In the sudden stillness, Javi’s ears roared, and the light was blinding. His seat was tilted and something clung to his face, smothering him. When he tried to push it away, it snapped back against his mouth.

Elastic straps. The oxygen mask. Of course.

Javi pulled it off his head and realized that the air hose didn’t lead to anything. There was no ceiling above him, just bright sky.

He remembered now—the plane had been torn open from the top.

Javi tried to stand but couldn’t. Even pressing down with both hands, he could rise only an inch from his seat …

Were his legs broken?

“Seat belt,” came Molly’s voice.

“Oh, right.” Javi unclipped himself and stood. His legs definitely worked, but he wobbled for a moment. Then his eyes finally adjusted, and he saw how tilted the floor of the cabin was. Most of the seats were gone.

Most of the people, too.

He looked around and saw only Molly, Anna, and Oliver. Team Killbot, but no one else.

“Where is everyone?”

Anna started to answer, but Molly cut her off. “We should get outside. In case there’s a fire.”

Javi sniffed the air. He didn’t know what jet fuel smelled like, but he was pretty sure it didn’t smell like this—humid and pungent, like a hothouse full of flowers.

He squinted up through the torn roof and saw that the rubber jungle had been replaced by … a real jungle?

Trees towered over the plane, sprouting reddish ferns and flowers with spiky crimson petals. Screeching birds flittered across the view. The sky was pillowy white, as if the jungle floated in a cloud. And the strangest thing of all—it was warm. The air was heavy with moisture, like a Brooklyn midsummer day without a breath of wind.

“Where is this?” he breathed.

All four of them stared up at the trees for a long moment. But then Javi’s eyes fell again to the jagged stumps where the seats should have been.

It was too much to take in, and the roar in his ears started to build again.

“What’s happening?” Oliver said. He was clutching Anna’s hand, but she barely seemed to know he was there.

“Why aren’t we freezing to death?” she asked.

The rest of Team Killbot looked at Molly, like they usually did when an insolvable problem presented itself.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’re not going to figure it out in here. Especially if the plane blows up!”

She pointed at the emergency exit.

A tremor of relief went through Javi. Anything was better than standing here, contemplating the missing seats that stretched out like rows of broken teeth around them.

They picked their way across the torn and tilted floor of the cabin. Javi reached the exit first and peered through the little window. The metal trapezoid of the wing was shredded, the flaps and ailerons yanked out by the crash. The shiny metal looked alien amid the jungle’s wild shapes and colors.

He glanced at the diagram over the emergency exit, then pulled on the big red handle. The door eased from its frame, and Javi pushed it out. It landed with a bang on the wing, sending a shrieking chorus of birds into the air. A hissing sound came from outside—an evacuation slide inflating automatically.

Javi stepped out carefully. Wet red fronds lay scattered across the metal, and the wing had huge dents along its forward edge—it had sliced through trees while skidding to a halt. From out here, Javi could see a path of destruction stretching back along the landing path.

Pieces of wreckage, strewn luggage, broken trees. But no bodies anywhere.

Five hundred people, just … gone.

“Javi, keep moving,” Molly murmured.

The evacuation slide had taken only seconds to inflate. It was chubby and bright yellow, like something from a bouncy castle. But it worked. A minute later, the four of them were on the ground, which was soft with a thick undergrowth of red vines. The whole jungle seemed tinged with red, and every inch of it was alive. Under the shriek of birds, an insect-like buzz came from the iridescent blurs flitting along the ground.

Team Killbot stood there a moment at the bottom of the slide, silent.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Molly murmured.

She was staring back at the plane—what was left of it, anyway. There was no tail section, just a jagged tear about forty feet behind the wing. And at the front end, the cockpit gaped open, empty.

“No tail section, no pilots,” she said. “But we came down in a straight line, like a controlled crash landing.”

“When it should have cartwheeled down,” Anna calmly agreed. “We should all be dead.”

Oliver’s hand dropped from hers as he pulled away.

“What do you mean?” he cried. “None of this makes sense! We’re in the wrong place, and everyone else is missing. We must have gotten knocked out, and everyone else went to get help!”

Javi nodded. Help was coming, of course. Help always arrived after big crashes—search planes and helicopters and ground parties. Airliners constantly updated their position with air traffic control. They didn’t just disappear …

“But why would everyone leave the plane?” Molly asked. “Hundreds of people wouldn’t just march off into the jungle!”

“They didn’t leave,” Anna said. “They were taken.”