He looked skeptically at the snow dusting their clothes. “A very little.”
A part of Emily’s mind marveled at itself—calmly weighing the risk of being blown up against the risk of hypothermia. If only Miss Brady could see her now. Thinking of Miss Brady made her think of that last day at school: the orange and blue flames licking up the locker-room walls; the sirens; the sparks snowing, glowing red, into the sky.
She shook her head, refusing the memory.
She tried to think, to crystallize the options. Absurdly, her first instinct was to call Jeremy, ask him for advice, but he was a lifetime away in Minnesota, and anyway she’d left her phone at home—she hadn’t wanted anyone to trace it.
She looked forward, toward the cockpit.
“I need to check on the pilot,” she said.
Aidan turned his head. The back of the plane was a raw circle, a horrific O, with snow outside it. The front was a twisted mess leading to darkness. A scene from a wrecking yard.
“Um…,” he said.
He looked…scared. Worried. She hadn’t seen it before, that expression on him, and it hurt her more than the cut on her head.
“Yeah” was all Emily could manage. She pushed herself up. “Wait here.”
CHAPTER 3
USING WHAT REMAINED of the seats for support, Emily made her way slowly to the front of the plane. There was a partition between the pilot and the passengers—it was how she and Aidan were here in the first place. The door was shut, but that was a nominal state—it had bowed outward, the ceiling crushing down, and Emily could see clean through to the cockpit.
She held the handle and pulled—then braced herself and pulled even harder. The door screeched open wide enough for her to squeeze by. She’d always been small and flexible—that was how she’d ended up as the flyer on the cheerleading team. But she took up more room in the world than her size suggested. That was what her dad said. It wasn’t a compliment.
She got through and found Bob Simpson, the pilot, splayed over the controls. She didn’t know him, only his name. Spend a year in a small town in Alaska and you know most everyone’s name. He’s dead, she thought. She touched him. He wasn’t dead.
Bob Simpson gave a low sigh and shuddered. Emily had no clue what to do. Weren’t you supposed to leave people where they were if they had a head injury? The way he was passed out over the instruments, he must have hit his head pretty hard. When Jade Allbright had fallen out of that lift and onto the studio floor, the instructor had put her in the recovery position, curled up there, like a question mark.
On the other hand, if Emily left him here and the plane did explode…As one part of her brain tried to work out whether she could and should move him, another part screamed at her to get out of the plane before it blew up, before it burst into flames. She ignored that part.
She couldn’t tell if Bob was OK. But she did see his SPOT device—his emergency GPS beacon. They made them small enough that you could clip them on a cap—which was what her dad did. This one had fallen from the dash of the cockpit—did you say dash?—onto the floor of the plane, and was now right at her feet.
She turned back to the pilot. Move him? Or not?
Then he sat up, undoing the dilemma.
Half his face was sheeted with blood. When he saw her, he frowned. “Are you…an angel?”
She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Right, clearly not….Forget it. It’s pretty obvious I’m not dead because my head hurts like someone hit me with a tire iron.” He looked at the broken window, the snow beyond. “I crashed,” he said.
“Give the man a prize,” said Emily.
“But what are you…Who are you…?”
“Emily,” she said.
He looked more closely at her, his expression shifting to a different quality of frown. “The Perez kid?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Aren’t you the one who—”
“Yeah.”
He nodded slowly. Almost respect in it. Recognition. They were rebels, these Alaska bush pilots. Renegades. “And Miss Brady? It’s still her, right?”
It was still her. It would always be her. Hair pulled so tight in a bun it looked like she was smiling. She wasn’t when Emily was around.
“Suspended me.”
“Figures.” He felt in his denim-shirt pocket and took out a squashed pack of cigarettes. American Spirit. Only a bush pilot would smoke no-filters. Only a bush pilot would light one when he’d just crashed a plane into a mountainside. He flicked it out and into his mouth, and produced a lighter from another pocket. “I’m Bob. Bob Simpson,” he said.
Emily nodded. “I know.”
Bob lit the cigarette. Emily winced. Was he not aware that there could be leaking fuel pretty much anywhere?
“But listen, Emily Perez, of small-town notoriety,” he said. “What are you doing on my plane? You’re not on my manifest.”
Emily wasn’t totally sure what manifest meant, but she understood the point. “I stowed away,” she said.
“You…stowed away? What is this, an adventure story?” He blew out smoke; it stung her eyes.
“It is, since you crashed the plane.” Outside it was cold, and dark, and they were in the middle of nowhere. This wasn’t good for Aidan. Not good at all.
He grimaced. “Not my fault.”
“Not your fault? You’re the pilot.”
“I log five thousand miles a year, kid. Something went…wrong. The fuel-supply line, I think. I radioed, but it was too late.”
“You radioed?”
“Yep.”
Damn.
Emily looked out the window, as if there was anything to see. It was only white out there. One side of the cockpit was ripped open, rock and ice breaking through. “We should get out of the plane,” she said. “Can you move?”
“I think so. Shoulder’s dislocated, I reckon. And I knocked myself out pretty good. But I don’t feel anything else.”
He eased himself out of the seat, screaming only once, when he had to twist his back, which Emily thought was quite impressive. He scanned the controls in front of him, then looked at the damaged side of the cockpit. “You see a little orange thing with buttons on it?” he said.
“Like a SPOT tracker?”
He looked at her, surprised.
“My dad hunts,” she said.