by Roxie Noir
“Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she says, disdain dripping from every syllable. “All planes have them.”
I clench my jaw, the disgusting taste of the MREs I’ve eaten for the last day rising in my throat, because I want to shout at her, ridicule her, tell her that we’re going to die here and it’s going to be her own fault that I’m the last person she sees.
If we had a transmitter, someone would be here by now. The storm has cleared. It’s been over a day since we were supposed to make contact again. No one is coming.
I don’t say anything to Imogen, I just stand from the cargo box where I’m sitting and shove it out of the way, then shove aside the one behind it and the one behind that.
“Those are fragile,” Imogen says. “Be careful.”
I ignore her. It doesn’t matter if they’re fragile, because her microscopes and shit are never getting used for their intended purpose. They’ll be up here forever, probably with our skeletons next to them.
I reach the metal back panel of the airplane, in the tail section, run my fingers over where the rivets are holding it all together. This plane is probably twenty years old, and between that and our hard landing, some of the metal panels have separated a little.
I walk back through the airplane, past Imogen’s nervous face, and fish the toolbox out from under a seat, then walk back.
I grab the hammer. I heft it in my hand, unsure that what I’m about to do is a good idea.
Do you want to find out, either? I think.
Easier to leave and never know, probably.
I ignore the thoughts and swing the hammer, claw side first, right into the place where two metal plates meet. There’s an ugly noise and in my peripheral vision I can see Imogen flinch, still sitting on the floor with her bad leg extended in front of her, half-wrapped in the parachute.
I pull with all my might, letting my anger at her fuel my strength, the knots bunching in my arms as I try to tear this goddamn plane apart, swinging the hammer and pulling and grunting over and over again, sweat pouring down my back as the metal shrieks apart, exposing the insides of the plane, wires and electronics and more metal.
God, it feels good. After being helpless for this long it feels good to do something, to have some small accomplishment even if the accomplishment is tearing a single piece off of a plane.
Finally, it’s nearly off, bent in half, and I swing the business end of the hammer at it with a clang, bending the panel back further, cold air leaking in from the hole I’ve opened in the plane’s interior skin.
I’m sweating, panting for breath. Tearing steel off a plane is hard work, and I toss the hammer onto the ground with a heavy thump, then stick my gloved hand inside a nest of wires and pull.
And pull. And pull until all of it’s out, on top of Imogen’s suitcases and cargo boxes, just wires and wires of different colors, different patterns. None of it looks particularly high-tech or fancy, just wires and wires.
“Any emergency beacons in here?” I ask. “You see anything, Imogen? Let me know as soon as you do, being the expert and all.”
I can’t turn and look at her. I think I know the look on her face, a combination of horror and anger, the same splotchy red-and-white as before.
“It has to be in there,” she says, her voice barely shaking. “I thought it was illegal not to have one, I checked that on the way—”
“Tell me more about what’s fucking legal,” I say, reaching my full arm back into the space and coming up with nothing. “Please, tell me how it should be here and isn’t because it’s against the law not to have one of these things that you’re going on about. Because it’s not back here, Imogen, and it’s not in the front either and this plane isn’t very big.”
I finally turn and look at her, the pink splotches draining from her cheeks, her brown eyes wide behind her glasses. Despite everything she’s sitting bolt upright on the floor, leg stuck out stubbornly in front of her, the look on her face like she’s barely holding back tears but hates me anyway.
“You checked the front?” she asks, her voice quiet.
I thought she’d shout. Maybe I was hoping for it, that we could really have it out right now, scream at each other for a while. But instead she sounds deflated, broken, and I feel like she slipped a shard of glass through my stomach.
“While you were asleep,” I admit.
I’m suddenly deflated, and I sit heavily on one of the plastic cargo tubs, drop my head into my hands because I was so busy proving Imogen wrong that I didn’t realize that I’m also fucked.
There’s no transmitter. No beacon. She’s right that there should be. It should have been either in a spot below the instrument panel up front or behind that panel in the back, but it’s neither and there’s really nowhere else for the thing to go.
I don’t have an explanation. I don’t have a reason it’s not there.
I don’t have a reason for anything. I can’t even tell Imogen why everything on this plane suddenly failed and it crashed, because I don’t know.
“Oh,” she says, her voice changing completely in that one word, and I instantly feel terrible again.
For this, for her, for everything I did ten years ago and everything I’ve done since and anything else I’ll do in my life. Even if Imogen is a difficult asshole sometimes who treats me like I’m an idiot, she doesn’t deserve to die here. With me, of all people.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was still hoping someone would show up.”
“I don’t think they will,” she says, her voice quiet and distant, suddenly kind.
“I don’t think so either,” I say softly. “I think either we leave and take our chances, or we die here in this tiny plane.”
“You’re not supposed to leave,” she says, mostly to herself, tilting her head back against the metal skin of the plane. “You’re never supposed to leave, that’s the thing everyone always says, you’re supposed to stay put…”
Her voice trails off into silence, and I don’t respond because I don’t know what to say.
Chapter Twelve
Imogen
“You should go,” I tell Wilder.
I don’t mean it. Not in the least, because as much as I hate him being the only person around for thousands of miles, the thought of being here, of freezing or starving slowly to death in this plane, is infinitely worse.
But it seems like the kind of thing I’m supposed to say right now, even if I don’t mean it. Like I’m noble and brave or something instead of a terrified girl with a busted ankle who can put on a brave face for about thirty seconds before admitting how afraid she is of dying alone in the wilderness.
“Alone?” he echoes, looking up at me.
He’s slouched forward, his elbows on his knees, and he looks up at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. I push my glasses up, feeling like I need to do something and grateful for the extra layer between me and the world.
“Why?” he finally says, sounding genuinely puzzled.
I just point at my ankle, stuck straight out in front of me.
“We can splint it,” he says, his head still cocked as he frowns as my foot. “Between that and your boots it’ll probably hurt and we’ll be slow, but we can get you down.”
“There’s a boulder scramble between here and anything else.”
“I didn’t say it would be fun, I said it would be doable.”
“Wilder,” I tell him, my voice close to a whisper. “It’s broken, I can’t go down a boulder scramble.”
He looks at me for a long time, rubbing his hands together in his gloves, the knot in my stomach pulsing and tightening and loosening. I’d forgotten his stupid ability to bring out every single emotion in me, all at once: anger and disdain and nostalgia and this weird, almost tangible longing that sometimes comes out of nowhere and blindsides me like a Mack truck on the interstate.
And then he smiles. Wilder fucking smiles, takes off his gloves, stands up and ste
ps over to me.
“It’s not broken,” he says, crouching.
“I can’t walk on it.”
“No, you can walk on it a little,” he says, reaching his bare hands out toward it.
Instinctively, I jerk my leg away, gasping in pain as it scoots awkwardly across the floor.
“If it were broken it would hurt a whole lot more,” he says, his voice suddenly gentle and patient.
God, it’s like Wilder is two different people sometimes: this guy, the nice one, who’s strangely competent and in charge, who seems to know what he’s doing, and the raging asshole with pure venom in his eyes every time he looks at me.
“Can I see your ankle?” he asks, his voice quiet.
Instinctively I want to shout no, get away from me I don’t ever want you touching me again but instead of letting my animal brain control what I do, I take a deep breath. I swallow.
And I nod, moving my leg back toward him.
Wilder settles onto his knees without saying anything. He pushes the bottom of my fleece-lined leggings up to my mid-calf, his warm hand rougher than I remember against my skin.
Don’t remember, I order myself, leaning my head back against the plane, my hands clenching in mittens.
He holds the toe of my boot steady in one hand and unlaces it with the other. I’ve got thick wool socks on underneath heavy-duty over-the-ankle hiking boots, and he undoes the double knots in my laces, tugs them through the eyelets, loosens the tongue of my boot so gently I can barely feel it even though my ankle is swollen and prickling.
I didn’t know he could be this gentle, I think.
Yes, you did, I remind myself as he takes the boot off, cold air slowly filtering through the thick sock.
“Sorry about the smell,” I say, because I haven’t taken my shoes off since we crash-landed.
“I’ve smelled way, way worse,” he assures me, a slight grin on his face. “Trust me on that.”
He pulls my sock down over most of my foot until it’s just over my toes, his fingers lightly traversing the pebbled indentations that it left on my foot.
My ankle is swollen and light purple, ugly shades of green and blue around the periphery of the main bruise. Even though it’s midday, the sun is filtered through the layer of clouds and the layer of snow covering half the plane’s windows, and I wonder if the colors on my ankle are right.
There must be some sort of light tricks at play here, I think, willing myself to stop concentrating on Wilder’s hands touching my ankle this gently. Like a prism effect or something where it’s going through the frozen particulate matter up in the clouds.
He takes my foot in one hand and the bottom of my calf in the other, his hands strong and firm and amazingly warm, and he rotates my foot slightly.
I make a face, and he looks over at me.
“That hurt?” he asks.
I just nod, wishing he’d stop, but he keeps doing it, his eyes searching my face.
“But not too bad?”
“Not too bad,” I agree. “It’s way worse when I put weight on it.”
His hands move, sliding around, fingers digging into the swollen flesh around the joint. I’m holding my breath, thinking about how my foot must smell awful and how I haven’t shaved my legs in the past week, since I was going to the Arctic after all to look at musk oxen and not expecting someone to touch me. Even just to see if I have a broken ankle or not.
“How much does that hurt?” he asks, still prodding.
“Some,” I say. “I’m not kicking you in the face or anything.”
“And thanks for that,” he murmurs, teasing me. “Wiggle your toes?”
I wiggle.
“Can you rotate your ankle?” he asks, finally letting me go.
I rotate the ankle, dutifully, while he kneels next to it and watches.
“It’s not broken,” he finally says, rolling my sock back over my foot, pulling it up over my ankle. “Just sprained.”
“I still can’t get down that boulder scramble,” I say, remembering how much it hurt just to get outside to pee. There’s no way I can just hop from rock to rock with my ankle like this, and Wilder sure can’t carry me, not that he would, which means that there’s no way I can get out of this plane.
I take a deep breath, forcing myself to stave off the panic. It’s always worse at times like this, when I’m under stress and haven’t been eating or sleeping well, and good God are all of those things true right now.
“We’ll wrap it up,” he says. “There’s no ankle splint in the emergency kit but with some good bandaging and if we lace your boot up real tight, I think we can manage getting you down the scramble.”
We.
I don’t trust Wilder Flint. I don’t even like him, except for in moments like this when I catch myself thinking he’s okay, though in my defense right now he’s actually being okay.
But it’s not like I’ve got a choice. Well, I mean, I do obviously, but my choices are pretty much that either a) I trust Wilder Flint just enough to go with him, or b) I stay here, in this plane, and die of either hypothermia or starvation or dehydration or a lovely combination of all three.
“I’m not light,” I warn him, heart clenching.
He lifts my leg gingerly, sliding my boot over my toes and foot. I could put my own shoes back on but for some reason I let him do it, because sitting here with him, letting him be nice to me feels…
Well, it feels nice.
Of course he’s being nice, there’s no one else around, I think.
“Last year I had to wrestle a former NFL linebacker down a double-black-diamond ski slope,” he says, adjusting my boot around my ankle. “I think I can handle you.”
“Were you on skis?”
“Not at that point,” he says, a smile in his voice. “We don’t — well, we didn’t — screen for skiing ability before we would take someone heli-skiing, and let’s just say this guy didn’t have very much. You know how much force it takes to break a ski?”
“Oh, my God,” I murmur, because the answer to that is a lot of force.
“He did that, and as you can probably imagine, it fucked his knee up pretty good.”
Wilder tightens the laces around my foot, glances up at me.
“Too tight?”
I shake my head, and he starts looping the laces through the hooks over the ankle of my boots.
“Anyway, I figure if I can get three hundred pounds of screaming man-meat down a ski slope far enough for the rescue toboggan, I can probably get you down a couple hundred feet of boulder scramble,” Wilder says, double-knotting my laces.
“Now you screen for skiing ability?” I ask, trying not to smile and failing.
“Exactly,” he says. “Anyone who wants to heli-ski has to take a day of private instruction first. We got a couple of complaints, but most people appreciate that we’re not just letting incompetent maniacs down a difficult mountain with them.”
His hand is still on my leg, one finger on the stubble-laden strip between the bottom of my leggings and the top of my socks, and we just look at each other for a long, long moment.
There are a thousand things that I want to say, a thousand things I want to ask Wilder, starting with why are you being nice to me now? and ending with why did you ever pretend to be nice to me in the first place?
But I don’t ask either. I’m not sure I want to know the answers, if I’m really being honest with myself. And right now, I’m having an odd glimmer of a world where we’ve never met before, where we’re two strangers who have to get down a mountain together.
“Besides that guy, who’s the worst skier you ever had to take up?” I ask, and Wilder laughs.
Chapter Thirteen
Wilder
We leave at dawn the next day, or what passes as dawn here. The clouds keep getting lighter until they don’t any more, and it’s then that I have to assume the sun has risen and we can leave.
“Wilder,” Imogen says softly, still sitting on the floor as I shove the
door to the tiny airplane open, a bit of snow swirling in.
“Hit me,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow, and I grin at her.
“What?” I ask.
I’m feeling jaunty, almost giddy because despite everything I like this. I’ve always liked the adrenaline rush of danger, of knowing I might not make it back.
It’s why I’ve been skiing and snowboarding the hardest runs in Solaris since I was a kid. It’s why I joined the football team, why I joined the Navy and wanted to fly planes, it’s why I volunteered to fly a helicopter to the top of a mountain when I got out.
It’s probably why I ever messed around with Imogen in the first place, besides the fact that she drew me in like nothing I’ve ever felt before. She was different, strange, uncharted territory that I didn’t understand.
Also, I had a girlfriend. Melissa Hedder. The red-haired, ponytailed head cheerleader. The girl I was supposed to date, the girl I could show off to my friends and family and who I could be Prom King with.
Image is everything. My father taught me that, again and again. The man is a fucking maniac for his image, and it’s worked for him.
Sneaking around with Imogen behind Melissa’s back was a high I’d never felt before, a pure rush that I couldn’t get enough of, the one-two punch of being with Imogen and doing something I shouldn’t have.
Until it all went down in flames, anyway.
“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” she asks, and it jars me from my memories of high school.
“You mean leaving?”
She just nods, and I swallow, because I’m not. I have no idea whether anyone’s out there and looking for us or not. I have no idea if they’ll find us if they are.
“No,” I tell her, because Imogen’s smart, probably smarter than me, and I’d be an idiot if I tried to pull the wool over her eyes.
“But you think this gives us the best odds.”
“I haven’t run it through a spreadsheet or anything,” I tell her.
There’s a slight smile playing around her lips.
