Page 71 of The Ashes of Summer

I study the map and let my head do what it does on its own, running the routes and the angles and the timing, the places where a wall stops being a wall. Then I pull my phone and call Carter.

He picks up on the second ring. "Sheriff?"

"I need men at the hospital. Now."

The line goes sharp. "What happened?"

"I found her. I know how to get in." The words scrape out raw—not found, not yet, but close enough that I can finally taste it. "Bring weapons. Night vision. Ammo. Everything."

A beat. Then, lower: "We going in tonight?"

"Yes."

"Who do you want?"

I look back down at the map. Tree cover, dark ground, next to no visibility. Any other night we'd put a bird in the air and read the heat signatures before a single boot touched that property, and that's the one thing we don't have anymore. No air. No thermal. We go in blind, on foot, in the dark.

"We move quiet," I tell him. "No lights unless necessary. I want men who can track movement in dark terrain."

"I'll bring Hayes, Vance, and Groves."

Good. Men who don't panic and don't make noise, which is the whole job tonight.

"How long?"

"Twenty minutes."

"Make it fifteen." I hang up before he can answer.

The room's shifted under me. It's stopped being somewhere people are falling apart and turned into a staging ground, and I feel the panic in my own chest cooling as it goes, hardening into the thing I actually need.

Constance folds her arms. "So what's the plan?"

I set my finger on the east-side route. "The second Jackson realizes we're there, he runs. So we get to Summer before he understands what's happening."

Kurt nods once. "That's the only way."

Adelaide steps closer, her voice small. "What if he moves her before you get inside?"

Something ugly turns over behind my ribs.

"Then I burn that fucking mountain down finding her."

Nobody argues with that, because every person in this room knows I mean it.

Kurt finally lowers the pen. His breathing's gone rough and wet, like sketching a few lines on a page cost him more than it should have.

"You'll need me there."

Tamara rounds on him. "No chance."

"He won't expect me to turn on him."

"He'll kill you."

Something unreadable crosses Kurt's ruined face. "Maybe."

I look at him for a long moment and weigh it properly. Take him and he might sell us the second we're inside that house. Leave him and I go in without the only man alive who knows where the walls are thin and where to put my men when we hear movement.