There was a watery halo of headlamps between trees: her welcoming party. The drone’s running lights shut off. Now Ha saw the full moon, half-occluded by a smear of cirrus clouds. Cumulus clouds hovered low, watering the island’s tropical forests.

Ha breathed in, closed her eyes, opened them, adjusting her vision to the darkness. The hexcopter’s comms squawked. “Ground pickup incoming. Move away from the copter.”

Ha gathered her bags and ran for the shelter of the airport overhang. The hexcopter’s lights snapped back on. It lifted off the tarmac and swung away at an angle of attack and speed severe enough to knock a passenger unconscious. It was gone in seconds, enveloped in clouds.

The ground transport was armored, ex-military: a self-driving troop carrier with hardened porthole windows, oversized airless honeycomb tires.

Inside, it was upgraded for comfort. The passenger cabin was padded to dampen the noise and jolt of armor. The car’s fuel-cell engine ran silent enough, but the transmission whined and sent weird vibrations through the compartment. Ha dimmed the cabin lights.

The porthole’s thick strata of glass and polycarbonate distorted the scene outside. Through it, Ha watched the undulating barrier of jungle encroaching the narrow road. Ruined walls of rubble studded abbreviated clearings, structures that could have been fortresses once. Or mills, or factories. Anything. The full moon cast waveforms on the sea’s surface.

The car entered the dark town clamped between forest and ocean. The heavy red-tiled roofs of the French colonial buildings dripped with rain, their stucco walls stained with tropical damp. Their shutters were closed, their gardens overrun with vine and moss. Here and there, a brutalist Communist building broke the sequence: a high school, the Communist Party administrative building. Concrete monsters damp with lichen, colorless in the night.

In the daylight the deserted town would be composed of scabrous, peeling pastel tones. Ficus trees, their trunks painted a fading white, lined streets scattered with vegetal debris—leaves, fallen branches, seedpods, and fruit.

The transport swung out onto a boulevard flanked by a seawall. Its headlamps panned across two monkeys fighting, like human children, over a dubious treasure. At the edge of the town, the houses petered out to sag-roofed shacks already half-dismantled by vines.

The road followed the coast. On the left, the landscape dropped to rocks and ocean waves swarming in moonlight. The black backs of the archipelago’s smaller islands humped in the water. The main island’s spine rose to the right of the road, furred with trees.

Flood lamps pinned the roofs of a pagoda against the hillside, suggesting life on the evacuated archipelago. But lighting the structure was probably an automated municipal habit. A beacon for tourists who would never return.