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little to one side. It wasn’t much, but she had managed to move him against his will.
    Planting her feet, she twisted around and drove herself backwards into his side, pushing him further in the direction he was already tilting. That upset his balance more, and he had to take another couple of steps to keep from falling.
    When he turned back to face her, he stood at perfect striking distance and she jabbed her right fist at his windpipe. The impact would probably have made him gasp, might even have done some real damage. But Barrel Guard, still off balance, reeled and dipped his head forward just a few degrees an instant before she struck. The blow landed against the side of his nose, and Amy was sure she felt something give way when her knuckles connected.
    He let out a muffled honk, but still did not let go of her wrist. 
    Then came bubbling, and he started to cough explosively through his mouth and nose.
    Small droplets, almost a mist, peppered Amy’s cheek and arm. The guard’s face was partly toward the headlights now, and she saw blood running down to his chin. He bubbled some more and used his free hand to swat the choking flow away from his nose.
    Amy twisted her left arm again and this time the guard’s grip slipped. She lurched away from him.
    Even as he struggled to breathe, Barrel Guard managed to swing a big palm down onto her head and clench hard , but the hand was slick from wiping blood off his face, and his grip on Amy’s hair slipped. She kept moving, and between the guard’s fingers nothing remained but a few dozen long strands of medium brown hair.
    She threw herself toward the drop-off and began tumbling, sliding, crashing through thick undergrowth that spattered her with cool water. A knot on a fallen branch dug viciously into her back as she skimmed over it. It was a steep, uncontrolled descent of thirty feet or so, and Amy kept rolling hard, even after the ground beneath her leveled out. She got to her feet and tried to charge further into the darkness, but her head was spinning so badly that she couldn’t keep from slamming straight into an enormous tree trunk, though she saw it coming a good five feet before impact.
    There were rifle shots, but no one followed her down that s harp drop. She stayed still, not giving the guards any clue where she was. Somewhere above her, Barrel Guard was still roaring away. The strap of the sunhat had somehow stayed hooked around Amy’s neck.
     
     

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    Amy awoke in the cab of a parked truck and had no idea how she’d gotten there. The morning light seared her eyes. The first clear thought that made its way through the pain in her head was that she needed to get moving before anyone came up the road.
    She got outside, stood painfully, and checked her pockets, which were now just little white sacks dangling against her bare quadriceps. The camera was in one sack, the floppy white sunhat stuffed into the other. At the moment she cared more about the hat, which she put on gratefully.
    Seeing the scraps of denim tied to her feet, she began to remember the first part of the evening. Tearing up her jeans to make moccasins had taken half an hour and required teeth as well as hands. The seams, which served as ropes to lash a few layers of fabric to each foot, had made uncomfortable lumps under her soles, but that had still been better than walking in just her socks. She’d meant to have cutoff shorts left over, but in the darkness had accidentally made a diagonal tear all the way up through the seat of the pants. Instead of shorts, she now had loose shreds of fabric hanging from the waistband.
    Then she remembered the worst part. The rainforest canopy was so dense in many places that at night there was effectively no light at all. In one of those spots, she’d been using her phone to light up the ground and keep her footing. Somehow she’d stumbled anyhow, and the phone had gone flying. It might have landed face down in some crevice or it