The Spanish was coming from a radio speaker. She sat up, the side of her head erupting into a slid mass of pain. The voice on the speaker was talking about another airplane? They were being followed? She had to be careful; they didn’t know she understood Spanish, and as long as she kept that her secret, she had an advantage. Now, at long last, she remembered what they had told her about Sam being dead. An abyss wanted to open up inside her, one she wanted to resist: if another plane was following, whose was it? Sam didn’t know how to fly.

The voice in the loudspeaker said they were going to shoot the plane down. Amy pulled herself to her knees, close enough to the window to hear the air rushing past outside.

“Ah, she understands Spanish!” said the one she had bitten. She had not been unconscious that long. The blood on his wrist was barely dry, and the spots on his trousers were still very bright red. When he changed clothes, she was going to have to remember that she had separated him from the others by a crooked incisor. To one degree or another, they were all victims of bad dentistry.

“Tilt the plane over so she can see,” said the one who thought they should be grateful she was all right. The plane went over almost forty-five degrees, giving her from a height of six miles a view of rough green mountains, villages seemingly without roads leading to them, bare faint clearings in the verdure. At least she was bale to pick out a gleaming white dart, tiny and close to the surface, angling left and right, like a minnow trying to escape a net.

A wisp of cloud briefly obscured her view. She looked over her shoulder to more cloud cover coming up fast and the coast and the deep blue of the Caribbean just beyond. She almost didn’t see the little pinfeather of smoke rise from the water’s edge and turn inland toward the little plane. And just that quickly, they were above the clouds, unable to see anything below. Then a silent flash, a hint of orange that throbbed once against the white cover spreading ever wider beneath them.

“I saw that,” one of them said.

“Me, too,” said another.

And Amy realized she had been hoping she had imagined it.

O’Malley let out a whoop as he fought for control of the little jet. “Welcome to Cuba! Semper fidelis, Castro! Whaddaya say, Merrill? Want to go around again?”

“I just want to see if I still have all my parts.”