“Right. Yeah, exactly like that.”
A moment. “No. But come on. My little brother is back there.”
He cursed. “That tracker could be anywhere. We’ll have to hope they got a fix on my signal when I made that distress call. Now…Wait—your little brother?”
“He’s too small to look after himself. We’ve got to keep him safe.” The plane. Leaving. It had all been for Aidan. And now that they’d crashed…it was still true, just in a different way. If she could keep Aidan safe…it would mean she’d have done something. Something big. With her life.
She’d have saved his.
Now, of course, with the plane smashed into the side of a mountain, it was going to be an awful lot harder. She shivered, thinking of the white vastness out there, trackless and blank.
“OK,” said Bob, breaking her train of thought. “But if you and your kid brother die, it’s not on me. You’re not on my manifest.”
She nodded. That was fair. But they weren’t going to die. Definitely not Aidan. Not if she had anything to do with it.
Her fingers brushed against the pocket of her jeans, the small bulge there, where she had put the SPOT tracker. She felt it must be pulsing at Bob, beaming out its location—a heat, almost, came from it, burning her leg—but of course he didn’t notice at all.
CHAPTER 4
IT WAS DARK now. Or at least the sun had set. There was a lot of light from the stars and moon.
Emily had wrapped Aidan in two blankets, for shock and because he was easily chilled at the best of times. They were sitting at the new, torn entrance to the plane. She was wearing her hooded fleece-lined winter jacket, which she’d stowed under her seat before takeoff.
Bob braced himself against the wing that was still attached to the plane, pushed his shoulder into it, and twisted. Emily realized he was trying to pop his dislocated joint back into place. He did it again—and screamed. He staggered for a moment, as if he might pass out, but steadied himself.
He moved his arm tentatively. Then he nodded and grunted. Started gathering supplies. He set down a gas can next to various objects he had already taken from the plane: a rifle, a rope, a sheet of thin metal. Behind them, the peak of the mountain loomed, a blacker mass in the dark of the night. Below, the foothills stretched toward a glow on the horizon. A town? The ocean? Emily wasn’t sure.
“We’ve got food,” the pilot said. “Plus the usual stuff I keep in case of emergency. Had a crate of water too, but it’s somewhere down the mountain. Still, if we get a fire going, we can melt snow—should be able to camp here until someone finds us. We’ll build the fire by the plane, use gasoline to get it going.” He indicated the ground in front of him.
“Here? What if it…sets fire to the fuel tank?”
“Fuel tanks,” he said. “Plural. And they’re above the landing gear.” He slapped the side of the plane. “This part of the fuselage is just metal bulkhead. It’s our best bet in terms of shelter.”
Emily looked at the plane. Or rather, the pieces of it. A plane was something that flew, something with wings. This was just a jumble of broken things. Bob was right, though: around them were only conifers, buried in snow. They offered some shelter, but not as much as the body of the plane.
She took in the gas tank, the snow, the ceiling of the plane and the space inside for protection from the elements.
Her dad always said: water, shelter, fire. Find those things quickly, in that order of priority, or you die.
Once, they’d been caught by a storm in the Adirondacks, too many miles out from the cabin they were supposed to be staying in that night. It had still been full daylight, but within an hour her father had found a stream, made a bivouac, lit a fire. We get cold and dehydrated, he said, and we die. And that hadn’t even been in Alaska. Emily wanted to move, to keep moving, but reluctantly admitted the best course of action was to shelter here. “You’re right,” she said.
“Let’s build that fire,” said Bob.
Aidan looked up. “Do you have marshmallows for roasting?”
Emily raised an eyebrow at him.
Bob grunted, a half laugh. “If you find any, knock yourself out.”
He sent Emily into the trees to find fallen branches to burn. She set off through the snow—grateful for the leather boots she was wearing but surprised by how tiring it was to walk in the deep powder. She gathered a few branches and dragged them back, sweating, even though the air was freezing in her nostrils. Then they broke open some of the packages from the plane and tore up the cardboard—it was drier and thinner than the wood.
With Emily’s dad, it was all military precision and attention: tinder, kindling, firewood. Bob had a different approach. He just made a pile of cardboard and wood, doused it with gasoline, and set fire to it.
The rush of heat was immediate: something primitive, almost alive. The flames shot up, casting a glow on the side of the plane, made the nearby trees flicker and their shadows grow and recede, like breath. The mountain disappeared, and the horizon: they were in a glowing bubble now, surrounded by blackness.
Aidan glanced around. “Quite visible,” he said, “these pyrotechnics.”
It was exactly what Emily had been thinking. She squeezed his hand, as if to say, what could they do?
Then she saw that Bob was staring at Aidan, brow creased.
“Aidan’s…um…different,” she said. “Special.”
Bob nodded slowly.
“We should eat,” she said, so he would stop looking at her little brother.
They opened cans at random: corn, tuna, beans. Even Coke, to drink. There were also cookies and chips, but Bob said to save some stuff for later. He pulled one of the broken seats from the plane and set it up next to the fire. Then he yanked a first-aid kit from under it and took out a bandages, alcohol, cotton balls, scissors.
He walked over to Emily, snagging a water bottle from his pile of stuff, and motioned for her to look up at him.
“This will hurt,” he said, pointing at the cut on her forehead.
“I know,” said Emily.
This will hurt: it was practically her motto, she’d heard it all her life. Those years of pointe shoes, building up the strength in her toes, losing nails, developing calluses as hard as horn. Hiking with her dad. Even Miss Latimer (“call me Rachel”), the cheerleading coach from this past year in Alaska, had said it, about learning the routines. But it wasn’t the routines that Emily had found painful. Not that.
Bob poured water over her forehead—some of it ran into her nose and mouth, and she coughed; turned involuntarily—and when she faced the right way again, he rinsed off the blood before using the alcohol and a cotton ball to clean the wound at her hairline. Finally he put a bandage on it.