Use this sentence in an excerpt from an action/adventure novel:
"Her face was covered by a layer of dust and grime, making her fiery eyes stand out even more than they usually did. This time though, the fire was extinguished. She was prepared, waiting for the imminent threat that was looming ever closer; whispering in our ears, choking out any hope of freedom. Death."

I glanced down at Ellie. Her face was covered by a layer of dust and grime, making her fiery eyes stand out even more than they usually did. This time though, the fire was extinguished. She was prepared, waiting for the imminent threat that was looming ever closer; whispering in our ears, choking out any hope of freedom. Death. Swallowing my pride, I took her pale hand in mine and squeezed it. I don't really know what I aimed to convey in that gesture, except maybe the obvious: that she wasn't alone. Sometimes people need to be reminded of the obvious— having spent so long overlooking it, they've forgotten how to see it. She turned her amber-caramel eyes up at me and I could've sworn I saw moisture them. I looked away, unwilling to witness the tears rolling down her cheeks. Ellie didn't cry. That was one of the reasons she was a not-too-bad little sister. Ellie did not cry.
But then, the government didn't hunt down and kill harmless orphaned kids, either, and yet here we all were.
"They're coming," Ty grunted beside me, his gun emitting sinister snaps as he loaded it. He had a certain flair for stating the apparent.
A dead hush came over our rag-tag band of underage fugitives. We all heard it— car engines. They were here.
No one moved. The air was so flat, I believed everyone must've been holding their breath, to keep the ripples of their exhales from marring the air's surface. Car doors slammed. Voices. They weren't even trying for stealth. Ty and I exchanged a wary glance, and understood we were both thinking the same thing: If they don't think we're even worth the effort of surprising, what chance to we have of survival?
Our odds were shriveling exponentially, with each additional second of inaction.
Ty rose, gun cocked, and demanded with difficulty, "Well then, what're we waiting for?"
Murmurs of agreement shuffled through the dingy motel room, and —like a bolt of lightning had suddenly decided to strike every heart— a great scrambling ensued as our troop of child soldiers readied for battle. I tried not to allow myself to think. I couldn't bear the involuntary calculations of predicted value and probability of death count. Most of them I'd known a grand total of five days, but there's a peculiar comradery found in being on the run for your life that made me almost believe I'd known them all my life.
I was loading my gun— or rather, the gun I'd picked off a careless security guard two weeks prior— when Ty sauntered over, strapping a backpack to his back.
"Hey Mike," Ty wondered as though on a whim, "If you die, can I have your car?"
I smirked, genuinely amused, despite the gravity of the situation. Why did everything always seem to get funnier the more dire the situation got? "Dude, if I'm dead, you're dead too. You wouldn't last a minute without me always saving your skin." I'd meant it jokingly, but when you're staring death straight in the face, a whole new world of meanings suddenly pop up, and nothing can just be taken for its literal weight anymore.
"Yeah, man," he agreed, clamping his hand on my shoulder, "You've always got my back." We stared at each other, unmoving, the fear that we hid from the others blazing plainly in our eyes. We'd had close calls, we'd fought them before, but that was when it was just the three of us— me, Ty, and El. And this time, they'd gotten us cornered.
I'd known Ty longer than the others: we'd been classmates. We hadn't actually been friends until I'd discovered three weeks ago that the government was after me and Ellie and we went running. Ty joined us two days later, after his mom was shot by one of our pursuers, and we'd been on the road since, alternately lying low and driving as far away from home as possible. In our most recent scrape with the government agents (we assumed FBI agents), we stole a file (we hoped had made them angry FBI agents) that contained names of the next seven targets on their list— all of whom we promptly sought out and accumulated into our tragic running group of kids age 5-17. Now we— Ty and me, the oldest— had been granted the responsibility of leading a ten-kid army of orphans with practically no money and no resources. We'd resorted to stealing, which I wasn't proud of, but at least we'd made it this far, with the government on our tail for three weeks.
After a broad expanse of silent between us, Ty cleared his throat, and gave me one last consolatory slap on the back, before he moved back to Tina and Norman, to offer last-minute words of encouragement and advice.