With the steady roar of the plane in her ears, Molly could almost imagine falling asleep …
In her dream, snow still rolled beneath the airplane, endless and empty.
Molly could see everything now, not only through her little window, but in all directions. She saw the ice floes stirred by the ocean beneath them, pushed by the winds spinning around the globe. From up here, the forces that shaped the ice all made so much sense, like when she grasped a solution to an engineering problem.
But there was something ahead that didn’t make any sense at all. Out there in the snow, a hundred miles away, something was waiting. Something that reminded Molly of her mother—lonely, angry at fate, and a little confused.
But it knew what it wanted.
It reached out, grasping with lines of pure force …
… for the airplane.
A jolt went through Molly’s body, along with a blazing white in her mind as bright as the snow outside.
The thing out there in the ice, its claws were inside the plane now—slicing and cutting along the seams, setting those hundreds of miles of wire aflame, bending the course of the shuddering aircraft by sheer force of will.
Then the blaze of its attention turned from the shell of metal and saw her, Molly Davis. It reached straight into her mind, lighting up her brain. Like it wanted to know her …
Molly awoke gasping from the dream, but out here in the real world, things were just as bewildering. The cabin lights pulsed and flickered, and the plane was shuddering beneath her. Smoke filled the air.
“No way.” She turned to Javi. “Am I awake?”
“I sure am.” His face was pale.
One in ten million, Molly thought. Those were the odds of a jetliner going down, according to her trivia book. She was about to say it out loud when the shriek of an alarm filled the cabin, and five hundred oxygen masks suddenly tumbled from the ceiling. They danced and swung with the rocking of the airplane, like a chorus of horrible puppets flailing among the light and smoke and noise.
It was a rubber jungle, and everybody started screaming.
An oxygen mask jumped and bounced like a living thing in front of Anna Klimek’s face. She grabbed for it, her mind racing, trying to remember what to do next.
To start the flow of oxygen, pull it toward yourself.
Oxygen sounded like a good thing. Anna pulled the mask against her mouth and took a deep breath. It smelled like antiseptic and rubber, which was better than the acrid smoke that had woken her up. Her eyes stung and she could barely see. She held the mask against her face with one hand.
Next to Anna, Mr. Keating was shouting something, but she couldn’t understand him over the squeal of the alarms. The plane bucked beneath her, sending a jolt up her spine.
She turned to Oliver. He was gripping his armrests and his mouth was open in a scream she couldn’t hear. With her free hand, she grabbed at his oxygen mask and pushed it into his face. He stared at it for a moment like he didn’t recognize it, but finally took it and held it to his mouth.
His eyes were bright with tears, and Anna tried to smile, to reassure him. But her face felt frozen, disconnected from her mind.
What was she supposed to do now? She replayed the safety announcements in her mind. Something about a crash position …
Right. This was really happening—the plane was crashing.
Something clicked inside Anna, and suddenly her fear was gone, replaced by questions.
Does hitting the ground hurt? Or is it over too fast to feel anything?
She almost found it comforting, when this cold, emotionless part of her brain took over in emergencies.
But her panic was rekindled by what happened next.
A tearing sound filled the plane, a metal shriek from directly overhead—the ceiling splitting open. The great spine of overhead luggage compartments and lights and little air blowers lifted away, shattering into a million pieces of beige plastic as it rose. The oxygen mask was yanked free from her hand and went spinning into the sudden wind.
“No way,” she breathed.
Through the huge hole, a sudden white sky shone down on Anna, hard sunlight and snow-filled air. The wind was freezing, blustering at hundreds of miles an hour, forcing her smoke-stung eyes into a squint. Her ears popped so hard her whole head felt like it was bursting.
The gale in the cabin reached into the seat-back pockets to seize magazines and safety cards and boarding passes, churning them into a blizzard of paper that slapped at her face and hands. But a moment later all that debris had fluttered up and away. Nothing was left but the snapped wires and shreds of plastic at the edges of the torn roof, trembling madly in the wind.
The oddly rational part of Anna’s brain wondered, How are we still flying?
It seemed like the entire airplane should just surrender and fold up around her, like something made of tinfoil. But somehow it was still slicing through the freezing air in a straight course, as if guided by a giant hand.
And now something even weirder was happening—an electrical storm shot through the cabin, a hundred-legged spider made of lightning that skittered from seat to seat.
When it reached Anna, a buzzing filled her mind, along with pain as bright as the white sky. Her eyes slammed shut, but she couldn’t keep it out—the lightning crawled through her head, rummaging and pillaging.
It felt like it was testing her, running a thousand little logic problems through her mind. For a moment Anna’s brain almost seized up, but then the cold, unpanicked part of her took over, weirdly delighted to play along.
When the lightning finally passed, it left her mind feeling scoured and bruised.
She blinked her eyes and turned to Mr. Keating. “What was that?”
But he wasn’t there. Not even his seat was there, just a jagged hole in the floor of the cabin.
“Wait—” Anna started to say.
The dazzling light swept past her again and wrapped itself around the man across the aisle. His whole body went into spasms, and from his mouth erupted a shriek that Anna could hear even over the roaring winds.
The man’s seat began to shudder, to bend and deform beneath him. Then all at once it tore itself from the cabin floor and lifted up, and both seat and man were flung out through the ceiling into the blinding white sky.
“No,” Anna squeezed out through clenched teeth. “This is a dream.”
It was a relief, the sudden certainty that this could not be happening.
The lightning moved on down the line, and Anna slammed closed her eyes against the blinding unreality of it. She tried to shut out the sounds of screams and tearing metal, the buffeting air that was too cold to breathe.
She shut out everything. Putting her fists against her mouth, she screamed into them, wishing this all away. But the light and noise and freezing cold refused to fade.
When Anna opened her eyes again, the cabin had almost been stripped bare of seats. But Javi and Molly were still there in front, and Oliver beside her.
The weird lightning was gone, but the wind was just as wild.
For a moment, Anna’s eyes caught something through the cracked plastic of her window. A huge wall shimmered past, shining like a mirror, as if the sky was turning solid around them.
But then white mist filled her window, and the sky above muddled into cloud. The freezing air grew damp.
A crack came from beneath her. Then a thousand shrieks shivered through the plane—something was scraping along the bottom.
Just in time, Anna remembered the announcement about crash positions and leaned her elbows against the back of Javi’s seat. The plane jolted sickeningly as it hit the ground, then rocked from side to side in a long, skidding stop. Snapping and ripping sounds filled her ears along the way.
Finally, the airplane came to rest, the cabin floor tipped at a funhouse angle. She eased back against her seat and stared up through the torn roof.
The sky was laced with leaves and branches.
This last
bit of weirdness somehow switched off the remaining shreds of panic inside Anna. There wasn’t room for fear anymore. Suddenly, she was watching everything from a thousand miles away.
Birds fluttered past, shrieking, upset that this giant metal thing had come crashing down into their forest. And from the depths of her strange calmness, Anna noticed that they didn’t sound like any birds she’d ever heard before.
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.”
Molly stared at Anna.
“Something came into the plane during the crash,” Anna said, her voice steady. “Some kind of electricity.”
A chill came over Molly. She had seen the lightning moving from seat to seat. She’d thought it was a dream, some kind of brain-fritz caused by panic. But if Anna had seen it, too, maybe it was real.
Molly remembered how the lightning had felt in her head—probing her, testing her, finally accepting her.
Rejecting others.
“It took people,” Anna said. “Just lifted them up and—”
“We’ll figure that out later,” Molly cut in. Oliver wasn’t ready to hear this.
She wasn’t sure if any of them were ready to talk about what had happened to the other passengers, but Oliver was the team mascot, two years younger than the rest of them. His mom hadn’t even wanted to sign the permission letter for the trip, until Molly had promised to look out for him.
Now he was staring off into the jungle, as if expecting a rescue party to appear. If he started panicking, everyone else would, too. Including Molly herself.
She needed to distract them, and trivia questions weren’t going to cut it.
“First things first: We have to figure out if those engines are about to blow up, okay?”
That got everyone’s attention. All eyes turned to the two huge engines on this side’s wing. They looked like they’d bashed through a few dozen trees on the way down. Their intakes were stuffed with leaves and shredded bark, even a few bright feathers. The engines steamed in the wet air, creaking and hissing like wet wood on a fire. Molly saw charred metal but no flames.
“I don’t smell fuel,” Javi said.
Anna nodded. “Something sliced the roof open. An engine fire wouldn’t do that.”
“Then we’re probably safe,” Molly said, letting that last word linger. “Second question: Is anyone else around?”
Javi took a deep breath and called, “Hey! Anybody there?”
Only the birds responded. Molly didn’t know much about birds, but these sounded weird. Their squawking slid from pitch to pitch, like a screen door with a rusty hinge.
Suddenly, a hiss came from the front of the plane. Something was ballooning into being, a giant arm jutting out!
&nbs
p; Oliver screamed, and Molly stepped in front of him. But then she saw the forward emergency exit opening—the giant arm was just another escape slide inflating, flailing madly as it took shape.
“It’s okay,” she said to Oliver, part of her marveling at how quickly the wadded-up plastic formed into a slide.
Two girls stepped out onto the wing, in identical skirts like school uniforms. They held hands, wobbling a little. A taller boy loomed behind them.
An exhausted shudder of relief went through Molly. If someone else had survived, then maybe Oliver was right, and the rest of the passengers were somewhere out there in this inexplicable jungle.
“Be careful up there!” she shouted, and turned to Oliver and Anna. “You guys help them. We’ll keep looking.”
Anna started through the undergrowth toward the base of the other slide, signaling for Oliver to follow. He went after her, looking relieved to have something to do.
A moment later, Javi and Molly were alone.
He looked at her with a blank expression. “I hope you don’t want any theories or conjectures from me.”
Molly swallowed. She didn’t know what she wanted, except for things to start making sense. And Javi could help with that. One thing she’d learned from living with her mother: Shared crazy was better than the stuck-in-your-own-head kind.
“Just tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Okay.” Javi’s eyes were wide as they swept the surroundings. “This looks like a jungle. But between Tokyo and New York, there’s only Canada and Alaska and ocean.”
Molly watched as the first of the two girls slid to the ground. “You forgot Hudson Bay.”
“Which is still not a jungle,” Javi said. “Which means we’re way off course. Maybe there was some kind of storm, or a hijacking? And we wound up in …” Javi looked up at the trees and shrugged. “South America?”
“We flew thousands of miles due south, and none of us noticed? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I didn’t say it did!” A note of panic crept into Javi’s voice.
“Sorry. It’s just …” Molly shook her head. “Before I fell asleep, there was snow outside my window as far as I could see. And South America would take another twelve hours. What plane carries that much fuel?”
Horizon Page 2
