settled back to wait.

From the left hedgerow, a flash of chrome winked once, like a man’s scope catching sunlight...

And the cab filled with a sharp, metallic ping as a round smacked the hood and ricocheted into the ditch.

Zubair leaned into the throttle and drifted half a lane to change the angle, eyes already mapping where the shooter had to be under those cottonwoods...

And the second shot came, lower, meaner, angling for the radiator as the floodplain’s first sheet of brown water slid up to swallow the road in front of them.