“It’s special,” Briggs says with a chuckle. “We make them ourselves, designed to pass through any airport checkpoint. It looks like any old thing. The battery scans like a phone would. Same with the electrical wires. The gas propellant was the tricky part, but we got that sorted.” The man draws closer, his hot breath steaming my neck as he whispers: “And you give ’em too much credit, airports. No one’s looking too closely at what a chummy white bloke’s taking through security, unless it’s something obvious.”

I’m sorry I asked.

Thunder rumbles as the seven of us stagger through curtains of stringy moss and long, sharp palm fronds to find a cleared trail. My feet sing as the ground suddenly becomes firm and free of the prickling underbrush. Greenish, dying light—and a torrent of warm rain—meets us at the path. “This is the Coral Road,” Briggs announces. “It’s the only beaten path on this island, so do not wander off, unless you want to die of thirst finding your way back to us. There may be more upraised roots along the way, so we’ll keep taking it slow. Nearly there.”

“Nearly where?” I mutter.

Before I can realize my mouthiness, Briggs raises his taser to my shoulder. My whole body spasms backward as the device makes contact…but no sparks come. Another shitty grin crosses his face. “Off you trot,” he chortles. It was a fake-out, but he could’ve pulled the trigger and no one would’ve protested. It’s not like there are cops around to call.

In the pale shine of my flashlight, Briggs’s irises glow a sickly, bloodless white. Heebie-jeebies race down my arms, so I tap off my flashlight and stuff the phone inside my hoodie’s pouch. The twisting path along the Coral Road could be magical if our destination wasn’t so ominously unknown. Gargantuan tree roots snake along the ground, weaving in and out of the earth like the Loch Ness Monster emerging from its watery hideaway.

Around the next bend, a rusting generator—as enormous and cylindrical as the water tank in my basement—rattles beside a large cabin standing above the flooding road on a platform of raised stilts. I dash for the cabin’s staircase to get the hell out of this rain, but Briggs seizes my shoulder. “Mr. Major, we go into the clinic when I say. Trouble, you are.” The kidnappers snicker as I mumble another pathetic apology. “You and Miss Partridge follow me inside. The rest of you, let the director know we’ve arrived.”

Not to sound like a scumbag, but Briggs was a lot prettier when he smiled.

Inside the clinic, lemony freshness surprises my nostrils. Outside, an Old Testament storm bashes through the raw jungle, but inside is pure modern civilization. Nothing like its shack exterior; old-fashioned, maybe (chrome-and-Formica countertops are very eighties), but the clinic remains untouched by this weather. As soon as Briggs shuts us in, Molly lets herself exhale. Under the harsh clinic lights, her pink dress reveals itself to be annihilated by splotches of brown and green. She scans the clinic, alert and ready to scrap, but when her eyes land on me, her head drops mournfully.