Page 165 of Legacy Elite

I reach again. She's faint and getting fainter. But she's there.

Jon hasn't asked me one question since we got in this car. Luke keeps asking. Soren keeps asking. Jon just drives.

"She's alive," I say, to the windshield.

He doesn't answer. His grip shifts on the wheel, and the car goes faster.

There are cones on the road.

Tape along the shoulder, a woman in a coat standing in the middle of it with a clipboard, and further up a line of people walking slowly with their heads down.

Jon stops the car sideways across the drive and I'm out of it before it's finished moving.

"JESSICA!"

Somebody says something to me and I go past them. Nobody tries very hard to stop me.

The work-zone sign is still standing at the bend, folding and metal, pointing traffic left. Nobody's moved it.

Then the cars.

The lead one's windshield is gone — not cracked, gone, lying in white gravel all over the seats. There's blood on the door of the second car and a long smear on the road going down into the gap between the car and the ditch, where somebody was dragged.

There's a woman on a stretcher at the roadside with two paramedics working on her and an IV up. Gray face. Eyes open.

Cassel.

"She's been shot twice," one of them says, without looking up. "Somebody pulled her into cover."

Past the cars there's a shape under a sheet, and I make myself look at it, because it’s one of her security.

Two more from the lead car are sitting on the shoulder with emergency blankets around them, and one of them looks up at me.

The first van's on its side in the ditch. There's a boot sticking out from under the back corner with a marker set beside it, and nobody's working on him. Another man fifteen feet on, face down in the water.

The ground's torn up going right, so I go right, up into the beeches. There's a man at the base of a trunk with the bark stripped off above him at head height, and another one thirty feet away in the leaf litter who isn't getting up.

I stand in the trees with my hands shaking.

"JESS."

Back onto the road.

The second van's upright. There's a man beside the front wheel, face down, a launcher a yard from his hand.

The net's lying in the road in two pieces, torn at the corner, and there's a groove in the gravel about thirty feet long with a man's heel marks in it.

My stomach turns over.

Soren's reading the road behind me. Ander's gone straight up it, and it's Ander who stops at the top.

"Torres."

A third of a mile up, where the drive comes out of the trees and you can see the barrier and the hut, there's a field entrance on the left. Mud pulled out onto the road. Two sets of tire tracks, wide ones, and the grass inside the gateway flattened in two long strips.

Ander crouches and puts his hand flat in one of them.

"Two vehicles. Heavy."