You land in the aluminum boat and lose your footing, tumbling forward over the middle seat, landing painfully on your shoulder, and lying there like a fish in the bottom of the boat, gasping for air. You stumble to your feet, adrenaline charged, only to lurch forward as the boat comes to a juddering stop at the end of the line securing it to the dock.

You fall again, but you’re up in a flash, scurrying to the bow to untie the taut yellow rope connecting you to the land. You shove yourself off, putting water between you and them.

You’re floating free.

You stand as the boat drifts outward into the still black water of the little weed-choked bay. You are breathing hard, bruised and hurting, but triumphant! Your mouth hangs open, gulping at the cool air. Niven and Wallace just watch you like someone pushed the Pause button on them. Then click — Wallace moves. You’ve got more of a head start than you’d have ever dreamed. It’s eerie. You turn sharply to look behind you out onto the bay, half expecting to see a gunboat approaching — an armada. But there is nothing out there but the dusk.

You put your hands on your hips. Now what? You stare at the outboard. You have no idea how that works. It’s tipped up, the propeller out of the water. You step over the seat and give it a shove. It doesn’t move. Locked in position somehow. But lying in a rack attached to the inside of the boat is an oar. You grab it and stick the business end straight down into the water until it hits bottom, which is not deep. The bottom gives, you push down hard, and the boat shoots back end first out into the bay. You dip the oar in again and shove with all your might. The boat starts to come around, and you realize that this is a good thing, so you shove that oar down into the muck and push again so that the prow of the boat is now facing out into the lake, the way it ought to be. You’re a good twenty meters from shore now, and Wallace is only just reaching the dock. He’s got his hands in his pockets. He’s not in any hurry.

“Where you heading?” he says, standing at the end of the dock.

He doesn’t sound concerned, which immediately makes you worried. But you aren’t about to launch into any discussion about your immediate plans. It isn’t about plans is it, Blink? It never has been. Life is about reacting. When you end up in a mess, you do something about it. You beat them at their own game, didn’t you, boy? They only lowered their guard for a split second, and you were gone, ducking and weaving out of there.

You stick the oar down one more time into the murk, and you almost follow it overboard as the blade catches on something — a submerged log maybe — something that moves but not much. You reach out to grab the side of the boat, drop the oar into the drink. You fall to your knees to drag it out, wet and slimy.

You push again more carefully, and now the water is getting too deep to pole the boat away. Your eyes glom onto the oarlock. You’ve never seen one in your whole life, but you know what it’s for, all right. You sit and slam home the pin attached to the oar into the lock and then stare into the boat for the other oar. But there isn’t one. Where the other oarlock should be there is a rubber holder with a couple of rods stuck in it, standing straight up like car antennas.

You pull on the oar anyway, and the boat starts veering right.

“You aren’t going to go far like that,” shouts Wallace. There is a bit of laughter in his voice. “Why don’t you just bring it back, son,” he says. “It’s a lot shorter distance to here than it is to there.”

You pull the oar out of the useless lock, shimmy your butt across the seat, and with two hands dip the oar into the water on the other side, using it like a paddle.

“I’ve got a canoe over here, Brent,” says Wallace. “I can reach you in about three strokes. I’d rather you saved me the trouble.”

You shut him out. You paddle on the right until the boat starts heading left into the thickest of the bulrushes, and then you shimmy back to the left again and paddle there a bit, bringing the boat around, though you are now moving ever so slowly in a dry jungle of rushes. Up close, you can see that their brown heads are busted open, spilling out guts like the stuffing of a chair. You paddle hard, the best you can, with those reeds battering against the hull, while the prow piles up dead and shriveled lily pads.

The exhilaration of escape seeps out of you. An endlessly long day catches up to you. You sit. You turn and stare at the outboard as the boat comes to a dead stop out in the reeds. You are baby Moses in his basket. Except this Moses isn’t going to escape the pharaoh.

You are so tired. You are tired to death.

You turn your back on the shore and look out across the lake. And that’s when you notice the fishing tackle box. You don’t know for sure that’s what it is, but when you open it, you can see well enough. And what you see first is the white cross and the bright red of a Swiss Army knife.

You sit up straight, glancing back toward the shore, hoping Wallace didn’t see you make this discovery. The big man’s back is to you. He’s walked up the deck toward the shore, where Niven is coming to meet him.

Quickly you slip the pocketknife into your left running shoe, pushing it down under your arch, wiggling your foot to make it as comfortable as possible. Then you sit there waiting for a second wind, but all you get is the cold breeze coming up off the water, pushing the boat into the shallows. Even in your snug new hoodie, you can feel October close its fist around you.

The water stinks. Something died here. Out there, beyond the bay, the water still holds long gashes of setting sun. In here the water is brown and turgid like a plugged toilet bowl.

“There’s nowhere to go, boy,” says Wallace. He’s back at his spot at the end of the dock again, and Niven is standing at the foot of the dock, his arms crossed. “Out there is just bush and wetland,” says Wallace.

You turn to look out toward the “there” he’s talking about.

“You head out onto the lake, and you make our job easy. Nobody’s going to see you for a good long time, my man.”

You are “boy” one minute and “man” the next. And right now you’re not sure what you are.

He lets his news sink in.

“Now, there’s wetland at the south end of the lake,” he says. “With a bit of luck, you might find a channel through it. In a day or two, you might even find your way out to the Mississippi.”

He doesn’t say it nasty. He even sounds a little encouraging, as if he’s giving you a chance — a head start. But by now you can hardly imagine getting out of the bay, let alone all the way to some river. Did he say the Mississippi? How far is it you’ve come, anyway? Does that legendary river come all this way? How little you know about the world, Blink.

The darkness is coming on, and Wallace doesn’t have to say anything more to convince you that it’s over. There are no roads but the one behind you. The road ends at this nameless lake.

“Mr. Niven was right, Brent,” says Wallace. “We aren’t going to harm you. We just gotta talk, eh? I know you don’t want to believe that. Why would you? But it’s the truth. The only truth you’ve got right now.”

Not the only truth, you think. You’ve still got Kitty. She might have already beaten it back to the car. All you’ve got to do is hold on.

Captain Panic retires again to his deep room inside you. The dread recedes. You look down into the gloom on which the boat sits and see no reflection in it. You could just tip yourself over into it, into this brown nothingness. Which is exactly what you do. You stand and just step right out of the boat. You hit bottom, thigh deep.

The cold makes you catch your breath. Then you grab the yellow rope and lead the boat back to the dock, like it’s some big dumb animal that made a break for freedom and you’re this patient farm boy who has to bring it back to the barn.