by Nick Lake
ALSO BY NICK LAKE
Satellite
In Darkness
Whisper to Me
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Nick Lake
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Matt Taylor
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in the United Kingdom by Hodder Children’s Books in 2019.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781984896445 (trade)
ISBN 9781984896452 (lib. bdg.)
Ebook ISBN 9781984896469
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Contents
Cover
Also by Nick Lake
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
About the Author
For Leo, who was born alongside this story
CHAPTER 1
EMILY SAW THE mountainside only a moment before the small plane crashed into it. They were in thick fog; and then there was only whiteness, and noise, and pain. Before, Emily had always associated the color white with peace, with a kind of benign erasure. Snow smoothing out the angles of her lame little town. After that moment, she didn’t.
She felt no fear. Her life did not flash in front of her eyes; she didn’t see the things most important to her parade past, perhaps because they had already been taken away. No: her body was simply flooded with adrenaline: fight-or-flight response—though there was nothing for her to fight and nowhere to fly to, not anymore.
There was: the screaming of metal on metal, the shock that emptied her lungs, the white snow breaking in through the windows, the impact of her head on something, perhaps the side of the plane. It was a De Havilland Otter fitted with floats. This, thought Emily, was the kind of useless information she would take to the grave. Not that she would necessarily have a grave. Even with modern technology, it was possible they would never be found.
And then: the realization.
Aidan.
She panicked, flailed, tried to catch his hand—the little boy, her brother. But her fingers closed on nothing.
Then, after the whiteness, the blackness.
CHAPTER 2
EMILY BLINKED BACK into light.
Part of a tree was sticking through the broken window; a cedar, she noticed uselessly. Her head was throbbing. She brought a hand up to it. Her temple and cheek were sticky with blood.
“Emily!” said a voice. The voice of a young boy, from behind her, oddly muffled. “Emily!”
Aidan.
Instinctively, she rose to stand and was roughly pulled back. She wrestled with the buckle on her seat belt, but it was bent and twisted away from her in the strange, unrecognizable new contours of the plane.
She looked around. There: on the seat next to her were shards of glass from the broken window. She picked one up and used it to saw at her belt.
“Emily!”
She cursed the restraint. The glass cut her—not badly, but slippery blood loosened her grip on it. “Coming. Coming,” she said. Then the belt frayed and came apart. She lowered herself to the floor—nothing in her body seemed broken, but she couldn’t be sure—and crawled into the aisle. Aidan. Aidan was the priority.
That was when she saw: the back of the plane was gone. There was only a vast round hole, the tears in the fabric of the aircraft revealing—in a way that was somehow disturbing over and above the fact of the crash—the insulation material inside the layers of metal. It opened a hole in her heart too. Wind whistled through. The rearmost row of seats was nowhere to be seen. The incline of the aisle continued uninterrupted into the downslope of the mountain, all low pines pooled with snow and deepening shadow.
It was still daylight, just, but up here, this far north and at this time of year, the night always folded itself into the day, swirled together with it. Time was a murky concept, the day an endless dusk, so it was hard to tell what time it was.
In reality, only a moment had passed since the plane had crashed—she thought. She had a concussion—she thought. She struggled to her feet and inched down the aisle. She noticed that she couldn’t really hear her own movements. She looked into the row of seats behind her, where her little brother had been.
Nothing.
She swallowed a gasp, inaudible to her, like most everything else, her head jerking, casting her eyes around. But she’d heard him. She’d heard him, hadn’t she?
“Emily!”
The muffled voice again.
He was at the back, near the snow, a little dark bundle in his black puffy jacket. She hadn’t buckled him in. She’d done her own belt automatically but not his. Stupid. Selfish. She half walked, half slid down to him, past random boxes and packages. The plane was mostly a kind of unofficial mail service.
The soft confusion of hood and collar resolved itself as he turned and looked up at her. His eyes were huge, his skin pale. Looking to her for reassurance.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Aidan said. “But I’m stuck.”
Emily kneeled. The floor of the plane had cracked, and like two tectonic plates sliding against each other, one part had pushed and jutted up over the other. Aidan’s leg was caught in the gap between the old floor and its new, violent configuration.
Emily had seen a YouTube video once of a woman lifting a car off a toddler—but when she took the slanted floor and tried to raise it higher, it didn’t move at all. Aidan didn’t scream, but he sort of whimpered. Muscles she didn’t know she had—and she knew her muscles well—tightened around her heart.
“It’s OK,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.” Her voice was damped, as if wrapped in snow. Flakes of it were whirling in through the hole where the plane’s tail had been.
She saw a protruding metal bar, part of what had been the frame of a pair of seats. She pried it away from the rest of the structure, one end of it flattened, but still hard, still long.
“I’m going to lever the floor up,” she said.
Aidan nodded. His pupils were large; frightened; animal. But at least they were both the same size. In Emily’s ballet class back in Minnesota, a girl had fallen during a lift and hit her head, knocking herself out. Matching pupils were the first thing the paramedics had checked for.
She wedged one end of the bar into the gap, pushed it down as hard as she could, and was more shocked than she should have been when it met with a hard, jarring resistance she recognized as belonging to half-frozen earth. The ground under the plane. Then she leaned all her weight on the other end of the bar, and with a creak she felt more than heard, the raised section of floor lifted.
Aidan scooted out, and as soon as he was clear, she dropped the bar and pulled him close. “Your leg?”
He touched it experimentally. “Fine, I think. There’s a ringing in my head. Like a bell that won’t stop.”
“Yes,” said Emily. “Mine too.”
She pulled him to the side of the plane so they were sitting against the curve of it. He was light, small, easily movable.
“Will the plane explode?” he asked. His head came up only to her shoulder.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I’ve seen that happen in movies,” he said.
“Yes.”
“From the fuel.”
“Yes.” She paused. “But it’s snowing out there and, like, minus ten. In here we’re sheltered at least. A little.”
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 d
oing 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.
