Through the trees, I could see figures moving in the distance. Soldiers, and their uniforms didn’t match the guards at the prison. Then I glimpsed the silver beard on one of them. Becker. He was here with his special ops guys and that was very, very bad news.

I scrambled to my feet but, as soon as I put any weight on my leg, the pain exploded and I nearly fell again. I couldn’t even hobble until I got the pain under control. “Go!” I yelled to Erin. “Run!”

But instead, she ran over to me. She hooked my arm around her neck and then got her shoulder under mine and tried to lever me up to standing.

“No!” I snapped. Another shot rang out and I heard the bullet hiss past us. “Leave me!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she told me, and grunted as she pushed me up to standing. I was comically lop-sided because she was a foot shorter than me, but I was up. With her supporting me, I managed to limp to the edge of the clearing and into the trees. I didn’t have time to figure out which direction we were going, I was just trying to put distance between us and them. But after only a few minutes of stumbling along, I checked over my shoulder and shook my head. “Stop,” I panted. “Stop.”

She stopped and I pointed behind us. We were leaving a trail of bright red splotches in the pure white snow. “We’ve got to bandage it, or we’ll never throw them off.”

She lay me down in the snow and pulled out the first aid kit. Wincing, I managed to shove my pants down to my knees. The wound didn’t look bad: the bullet had just clipped me, leaving a shallow slash. While Erin wrapped bandages around it, I pulled out one of the prefilled morphine syringes and plunged it into my leg. By the time I’d got my pants back up, the pain was dropping away: it still hurt, but it felt like it was happening to someone else. Good. I struggled to my feet and almost fell over because my head was so floaty. Not so good.

We could move faster now. But the soldiers had closed the gap and they were gaining on us. The fear grew in my chest. If we’d been caught by the prison guards, Erin might have spent the rest of her life in a cell. But Becker had been planning to execute JD to cover up whatever scheme we’d stumbled onto.. He’d do the same to us, if they caught up.

I forced myself to limp faster. We broke through the trees and—

Oh shit.