Jina scrambled out of the wadi, no longer caring if she was exposed to anyone at the ruin who might have been looking for her. The fire had burned down to a much smaller blaze now and was farther off than she’d thought it would be. Wildly she looked around, but without Tweety and the laptop she couldn’t pinpoint the guys’ location, and without the night-vision goggles she had only the starlight to see by.

She could hear the guys in her ear, as if she was there with them. They made litters with the materials they had at hand, scavenged from the bodies of those they’d been in the firefight with, and within an impossibly short length of time they were moving. Boom and Jelly were carrying Voodoo, Snake and Trapper were carrying Crutch, and Levi was on point. They would swap out positions, to give each of them in turn a rest.

She tried yelling, only to find that the dust she’d inhaled had scratched her throat so much she couldn’t get much volume. They were too far away to hear, anyway, but she tried.

They were gone. They were gone.

She was alone.

They’d left her.

The realization was like a knife, slicing into her gut. Knowing why they had—two of the team were seriously wounded, and they had to get them out—that was accepted by her logic. Her heart, though, felt as if a giant hand was squeezing her. They’d left her behind, hadn’t even sent someone back to check.

She was the least valuable member of the team.

Knowing that and feeling it were two different things, and feeling it was shattering.

Despite the heat her teeth chattered, and her breath hitched in her throat. They thought she was likely dead, but they hadn’t checked and now she would die. She had no weapon, no water, no shelter. She would die out here tomorrow, or the next day, assuming someone didn’t capture her and she thought she’d rather die first, all things considered.

Mom! The single word echoed in her brain, brought all of them, her family, into sharp focus. They would never know exactly what happened to her, never have a body to bury. At best they’d be told that her remains were unrecoverable.

But the guys hadn’t even tried. They’d left her behind.

No! She had to get past that, push it away. She couldn’t just stand here and wait to die, she had to do something, and she couldn’t function if she let herself get sucked into despair. They’d done what they had to do. Now she had to do what she had to do.

Inaction wasn’t an option. She refused to accept defeat, refused to give up. She had a chance, because she knew where they were going, knew the coordinates of the secondary exfil point.

Willfully she fought down the thought-clouding panic; she needed every brain cell she had to get out of this alive. Not only did she know where they were going, but she had that damn compass in her cargo pocket, because months ago, almost a year now, they had insisted she learn it, use it, keep it with her, because sometimes phones and GPS didn’t work. Like now.

“I can do this,” she said aloud, and hoped she wasn’t lying to herself.

Cautiously she slid back down into the wadi and pulled out her little penlight, something else the guys had impressed on her to always keep with her—not in a bag, not nearby, but with her, just like the compass. They might have left her behind, but perhaps they’d also given her the means to survive.

She had to plot her course. She had nothing to write on other than the ground, and her finger to scratch in the sand with, but she could do this. She opened the compass, figured the variable, and set her course, as much in her head as in the scratching on the ground. Then she stood and rubbed her boot over the scratches, because she didn’t want to give anyone who might look for her in the morning, in daylight, an idea where she had gone.

If she let herself think about what she had to do, she’d be defeated before she even started, because this was so much more than she’d ever asked of herself before. She took some deep breaths, both calming herself and gearing up for what she had to do, then climbed out of the wadi again, and set out across the desert in a trot.

Panic lurked, nipping at her heels. She wanted to run, she wanted to set a blistering pace across the sand, but she couldn’t. She shoved it down, forced herself to focus on what was real, on the now and perhaps the next five minutes. If she thought about the future, or the what-ifs, then she was done.

Reality was that she was in the dark and she didn’t dare turn on the penlight to see better, because not only would she use up the battery way before daylight, but if any unfriendlies were out there, the light would pinpoint her location for them. Light was visible for long distances, even tiny pinpoints of light.

But—what if the guys were close enough they could see the light, too? Would they investigate?

They might shoot her.They had their NVDs, but the range of their weapons was greater than the visual range of the NVDs.

There was no safe way to reunite with them en route. She had to get to the secondary location.

She had to keep going. Focus, push, keep going. Set a steady, easy pace, and keep going.

The heat and the night and the wind pressed down on her. Even at a trot, soon sweat was pouring off her. Her lungs burned, her mouth was cotton dry. No matter how easy the pace, in this kind of heat she needed water, water that she didn’t have and had no way of finding. Without water, she had no chance of surviving the daytime heat.

Do this or die. Do this or die.

She stepped on a rock that slid out from under her foot and she went down, sprawled on the sandy, rocky ground. Her fingerless gloves protected her palms, but her knees scraped. She ignored the pain, got up, resumed her pace.

She didn’t let herself think. This was big, maybe bigger than she could handle, and if she got caught in the details, she’d falter. She had to be a machine, she had to run the way she’d trained to run—beyond how she’d trained, because this was farther than she’d ever run before. This was hours and hours in the dark, in the heat, unable to avoid pitfalls or vipers or anything else. One of those weird rabbit/kangaroo rats—what had Mamoon called it? She couldn’t remember—might jump on her and trip her.

Don’t think, Jina. Don’t worry about the rat. Just move, keep moving.

Was she still alive?

The possibility, slim as it was, ate at his guts. Levi set a brutal pace when he was on point, driven by the need to move, to get his men to safety and good medical care before it was too late, before they were carrying two corpses instead of two teammates. The faster he got to the pickup point, the sooner he could go back.

He had to. He had to find her.

Even if she hadn’t survived, he had to bring her body back. No man left behind. No woman, either. That was the creed he’d operated under when he was in the military, and nothing had changed when he joined the GO-Teams. He wouldn’t leave her for the jackals, the rats.

Only Voodoo and Crutch, saving them, kept him focused. Every time he thought about Jina, hearing the explosion and seeing the fire glow in the distance, he nearly buckled under the despair that gutted him. He hadn’t kept her safe.

He’d done what he thought he had to do, for the cohesion of the team, and kept her at a distance, always thinking that things would change, that he’d have time later to explore this thing between them. Now it was too late. She was gone. All the things he thought he’d have time for, holding her and laughing with her, fighting with her, those were gone with her.

“Hold up!” Snake said and did a quick check of the wounded men. Voodoo was in danger of bleeding out, and Crutch had an abdominal wound that could be fatal even if he’d had instant medical care. The massive infection from wounds to the gut was difficult to overcome, period.

Unable to help himself, Levi turned and looked behind them, as if he could conjure a small figure emerging from the night, blue-and-amber eyes flashing while she called them morons for going off and leaving her.

He’d left her.

Boom’s hand closed on his shoulder. Levi didn’t look at his friend and teammate, because sometimes not looking was easier.

“You couldn’t have done anything,” Boom said, his tone rough with emotion.

“Doesn’t matter.” Guilt and regret, grief and rage and despair, all balled together in his chest until he felt as if he could barely breathe. “When we get Voodoo and Crutch on the bird, I’m going back.”

“I’ll go with you,” Boom immediately volunteered.

Levi shook his head. “No. You have Terisa and the kids to go home to, so you go. The mission is done, it was an ambush. Fuck if I know how it was set up, or why. You can report as well as I can.”

“Two doubles the chance of success,” Boom retorted.

“I can go,” Trapper said. “I’m not married.”

“Or me,” Jelly offered.

Snake had a savage expression on his face. Not only did he have a family, too, but he had to stay with Crutch and Voodoo, keep them alive if he could.

Again Levi shook his head no. “This is on me. I won’t risk any of you. I made the decision to leave her, and I’m going back for her.”

The ground went out from under her. Jina gave a hoarse shriek as she tumbled down the rough side of a dry wadi. She hit hard, narrowly missed a large rock. She scrambled away from the rock, in case a snake was using it as shelter. Or maybe snakes were using the night to hunt, and sheltered during the searing heat of the day.

The impact hurt, but she hadn’t broken any bones. Was this the human version of having a beat-up chassis but a good motor? She don’t look like much, fellas, but she runs good.

She ran good. Hours and hours and hours of running. Legs like steel. Lungs like . . . lungs like jellyfish. Breathing hard, she decided now was a good time to recheck her course. The short rest would keep her from overtaxing her stamina.

Shaking, she pulled out the compass and penlight, and replotted. She’d gone a little off course, but not too bad. Okay. Really, she was doing pretty good. She’d covered some ground, not as much as she’d have liked because what she’d have liked was to be there right now, but a decent distance.

What time was it? How could she not have thought of that before? She roughly estimated the distance, then looked at the luminous hands on her heavy-duty wristwatch like all the guys wore. The world’s top marathoners could run that distance in two-something hours, but she wasn’t a top marathoner, and they ran in daylight, in sneakers on city streets, with people giving them water along the way. She figured her speed would be less than half that, so . . . at best she had, probably, another five hours of running, and that was if she didn’t fall and break a leg or crush her skull, though in the case of skull-crush, her worries were over.

Covering that distance in five hours was a reasonable expectation, she thought. A nice brisk walk would cover a mile in fifteen minutes, four miles an hour, twenty miles in five hours.

Five hours would at least be nautical twilight, and she’d be able to see.

What kind of time would the guys make? They were by necessity traveling slower, but had a shorter distance, and she knew they would push themselves to get Crutch and Voodoo to medical help as fast as possible. They were strong, they could see, and they had water. They might not be much slower.

If they got to the exfil point ahead of her, Levi would call in the helicopter for pickup, and they might be gone before she could get there. It was a short hop for the helicopter, across the Iraqi border just into Syria, then back. It wouldn’t wait; as soon as the guys were on board, it would lift off.

She had to go faster.

She climbed out of the wadi and set off again, picking up the pace. The boots rubbed up and down on her feet despite the two pairs of socks she wore. She was sweating so much her socks were damp, anyway. Nothing she could do. She felt the blisters rubbing, felt the pain burning. She ran. She had to cut that time down.

She ran. She fell. She got up and ran again. Over and over. Her gasping breath burned in her chest. But every time she fell she used the opportunity to recheck her course, to catch her breath. Veering off course would be disastrous.

God, her feet hurt. The pain was crippling, so debilitating that tears stung her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. Furiously she ordered herself to stop crying, because she couldn’t afford to lose even that much moisture. She stopped, stood weaving back and forth. Could she pull her boots off, run barefoot? Yes, there were rocks and rough shrubs and all sorts of other things, but could that hurt worse than scrubbing her feet raw?

Yes, it could. Her feet were already raw, she could tell by the sharpness of the pain. If she tried running barefoot she’d be inviting massive infection in her feet. Her fault; she’d grabbed the wrong boots.

Run anyway. No matter what, she had to run anyway. Forget her feet. One step after another, that was all she had to do, take the next step, and the next, and the next. Five hours. She could get through five hours. She could focus only on the next step, the next yard, the next mile. She could because she had no choice.

She ran.

What was Levi thinking? Did it bother him that he’d left her behind, was he thinking of her at all, or only about getting his wounded men to safety?

She began crying again.

He’d told her, in words so plain there was no misunderstanding: she was the least valuable member of the team. And now he’d proven it to her.

How many miles? She stopped, tried to calculate how far she’d gone, but the numbers didn’t make sense. She couldn’t remember, but she knew the coordinates, knew the time. She felt the minutes passing, tick-tock, closer and closer, later and later. Any minute could be one minute too late. She concentrated, dug deeper.

Her feet were agony.

The next time she fell, she lay facedown in the gritty sand, the sudden transition from upright to prone so overwhelming her entire body went limp in relief. She thought about closing her eyes and going to sleep. How blissful that would be, and how easy, just go to sleep and forget about this pain, this spirit-breaking struggle.

The temptation was so strong that she forced herself to sit up and dig the compass from her pocket. She opened it, stared at it with blurred vision, unable to make the dial make sense. Blinking hard, she tried again. Still blurred. Shit. She closed her eyes and sat, sucking in deep breaths, trying to gather her thoughts. She had to do this or she’d die. She couldn’t quit, not now.

When she felt a little steadier, she opened her eyes and made herself focus. She painstakingly checked the compass, replotted her course, then did it again to make sure she had it right. Okay. She could do this. She clicked off the penlight . . . and realized the darkness wasn’t absolute any longer. The black was becoming gray—a dark gray, but still a definite lightening around her.

Daylight was coming. She was running out of time.

She got up and ran.

Her feet pounded in time with her thoughts. I can do this. I have to do this. Left behind. Left behind. Left behind.

Staying upright was harder now. She kept listing to the side. She stopped, sucked in air, focused once more.

“Don’t quit,” she chanted to herself, under her breath. “Don’t quit.”

She’d never quit anything. She couldn’t start now.

She ran. Her mind felt as if she was running, but her body seemed to be rebelling, going slower and slower. Hours. How many hours had she been running? Was it five hours yet? She’d estimated five hours, that was her target. If she could keep going for the full five hours, she’d be there. She couldn’t let herself think anything else.

The dark gray became a light gray, the rocky sand took on a reddish hue, like blood. She puzzled over the color, finally realized that she could see. She wasn’t running in the unending darkness now, time had worked its unending magic and unending hell, because it was running out, time was running out.

The terrain was rougher, there was more vegetation—not much, but enough to matter, because that meant if the guys were close by she might be blocked from their view.

Don’t quit.

“I won’t,” she promised, her tone broken, breathless. “I won’t.”

Something . . . a noise, barely heard over the harsh rasp of her breathing. A strange rhythmic whump-whump that made her frown, because it seemed familiar but she couldn’t place it. Her instinct said to keep moving but the noise bothered her and she stopped, her head tilted as she listened to it. What was that? She’d heard it before, she knew she had.

Because she’d stopped, she dragged out the compass; it was habit now. Frowning, she stared down at the dial, the reading, concentrated.

The compass was wrong. She must have broken it. It said she was almost there, but she wasn’t, she was still alone and in Bumfuck Egypt, wherever the hell that was. No . . . Syria. She was in Syria. Bumfuck Syria. Ha! Egypt had a better ring to it.

But if the compass was broken, then she’d be here forever because she didn’t know how to find her way out.

Whump-whump-whump.

She looked up and saw a giant black insect thing, silhouetted against the horizon, and then it settled down to the earth.

Helicopter! Her dazed brain seized on the word, screamed it at her. It was the helicopter, their helicopter. She’d made it!

No, she hadn’t, because she was still standing there. Clumsily she began to run toward the helicopter, her legs not working quite right so that she lurched more than ran, but she was moving.

“Wait for me,” she croaked, her voice barely audible. “Here! I’m here! I’m coming. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”