Never wanting more. Never wanting to get out.
She looked around, at the wilderness. Although, she thought. Be careful what you wish for.
Now she was stuck on a mountainside in the Alaskan spring, which was not as full of warmth and new growth as that season suggests elsewhere. It was barely above zero, even with the sun up.
“What’s that?” said Aidan, and she put away her memories, swish, like minimizing a window on an app, and turned back to him, the little boy maximized. Bright. Backlit.
“What?”
He was pointing downhill. There was a kind of rumbling sound coming from that direction, something rhythmical, deep and beating.
“That,” he said. He looked scared.
CHAPTER 6
BOB FROWNED AT the noise. Emily’s eyes flicked to the rifle leaning against the side of the plane. Deer. She knew how to shoot. Had done it a lot with her dad, her mom too. Dressed in bright orange, so other hunters would see them. During the season. All day out in the woods; the whole thing. Her parents’ dream—her nightmare.
Her eyes still on the rifle, she took Aidan’s hand and held it. She could feel his heartbeat through his fingers. Da-dum. Da-dum. It felt so real; the only thing that was real.
Then from the treetops below them rose dark spinning movement, wide and flat. Rotor blades.
The body of the squat black helicopter followed its blades into the murky sky; heavy and unlikely seeming. Its nose angled downward, and it roared forward, then lowered itself toward the slope of snow in front of them, on the clearest patch, where the rocks and trees were thinnest.
Emily’s eyes were scopes, her mind a calculator. A hundred yards, she thought. Hundred and twenty, maybe. Wind strong. From the—she thought back to the sun and where it had risen, the wind blowing from the opposite direction—the west.
It was stupid, she realized afterward. It was stupid, but she just expected, somehow, that Bob would know. That he would do the same as her. She pulled Aidan back, started to fade into the plane. To disappear. She knew how to do that; it was how she’d survived at school. Until Brad saw her. Until they suspended her.
Men in white snowsuits jumped down from the helicopter. They began walking up the slope, slowly but with purpose in their movements. They were wearing black masks. To protect them from the snow whipped up by the rotors, maybe.
Or to stop people from seeing their faces.
Maybe.
But Bob didn’t know anything, of course, so he didn’t do what she did. He didn’t fade into the background.
He stood tall, arms up, and waved his hands in and out, almost crossing, the wave of every person wanting to be rescued. One of his arms didn’t quite reach the other, dangled awkwardly when he lowered it: the lingering pain of his dislocation.
“No—” Emily started to say.
But there was no time.
One of the white-clad men raised something, a long black stick that had been down by his side, blending in with the shadows of the low sun, the always presence of night, here in Alaska, in the corners of things.
He put the stick to his shoulder in one smooth movement and fired, and Bob fell backward, blood spraying in what, Emily thought in the strange clarity of that frozen moment, seemed awfully like the explosion of a red firework against the white background. But she didn’t have time to worry about Bob.
She dived into the snow, pulling Aidan behind her like a small dragged mannequin, then yanked him to his feet and ran, half carrying him, away from the fire, into the shadows. Where they would be harder targets.
CHAPTER 7
EMILY, STILL TOWING Aidan, hunkered down behind the broken-off wing of the plane. She peered over it, down the mountainside. The men in white suits were moving steadily up, sweeping with their guns, taking no chances. She counted them: one, two, three, four.
Four men.
And on their side: her, a wounded or possibly even dead pilot, and a seven-year-old boy. Apparently.
Not good odds.
She held Aidan’s hand, got ready to run, to scramble, up the mountain and through the trees.
Closer by, between her and the soldiers—or whatever they were—she saw Bob struggle to a sitting position, hand clamped over the top of his arm where, she guessed, he’d been hit.
Shit, she thought. Shit, shit. She couldn’t leave him here. But he was going to slow them down.
Her eyes flicked again to the men with the guns.
“Can you…?” she said to Aidan.
He shook his head. “Too far away. I can’t do anything.”
“OK. OK.” Her mind seemed to want to repeat things, to stutter. Like it was trying to go back in time to before any of this was happening. Going back in time was what she’d wanted for ages, of course. To Minnesota, to dance exhibitions, to Jeremy. Although now that would mean losing Aidan, and she wouldn’t do that, couldn’t do that. With Aidan, it was like her heart had been taken out of her and given a body, so it could move around the world on its own.
“Wait here,” she said to Aidan.
Then she came out from behind the wing at a running crawl, moving down toward Bob. She got one arm under his good one, and—while hissing at him, “Don’t say anything, just move”—she hauled him and he hauled himself back up and away from the men with guns. A percussive bang echoed off the mountains, and a bullet zipped over their heads. Then another kicked up snow by her foot. The figures in white were moving.
“Move,” she said again. Freeze-frame. Rewind. Stutter, stutter.
In the glow of the fire she saw the rifle from the plane casting a long, thin black shadow onto the fuselage. She gave the pilot a push in the back, to safety behind the wing, and jagged left as a bullet grazed her elbow—she felt nothing for a moment, and then hot sharp pain and a warm bloom as her sweater soaked with blood.
Ow.
But she was moving that arm, swinging it to grab the rifle, so she knew the wound wasn’t serious. She held the gun by the stock and booked it toward the separated wing, boots slipping on the snow; dropped by the fire to rake her fingers through the ash at its edge—she didn’t want a clean reflective scope lens giving away her exact position—wincing as it burned her skin; then on to the shelter of the wing. A bullet thudded into it as she flung herself down.
No time to think, no time to consider.
The gun was loaded. It was a Browning with a detachable box magazine. Her dad would have been contemptuous. You’re hunting deer, he’d have said. Not fighting a war. What do you need a magazine for?
Well.
Emily took a deep breath; held it. She was counting on surprise. She kneeled, wiped the soot from her hand on the scope. She had to improvise. Her dad’s hunting rifles all had modern multicoated antireflective scopes, but this was an old rifle—single-coated, if that. She had to cut down on the glare of the glass from the fire or it would give away her location.