The moment her skin touched mine, a wave of warmth washed through me. The fire in my lungs receded, and I sucked in a deep, shuddering, miraculous breath. The relief was so absolute, it nearly buckled my knees. It wasn't my imagination. It was her.
The shouts of Silva’s men were still close, and I had just been a gasping, useless liability. I had to be her partner, not her anchor. That was the liar in my head that saw the alley, a narrowgap between a textile stall and a butcher shop. A shortcut, it screamed. A way out.
“This way!” I yelled, my voice raw as I veered hard, pulling Luzia into the shadows with me.
The promise was a lie. Ten yards in, our path was blocked by a vendor’s heavy wooden cart, its wheels removed for the day—a wall of wicker and coconuts. The alley wasn’t a shortcut—it was a cage. The shouts of our pursuers grew louder, echoing off the brick walls, boxing us in.
A cold certainty washed over me, colder than the sweat plastering my shirt to my back. My attempt to lead had led us straight into a trap. My feet felt rooted to the ground, my mind a vortex of failure as the footsteps of Silva’s men thundered at the mouth of the alley. This was it. This was how it ended.
Then a sharp, searing pain as Luzia’s fingers dug into my arm, yanking me back from the brink. Her grip was steel, a strength that felt utterly alien. I stumbled, turning to face her, and the breath caught in my throat. There was no fear in her eyes. Not a trace. Only a cold, blazing fury—the look of a predator cornered and deciding which threat to eliminate first. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.
She took the lead.
With a single, fluid motion, she spun me around and shoved me not away from the cart, but towards it. For a split second, I thought she’d lost her mind. Then I saw it: a gap no wider than my shoulders between the cart and the wall, obscured by hanging tarps. She plunged through it without hesitation, pulling me along. We burst back out into a different section of the market, the shouts of our pursuers momentarily confused.
She didn’t slow, ducking under an awning and pulling me towards a rickety wooden staircase clinging to the brickwork of a dilapidated building. “The roofs,” she said, her first word since the chase began.
The wooden stairs groaned under our weight. We burst onto a sprawling, chaotic patchwork of corrugated tin under the merciless glare of the sun. This was her world now, a domain of instinct and agility. But the landscape was mine.
She was about to leap onto a long, flat roof covered in faded red tiles when my research slammed into the forefront of my mind. “No!” I yelled, my voice raw. “Not that one! Structural damage from the ‘88 flood! It won’t hold!”
She stopped instantly, her trust in my word absolute.
“There!” I pointed, gasping for breath. “The blue one! It’s a workshop—the roof is reinforced! It will lead us towards the docks!”
She nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement. We moved as one entity: her body, my mind.
We were nearing the edge of the blue roof when it happened. I placed my foot on what looked like solid tin, but it gave way with a sharp crack. My leg plunged through, and for a horrifying second, my world tilted. Before a scream could even form, her hand shot out and clamped around my wrist. With a single, explosive motion, she hauled me back from the edge as if I weighed nothing.
There was no time to recover. The shouts from behind us were closer now, echoing across the tin. I spotted our only way down: a rusted iron ladder bolted to the side of the building, leading to the docks below.
“There!” I pointed, and we ran. The descent was a clumsy, frantic scramble. The splintered wood of the pier felt solid beneath my feet for all of a second. Then they were there. Two of them, then a third, spilling out from the alley at the base of the building, cutting off any escape back into the city. We were trapped, the wide, murky river at our backs and Silva’s closing net in front.
My eyes darted everywhere, searching for another miracle. And then I saw it. A small, motorized river skiff, its paint peeling, was bobbing on the murky water, tied loosely to a thick wooden post. I turned to Luzia, the desperation making my voice hoarse. “Can you start one of these?”
She just nodded, her eyes fixed on the boat, her focus absolute.
That was all I needed. While she leaped from the pier into the skiff with a dancer’s grace, I scrambled for the post, my fingers fumbling with the thick, wet rope of the mooring line. The knot was stubborn, slick with algae. Behind me, I heard a cough, then a sputter as Luzia gave the outboard motor a sharp, practiced pull. The engine caught, roaring to life with a puff of blue smoke.
The knot came free. “Go!” I yelled, shoving the skiff away from the dock with all my strength and tumbling in after it.
We pushed off just as the men reached the edge of the pier, their faces contorted with fury. One of them raised his arm, something dark and metallic in his hand. A deafening crack split the air, sharp and violent, entirely different from the market’s noise. Something whizzed past my ear, and a small geyser of water erupted a foot from the boat.
The shot cemented the truth of our situation in a way nothing else had. They weren’t trying to capture us anymore.
Luzia didn’t look back. She expertly steered the small skiff into the river’s main current, the boat cutting through the brown water with a determined churn. The sprawling chaos of the Leticia docks began to shrink behind us, the shouts of Silva’s men lost to the steady chugging of the two-stroke engine. Soon, the entire city was just a smudge on the shoreline, the noise of ten thousand lives fading into a dull, distant hum.
The adrenaline drained out of me all at once, leaving a hollow, aching void. I slumped against the boat’s grimy interior, my breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. Every musclescreamed in protest. My hands were raw from the ladder, my leg throbbed where I’d fallen through the roof, and a deep, bone-weary exhaustion settled over me like a shroud.
And with the exhaustion came the crushing weight of our failure. We hadn’t just failed to get theSussuron. We had been seen, identified, and hunted. We had lost our quiet anonymity and gained a powerful, ruthless enemy. We were fugitives, adrift on a muddy river with no destination, no allies, and no plan. All my knowledge, all my research, had led to this—a stolen boat, a missed gunshot, and the complete and utter ruin of our mission. I had failed her. Again.
I looked over at Luzia, needing to see some sign of relief, some shared flicker of survival in her eyes.
She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze was fixed on the receding shoreline, her knuckles bone-white where she gripped the tiller. The wind whipped strands of hair across her face, but it couldn’t soften her expression. A cold, silent, and devastating fury, the likes of which I had never seen, radiated from her. The kind of rage that doesn’t scream, but burns. The kind that promises retribution.
CHAPTER 18
Caio
