Departure

“Everywhere. My whole bloody body.”

He smiles and exhales, laughing for the first time. “Me, too.”

He fills me in as we trek back to the fire, gathering loose branches as we go. Nobody’s cell phone works, which is strange, but not out of the question in rural England. He’s tried to get into the cockpit with no luck. He figures the pilots are dead; he’s had a look at the cockpit and it’s pretty tight, would have been deadly during the crash. Poor souls.

At the fire, I insist he take one of my blankets, and after a bout of protests, he relents. We sit in silence for a while. I’m dying to ask him what he does for a living, where he’s from, anything. I want to know what Nick Stone is like, you know, when he’s not rescuing plane crash survivors from an icy lake. I’ve never met anyone quite like him. He seems to have been delivered to Planet Earth from some other place, some place where normal human weaknesses and shortcomings don’t apply.

I’m about to launch into my first lame question, which I’ve rehearsed in my mind nine times now, when someone runs up to us, almost colliding with Nick.

It’s Mike, the guy with the green Celtics T-shirt. He focuses on Nick, speaking between pants. “We’re … in.”

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_0185e263-4938-52bb-9f5e-21e43f51a731)

Harper (#ulink_0185e263-4938-52bb-9f5e-21e43f51a731)

IT’S A STRUGGLE TO KEEP UP WITH NICK and Mike through the woods. With each step, I can feel the air temperature dropping and the pain in my lower leg rising.

When we reach the nose section, the two of them bound up an assortment of luggage and plane bits stacked to form a rough stairway. Nick pauses at the top and reaches down for me, as he did when we climbed into the plane in the lake.

I scramble awkwardly up the pile, and he catches my arm and pulls me to the threshold. My body crashes into his, sending waves of pain through me while he holds me close to steady us.

Worth it. So worth it.

The other two swimmers—their names escape me—are there already, and someone I don’t know, a short, bald man wearing a black sweater. He peers over his small round glasses, fixing me with a skeptical gaze as if he’s about to ask who invited a girl into his boy’s-club airplane tree house.

I’m one second away from asking if this is a boob-free zone when Nick intercedes. “Harper, this is Bob Ward. And you remember Wyatt and Seth from last night?”

Bob’s suspicious look vanishes with Nick’s words, and after we exchange shakes and nods, everyone turns to the first row of seats. A man in a pilot’s jacket lies there, his face crusted with dried blood.

Bob steps forward and kneels by his side, motioning back toward Nick. “Dylan, we’ve got Nick Stone here.” His officious tone would be funny in any other circumstances. “He’s managing the situation on the ground. I need you to tell him what you just told us.”

The pilot turns his head, trying to pick Nick out of the crowd. His face is so discolored and swollen that I can barely make out the whites of his eyes, but he begins speaking, his voice a whisper.

“We lost all communications about halfway in, somewhere over the Atlantic.”

Nick raises a hand. “Stop. I need you to wait one minute.”

What’s he up to? He marches down the aisle into business, stopping next to a young Asian man who’s typing maniacally on a laptop. After a brief exchange, the Asian man gets up and follows Nick back.

“Please continue,” Nick says to the pilot, eyeing Laptop Man.

“Like I said, we lost communications over the Atlantic, but we maintained our flight path. The captain has been flying this route for three years. I’ve been on it six months. Radar still worked, but nothing else. We generally knew where we were, but it was really odd, to go dark like that. The captain swore the problem was outside the plane, but that’s impossible. Anyway, we got radio contact—Heathrow air traffic control—a little over two hours before our designated landing time. There was a global situation with communications, they told us, and they would walk us in. We should land normally, but descend to seven thousand feet for safety reasons. That slowed us down, but we did it. Then everything happened at once.”

“The blast?” Bob coaxes.

“The first one, yeah.”

“Was it above you?”

“No—behind, I think. Or all around. I don’t know. We dove, trying to get away from it.”

“And there was another blast?” Bob sounds eager, expectant.

“I … I don’t know. There was something … else. But I don’t know what. A series of shock waves, tossing us around in the sky. Never seen anything like it. We lowered the landing gear and went down even farther, trying to cut our airspeed, preparing for the worst. We thought it might be some megastorm. We couldn’t get away from it, though. Everything after that’s a blur. We kept diving, trying to get past it, but it caught up to us.”

Nick is still staring at Laptop Man, who hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s like a statue. What’s going on? You sleep in around here, and mysteries pop up by the minute. “What do you think of that?” Nick asks him.

Laptop Man avoids eye contact with Nick and speaks in an even, controlled tone. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about it. But it sounds sort of like the communications went out during a storm, and we crashed. Can I go now?”

“Nobody’s holding you.”

The Asian guy walks back to his seat and, after a last glance over his shoulder at Nick, plops down and starts typing away again.

What the hell was that all about?

Nick thanks the pilot and moves back into the galley between first class and the cockpit. Sabrina, who came with us from the lakeside, moves in to examine the pilot.

“You buy the pilot’s story?” Bob asks Nick, his tone skeptical.

Nick stares at Bob for a second, as if waiting for him to recant. “Yeah, I do.”

Bob nods a bit too theatrically, as if he were a TV detective finally choosing to believe an informant’s story. “The other two pilots are dead, so we’ve got no corroborating witnesses—well, save for ourselves. We tried the radio, but there’s no answer.”

“All right. I think we bed down tonight, wait for rescue. If nobody’s come by daylight, we reassess.”

“You’re forgetting the most important part.” Bob’s voice is edging toward panic.

“Right. What am I forgetting?”

“The guns.” Bob races into the cockpit and returns with a handgun, holding it by the end, like it’s a fish he caught on holiday.

“Put that back,” Nick says sharply. “And bring me the key.”

Bob mutters but returns with the key, placing it in Nick’s palm. “There’re four handguns in there. One for each of you.” He nods to the swimmers and Nick. I guess I didn’t make the handgun club.

“We’re not carrying them around,” Nick says. “We have to sleep, and someone could take them off us. It’s too dangerous.” He glances at the key. “And so is this.” He hands it to me. “They know the five of us will have been in the cockpit.”

I slip the key into my tight jeans pocket, where I swear I can feel it radiating heat. I feel like Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, knowing I may hold the key to the lives of the survivors of Flight 305. Another burden to bear, though not quite as dreadful as the Decision.

The sun is setting as Nick and I make our way through the woods to the fire by the lake. Neither of us says a word, but in my mind, I’m going through the questions I want to ask him. Namely, what he does for a living. Ah, who am I kidding? I want to ask some roundabout question that gets at the real money shot: Is there a woman in Nick Stone’s life? A little lady waiting at home. A Mrs. Nick Stone. A soulless, way-too-skinny, fashion-victim, fake-as-Santa girlfriend. That’s unfair. My leg hurts. Excuses …

At the fire, we settle in and watch the sun set over the lake. As it slips below the horizon, I start my interrogation—nonchalant, of course.

“Where you from, Nick?”

“All over. You?”

“I grew up in a small town in England, but I live in London now.”