“Don’t you two look at me like that,” Lett said. “Hear me out. We can maneuver smarter without it. We won’t make our moves based on firing back. We’ll base them on avoidance. Less the lumbering bear, more the wily fox.”

Jock said to Kanani, “I think maybe they did something to his noodle.”

Kanani’s face screwed up as if she’d sucked on lemon.

“Supposing the local authorities happen to find us?” Lett said. “It’s far better we’re not packing a loaded revolver. And if someone starts pointing fingers? It wasn’t us, we’re not the guilty party. We’re not even armed.”

Jock rubbed at his temples. Like Lett, he knew this was about smarts, but also about faith in the others’ ability in the field—as whispered by Jock and his fellow Marines in dark island huts riddled with bullet holes, as chanted by Lett and his dogface buddies in French farmhouses scarred with shrapnel. They would honor one another’s madness so that they might reach what came after.

“Maybe it makes sense,” Kanani said finally. “We no have gold bars, and we no have guns, either. We’re pure like a newborn babe.”

Jock snorted. But he already had the revolver out. Jagged lava rock piles and ragged crannies waited on either side of them. He stepped around and over them, looking for a good spot. He stood over a dark crevice. He dropped the revolver, and the abyss proved so deep they didn’t hear the gun hit bottom. He pulled his tunnel map from his pocket, crumpled it, and tossed that down, too.

“Well done,” Lett said. “I know that wasn’t easy.”

“Your turn,” Jock said and broke up the tropical bar for Lett. The chunks tasted like a cross between potato and stale chocolate and Lett choked them down.

Jock marched them onward, pushing the pace, his pack bobbing between his shoulders as if empty. They had a long way to go. They were crossing the island over its unforgiving volcanic center, a gritty and grim gauntlet of lava rock fields. Heading northeasterly, it was roughly fifty miles in a straight line to the opposite coast, about a day’s journey if they could cover a mile every half hour or so.

As they marched on, the sun rose and bloomed pink and orange. Then it emerged golden round and white in its heart, and their black moonscape turned mustard and olive from the dry grass that covered the rolling outback as far as the eye could see. The terrain looked like a vast cracking tarmac carpeted with khaki. But it was no carpet. Up close the grass was thin and sparse, its soil just another variant of the black lava rock.