My hands were weakening, fingers burning with strain, but I kept the girl draped across my shoulder, one arm hooked under her cold thighs, the other steadying her back. Her skin was unnaturally chilled against my neck, like holding something pulled from deep water. I moved through the last stretch of motionless infected toward the cars, boots crunching softly over sand and broken concrete, careful not to brush against any of the pale figures standing like statues in the moonlight.
I was the last one out.
Sinn laughed when I finally cleared the city boundary, a real, deep laugh, the first I had heard from him on this entire mission. It rolled out of him like something heavy he had been carrying and had finally set down. We had done it. Against everything that had gone wrong, Speed, Oddo, the Guardian truck, Richard, the sand, the tape, waking up tied with a splitting headache in the plain, we had actually done it.
