“I could hop that fence,” Mason said when they’d retreated back to the rear of the property, the locked gate. “Those cars back there would block any view from the house.”

Jess looked at him funny. “No offense,” she said, “but you were locked up in jail, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “So?”

“You ever try to escape?”

“I told you,” he said, “I served my time.”

“So you aren’t exactly a fence-hopping expert, then.”

He had to laugh. Kept it quiet, though. “You have any better ideas?”

Jess cocked her head, motioned back toward the front. “Sneak in alongside that house,” she said. “There’s got to be a way.

“Unless you want to put a pin in this,” she said. “Go buy some wire cutters and come back tomorrow.”

He thought about it. Looked up and down the fence line, didn’t see any better ideas. Was about to tell her, okay, they’d try alongside the house, when a screen door back that way slapped open and slammed shut again, and he and she both could hear boots on wood stairs, somebody whistling as he walked back through the yard.

Mason felt his blood go cold. “Shit.”

Beside him, Jess didn’t say a word.

*  *  *

Jess wasn’t enjoying this. She’d felt that surge of adrenaline at the start, but as soon as they’d started up the road, the rest had come flooding back. The bad stuff. Patrols gone haywire, faulty intelligence. Ambushes out of nowhere, gunfire from the shadows.

Afia screaming her name as they dragged her away.

It wasn’t even the violence that got to Jess; she could take the violence, while it was happening. She’d been trained for that stuff. It was the other parts, the before and the after, that’s what killed her. Driving out beyond the wire into a sea of hostile faces, suspicious eyes, not knowing who was coming after them, or where they were coming from, but knowing they were coming all the same.

It was the tension, constant and unceasing, a boot pressing down on your chest, paralysis. It was the flinching every time a car backfired, every time a hand in the crowd reached for a cell phone. It was the waiting, that was the shitty part, waiting and knowing the violence was coming, not being able to do a damn thing about it.

And then the after, the blood and the chaos, urgent voices and the smell of burned flesh and shit and piss and fire. Replaying the violence in your head for hours, wishing you’d just done one little thing different, so your buddy beside you, who’d played Counter-Strike and showed you pictures of his daughter, so he’d still be alive and intact and not another body bag in the back of a jet.