“I’m looking for something you took, and if you don’t got it on you, I need you alive to show me where it went.”

Bill’s Walkman. The Ricky tape. They lie heavily in my left pocket. Once she has the tape, I’m dead.

Numbly, I withdraw the next item from my pocket: “A Polaroid,” Molly calls out. “A picture of a boy…looks like it’s from the Winner’s Wall.”

“Toss it,” Miss Manners orders. I ditch the teenage picture of the Reverend, the last-known proof that he was ever sweet, saucer-eyed Stanley Packard.

The next item is sentimental for me: “Another Playbill. South Pacific.”

“We’ve seen it already. Toss it.” Down it goes, my gift from Ricky—one of the last totems tying me to my old life, back when my only worry was Ario leaving me to go to college.

The only thing remaining in my pocket is the Walkman.

Miss Manners’s rifle lowers to a more relaxed (for her) position. The millimeter’s difference between having a gun pointed directly at you and not having a gun pointed directly at you stretches as wide as the ocean trapping me here. “Mr. Major, anything else in your pockets? Turn ’em out.”

There’s no room left for fear. Another emotion takes its place: the will to survive.

Hell with it, I’m dead anyway.

I pull the smooth jersey material of my pockets inside out. As they invert, I grip the Walkman and unplug the headphone jack with my thumb. It’s as dense and hand-shaped as a grenade, so I throw it like one. The tower is too high for me to have a hope of beaning Miss Manners with the device, so I chuck it to my left.

It flies up and begins to descend…enough to draw her eye…

“GO!” I holler. A moment later, the gun fires.

But Marcos, Molly, and I are already leaping for our lives toward the base of the watchtower. The Coral Road erupts with the ping of a bullet. It missed everyone. Pressed flat against the base of the tower, the three of us can’t be seen from above, much less shot. The jungle wall—our dense, camouflaged sanctuary—lies only a scant few feet away. Above us, the pageant queen cocks her rifle for the next shot with a grinding, metallic scrape.

She won’t stay in her blind spot for long.