The tip of his ponytailed little head briefly emerges from the basket, followed by shuffling and the muted shink of a blade. “Oh my God,” I whisper to myself, imagining what the hell that sound was and if Miss Manners caught him. A dreadful moment later, Jack reappears to the crowd—Miss Manners’s rifle slung across his back by a leather strap—and he scurries down.

“It’s empty,” Jack informs Darcy, casting the rifle into the darkened woods and retaking his place in the amoeba. “Oh, and I’ll trade you.” Jack produces a long rusted blade—the one Bill had jammed into the side of the bird’s nest ledge—flips it around, and presents the hilt to Darcy. She trades Jack her taser as her fingers close powerfully around the dagger.

Spears, tasers, torches, and knives. We’re collecting weapons as nonchalantly as characters in a video game. You’re gonna need them, a voice in my head reminds me.

“Anyone on the path ahead?” Darcy asks.

“Torchlights at the chapel,” he reports. “But they always keep them lit. All clear.”

“Let’s hustle! Halfway there.”

Jack gives his spare taser to Christina, who wields it like a Harry Potter wand, and we’re off again, passing the signpost for Chapel and Clinic. The classrooms of Nightlight receding behind us, we walk with brighter, brisker steps. Some of our worst memories of this island are literally in our rearview, and hope lies ahead. However, when we pass Ambrose Chapel, my insides twist again. The ash-colored giant looms within the copse of trees, circled in torch flames like a Satanic altar. “Hey,” I whisper to Marcos, angling my head toward the chapel. “You think you’ll ever go to church again?”

“I don’t know,” he moans, defeated. “Don’t ask me that right now. But if you’re asking me right now, I’d say…I need to think about it.” It warms me to hear Marcos describe my exact thoughts so perfectly. It’s going to take time to bleach Nightlight—and for me, the Reverend’s chapel back home—out of the idea of church.

Back home. So close.

Through the torchlight, flecks of blood appear across my wrist. The Reverend’s blood. The man who booped my nose and scolded me for drinking too much coffee—I’m leaving him dead and rotting in a boathouse. How can I possibly explain any of this to my mom? Or the town? Every soul in Ambrose worshipped him, literally. However, any concerns about the future, my mom, or my return home meet a horrible brick wall when we reach the rattling generator outside the clinic:

It’s everyone.

Every surviving Nightlight staff member waits with torches, tasers, and spears of their own across the expanse of the Coral Road. Ten of them—Miss Manners, the tattling Archie, four squat but muscular gray-shirts, the sun-weathered captain I recognize from the boat, even the three lunch ladies.