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Jasha
Lola is stunned for a moment, hanging on my words in silent shock for several seconds before the door beside her opens and my men begin boarding the train again. “All clear,” one of them says.
Lola’s bewildered expression melts into firm determination. “I’ll start the train,” she says.
I nod, and she starts pulling levers and checking screens. After a moment, the train shudders to a start, and we’re on our way again. I just hope we haven’t lost too much time or fuel. We can’t afford to cut it this close.
But there’s really not much I can do now that we’re on the way again. I just can’t fall asleep a second time. If something else comes up, I need to be able to address it immediately.
“Everything good?” I ask, leaning over Lola’s seat as she studies a gauge cluster to her left.
She scrunches her face, tapping one of the gauges and shaking her head. “Not really. The fuel is low. Like, really low. We’re not going to make it to Texas without a miracle.”
“Fuck,” I mutter, my mind moving a thousand miles a second to come up with a solution. “There must be something else we can do, something that will allow us better fuel efficiency.”
“We’re already running without heat. We could turn off the lights, but the savings would be negligible.”
I drum my fingers on the back of her seat, sweat starting to run down my face despite the cold. Nikolai warned me that this trip was going to be dangerous, but I didn’t take him seriously. Now, with reality crashing down from all sides, I’m the one who’s responsible for pulling us out of this mess.
Normally, that wouldn’t cause me that much stress. I’ve been in much worse situations on my own, but that’s exactly the point. I’m no longer on my own, and the idea of losing Lola and the baby crushes me.
I can’t let that happen.
“We can have fuel airdropped further down,” I say, my tone lifted by a new idea. I wipe the sweat from my brow and lean into the gauge cluster. “How many miles do we have left?”
Lola takes a deep breath. “I can’t say exactly. Maybe six hundred if we’re lucky. It’s definitely not enough to get to Texas, unless we don’t brake at the turns, but that could derail the entire train.”
“We’re going to play it safe,” I reply, having made up my mind to protect Lola. “Once I get a signal on my phone, I’m going to get in touch with Nikolai. He will be able to send a small plane or helicopter to drop off fuel. How much does a train like this need?”
Lola’s eyebrows draw together in a tight frown. I’m tempted to comment on how cute she looks, but she’d probably just get annoyed. “We get about half a mile to the gallon,” she says, studying the gauge cluster. “So, if we want to play it safe, we’re going to need about three-hundred gallons.”
“And what if we don’t want to play it safe?” I ask, gritting my teeth at the prospect of transporting that much fuel at such a short notice.
“Two-hundred, and that’s bare minimum,” she replies.
I do the math in my head, coming up with at least two-thousand pounds of fuel. We have a helicopter that can lift up to four, so it’s not out of the question for us to transport that much fuel. It just depends on how quickly we can get it here.
I take a sharp breath, turning away from the controls. “We’ll do two-fifty, and that will have to suffice. If I can get Nikolai to transport that much fuel in our direction, we should be able to pull this off.”
“And if we can’t?” she asks, spinning around in her seat with a wide-eyed look of concern.
A cold chuckle escapes my throat. “Then we’re going to have to shoot our way out of this mess.”
I leave the room and Lola follows after me quickly, tugging at the back of my shirt to get my attention. I’m not trying to scare her, but I’ve done a good job, anyway. She’s terrified.
“Are we going to die?” she asks as I continue down the hallway past our usual cabin.
“Probably not,” I reply flatly, keeping the same pace as before.
“Probablynot? That’s not very comforting. I thought we had found a solution?”
“Tentatively.”
“Bullshit,” she snarls, yanking my shirt so hard that a few of the stitches pop.
I spin around, wrapping my hand around her waist and pulling her to me. She bounces lightly off my chest, her eyes sparkling with something that’s awfully close to excitement. It’s like she wants me to snap. She’s enjoying this.
But her expression returns to stark annoyance the moment she catches me smiling. “This is serious,” she says. “The estimate of three-hundred gallons could’ve been off. You shouldn’t do two-fifty.”
