He left his sentence unfinished. It was hard to live in a world of hypotheticals. Would he be advocating for the same had he never met Song?

“I trust your judgment,” Amber said, snuggling closer into the crook of his shoulder.

Cade sighed, his eyes flicking up to the unwavering gaze of the Codex. Always there. Always following.

For a moment, he wondered if he should give the Codex to Marius. With the drone elsewhere, he could fill in his friends on the plan. But he knew it was too great a risk. Who knew what other drones hung above him, silent and invisible? Perhaps Abaddon liked to watch him suffer through multiple angles. He wouldn’t put it past the sadistic voyeur.

No, he would have to do this himself. Convince his friends of two reasonings at once. For now, they intersected—both plans involved heading into the jungle. But when it came to bringing nuclear weapons back—how would they react?

But now was the time to “realize” that the bomb was what they needed.

“Show me the remnants within fifteen miles from here that the current contenders have not seen before with their own eyes.”

The screen flashed, and blue dots scattered across the map winked out. He cursed silently. The crashed plane was just out of range—the clearing where it sat must have been a mile farther.

“Make that thirty,” he said.

The screen flickered again, and this time the blue dot he was looking for appeared. He tried not to look at it directly.

“Oh?” Amber asked, “were those not enough for you? There’s at least ten we could go for.”

Cade cleared his throat. “Yes, well. It would be silly to go so far if there was something really good a little bit farther. We’ll only go for them if they’re worth it.”

Amber hummed. “I guess that makes sense. Remember, we’ve never spent the night in the jungles. Not without shelter anyway. Maybe there’s somewhere we can use as base camp on the way?”

Cade moved his fingers over the screen. “Remove this one, and this one, this, this, this…”

He swiftly ran through the remnants they had encountered in the past or he already knew of that would be useless for their endeavors. What remained were only a few dozen remnants. More than Cade had expected, really.

The Romans had been lucky, considering their two expeditions had effectively been random wandering through the jungles. There were advantages to following the Roman routes, made obvious by the string of blue dots that followed a winding but semidirect route along the map.

For one thing they knew it was safe. Well, forgetting the area where the slavers tended to hunt. If there were places rife with predators, the Romans had survived them.

At the same time, if they followed the same route, they had no chance of stumbling upon new remnants of their own. But ultimately, it did not matter. Because at the very end of one of the Roman expeditions, deep in the heart of the jungles … was the nuclear bomb he needed.