"Your ribs are fucked and you're going to pass out if you keep pushing."
"Then I'll pass out after I find them."
He grabbed my arm, and I spun on him, hand on the katana before I registered it was Lorenzo. He held his ground.
"Listen to me," he said. "Rafael is still out there. Eight is still out there. Running yourself into the ground helps no one."
He was right. I let go of the hilt and bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to get air past the fire in my ribs.
"Two hours ahead," I said to the ground. "Maybe less if they're carrying wounded."
"Then we keep moving," Rhadamanthys said behind me. "But at a pace that doesn't kill us before we get there."
I straightened up and kept walking.
The trail wound down the mountain through rocks and scrub brush. The boot prints led us around a switchback and into a valley that opened up green after all that red rock. Alonzo stopped short and pointed.
A building sat at the far end, tucked against the mountain. The walls were stone, the roof rusted metal. Smoke came from the chimney, and the wind carried the smell of it down the slope,wood smoke and something cooking underneath it, garlic and peppers, the kind of smell that meant someone's mother had taken over a kitchen.
Diego's safe house sat below us. People moved around outside, but the distance swallowed the details.
"Do you see her?" Lorenzo asked quietly.
I didn't answer.
We started down the slope. Someone at the safe house spotted us, and a shout went up, and people reached for weapons. I kept my hands visible and my pace steady.
A man stepped forward from the group, older, broad through the shoulders, holding a rifle but not pointing it. I recognized him from the funeral.
"Jasper," he said. "Diego's inside."
The front door opened before I reached it.
Diego stepped out,, and the sunlight hit his face. He looked like he'd aged a decade since I'd left him at the tunnel entrance.
My knees tried to give out. I locked them to keep from falling over. He was alive. That was something.
I scanned the yard behind him. Eight wasn't there.
"Inside," he said. "We need to talk."
My babushka used to say that when a Russian tells you to sit down, it's because the news will put you on the floor. Diego wasn't Russian, but I'd been around him long enough to know the sound.
I followed because what the hell else was I going to do.
The building was dim after the bright sun. The main room was full of people. Diego's mother sat with her hands folded in her lap and her face blank. Valentina stood by the window with her arms crossed.
Eight wasn't among them.
Diego crossed the room and pushed through a door at the back. I followed him down a narrow hallway that smelled like oldstone and wood smoke. He stopped at the last door, opened it, and stepped inside.
The room was barely big enough for two people. A cot sat against one wall, shutters closed against the heat. Diego stood with his back to me, shoulders tight, fists at his sides.
I closed the door, and the latch clicked loudly in the quiet.
"Where is she?" I said.
Diego pulled his shoulders tighter.
