“We’re getting close,” Eric says.
His words jerk me awake. Until that moment, I hadn’t even been aware that I was sleeping, but the vibration of the plane and the whirr of the engines made me drift off. My back is kinked from the hard chair, and, despite the meat strips I ate a couple of hours ago, my stomach feels hollow and tight.
I raise myself up a little, looking out of the cockpit glass. I can’t see a damn thing. Dawn is starting to glimmer behind us, but I can still barely tell the difference between the ground and the sky. It’s hard to believe that Eric knows where he’s going.
“Shouldn’t we be seeing lights?” I say.
“We don’t know what we should be seeing,” says Eric. He sounds more subdued than before, a note of worry creeping into his voice. Not surprising–soon he’ll have to land the plane, one way or another.
“Don’t you worry about Eric,” says Harlan, his voice coming crystal-clear over the headset. “He’ll fly us right. Hey, Riley–come back here for a second, would you?”
I stretch briefly, kneeling on the seat. Then I clamber out into the main body of the plane, leaving my headset behind. Eric is making a gentle right turn, and it nearly throws me off balance, but I manage to keep one hand on the side.
Harlan and Finkler have turned the place inside out. Boxes lie everywhere, their contents upended and scattered across the metal floor: scrap metal, spare parts, tools, pieces of foam rubber, articles of clothing so threadbare that it’s a wonder they don’t fall apart when I look at them. Finkler is on all fours, picking through a pile of seemingly identical screws. Bandages and bottles are stacked on his right. A single dim bulb, set into the ceiling, is the only light.
Harlan waves me over. He passes me an extra set of headphones, the cable running into a box bolted to the roof.
“Here,” he says, bending down, once I’ve got them in place. There’s a backpack by his feet, covered in lurid red and green stripes, the fabric torn in places. By the way he grunts as he lifts it up, it’s clear that the pack is heavy.
“Food, some extra clothing, odds and ends that you might need,” he says. “There’s a gun in there, too, although we can’t find any ammo. Still, might come in handy. Oh, and here.”
He passes me a piece of clothing–his coat. When he sees my expression, he shrugs. “It’s thick, you know? Thicker’n the one you got on, anyway. You’ll need to keep warm.”
I tell him thanks, pulling off my coat and exchanging it for Harlan’s. He’s right. It’s scratchy and uncomfortable, but it’s also warm. The fabric smells of smoke. The pockets are stuffed full–I decide not to pull everything out now, where it could roll around the plane. I’ll check on it later.
“I still think we should give her those socks,” says Finkler, from his position on the floor.
Harlan rolls his eyes. “They’re more hole than sock.”
“I’m just saying.”
“She’d be better off wrapping her feet in marsh grass.”
“Fine. Then I’ll keep them. I like socks.”
I try to smile at Finkler’s words, and don’t quite manage it. The thought of going out there by myself, of leaving them, is almost too much to take.
I crouch down to Finkler’s level, putting an arm around his shoulders. He stops picking through his pile of screws, letting his hand rest on the cold metal floor. “Just get back to Whitehorse safe.”
I reach over and grip Harlan’s shoulder. “You too, all right? You’d better be around when I get back.”
He nods, not looking at me. “The terrain down there isn’t going to be what you’ve seen before,” he says. “Alaska’s a bad place.”
“Bad? Like how?”
“It’s tougher for things to grow. The land isn’t honest. It plays tricks on your feet. It’s all bog and swamp, especially this close to the shore. You watch yourself.”
“Thought you’d never been to Anchorage.”
“I ain’t. But I’ve been a little ways west. I’ve seen how it gets.”
Eric’s voice comes over the headphones, crisp and cold. “We’re coming up on Fire Island, which means Anchorage is north of us. I’ll go a little way past it, down the inlet. I don’t want to put this bird down in Anchorage, not when I don’t know what’s out there.”
“Fire Island?” I say.
Harlan points to the window, and I bend down to look through it. There’s more light in the sky now, enough for me to see the vast ocean stretching away from us, a thousand times bigger than Fish Lake. I try to take it all in, but the sheer size of it makes me blink with astonishment.
At the very bottom of the view, peeking over the edge of the window, is a black strip of land. Water pushes in on it from all sides. We’re coming in low over the ocean, and I can just make out scrubby plants on the shoreline. Water laps against the rocks.
Almost there.
Finkler stands up, resting one hand on the wall for balance. He puts his head close to mine, gazing at the view out of the window, and whistles softly. “You keep that incision clean, you hear me?” he says after a moment. “Don’t wreck my beautiful stitches.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good. Because if I find out you picked up another infection, I’m never going to let you forget it.”
And that’s when the sky explodes.
It’s like we’ve flown into a meteor shower. The plane shudders as objects pelt it from all sides, too many to count. And the noise. All at once, I’m back on the Shinso as it plunged down through the atmosphere, tearing itself apart.
Eric banks the plane sharply, shouting over the headset. Harlan is thrown to the floor, and Finkler and I nearly land on top of him. At the last second, I manage to grab one of the headphone brackets on the wall, and stop myself falling. But the plane rocks from side to side, shaking to pieces as the storm gets more intense. My fingers slip loose, and my knee slams into Harlan’s shoulder. Finkler is on his feet, whirling his arms, desperately trying to keep his balance.
A window detonates, glass raining inwards. Something is burning, and I smell the sharp stench of fuel, shooting upwards into the cabin from an unseen puncture. It’s like we’ve flown into some insane weather pattern, a localised storm that—
Gunfire. It’s gunfire. We’re being shot at, by what feels like a million stingers going off at once.
We lurch to the side, tilting almost ninety degrees. Finkler slams into me, knocking me off Harlan. I feel his arm wrapping around me, like he’s drawing me into a protective embrace.
We’re heading right for a closed door in the side of the plane. The thoughts come in split-second bursts: It slides open sideways, it’ll hold us, it has to.
Finkler takes the full force of the impact. I feel the bang, and it’s so powerful that it rips the door off the wall.
I don’t know if the metal is too old or the rails it’s on are too fragile, but one second we’re in the body of the plane and the next there’s nothing but open sky above us. My headphones are yanked right off my head.
The tracer part of me kicks into overdrive, adrenaline and instinct overwhelming everything. I see the plane’s pontoon and grab it in the same instant, wrapping my forearm around it. With my other arm, I reach for Finkler, already bracing to take the weight.
I get one last look at him, at the raw shock on his face. Then my hand closes on empty air and Finkler is gone.
Bullets are whizzing by me like angry insects, and the roaring chatter of the gun is everywhere, coming in quick bursts now, like whoever is firing is trying to save ammo. The plane took fewer hits than I thought, but it’s still holed in a dozen places, gushing black smoke.
Harlan is above me, spreadeagled in the doorway, trying to get a better grip. He sees me, shouts my name, but then Eric swings the plane back the other way.
For a moment, I’m weightless, the motion of the plane cancelling gravity out. I can see the ocean below me. The white caps on the waves look as if they’re frozen solid. We’re seventy feet up, maybe more.
Harlan reaches out from the doorway, desperately trying to find my hand.
Another bullet hits us. I feel the plane tilt, and my arm rips free from the pontoon.