And then, slow as dripping butter, the plane floated in, while Leo’s heart and eyes and hands worked quick as lightning, keeping pace with the rotors of the beast she’d left in her dust.
Immediately, the river wound left, leaving just enough room to maneuver before shifting right, barely widening, providing an extra few feet on either side.
She’d flown places like this in small helicopters, back in the day. But they’d skittered and dropped, risen and flitted like an extension of her body, whereas this one sailed at its own pace, as unwieldy and slow as a big fat kite.
If they would just come after her, the terrain would do the dirty work.
When the river flared out on both sides, giving her another foot or two to work with—yet still not wide enough for the helicopter’s nearly sixty-foot wingspan—she let out a sigh. At the last second, she lifted its tail and slapped the ice with an ungraceful scrape.
The sound was ugly, but it was the best thing she’d ever heard.
Her muscles had just gone weak with relief when a rock came out of nowhere, a dark stain rising from the still water, barely a blip the size of a baby’s head. Around it, the ice had melted entirely.
Against the float, it might as well have been a boulder. By the time she’d spotted it, it was too late to do a thing. The float caught, spinning the plane to the side—ironically fast, considering the snaillike landing—tipping the right wing down and sending the cockpit up into the air before seesawing in the opposite direction.
Leo braced for the other impact that was sure to come—wing tip to ice.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her team, her dad, Old Amka, the world.
A final sickening flip spun the old Cub a slow ninety degrees and boomeranged her toward the cliff face. She barely had time to cover her head before metal ground against rock and the world went dark.
Chapter 4
Bo disappeared ahead, barking out of control.
There was no room for hope as he rushed down the steep, muddy slope to where the plane had gone down. No prayer, no wishes.
He’d hoped, prayed, and wished enough for a lifetime, and God—or whatever the hell was out there—had ignored him.
Because there’s nothing there.
Right. No God, nothing divine to balance the scales, no justice to make things right. The world was what it was. Nothing but life and death. And more often than not, those things weren’t pretty.
So, while he raced in the direction in which the plane had gone down, he didn’t expect the outcome to be a good one. In fact, he didn’t expect a thing. The only way to live a life like his was without expectations.
He jumped from an eight-foot ledge, landed hard on his heels, and sprinted the last twenty yards to the edge of the woods, where his body stuttered like a cartoon runner hitting a wall.
One bright yellow wing lay across the ice, its tip blown apart like a burst paper bag.
Bo barked again, the sound coming from the right, around the bend, where the glacier overhung the river. He figured that was where he’d find the rest of the plane. On the ice or, more likely, under it. He whistled in response, letting her know he was on his way, and sped on, sliding across the river where the boulders jutted out, past the curve, and through the invisible wall of denial his mind threw up when he saw it.
No. No, God, no.
The nose was gone—flattened against the glacier like a crushed soda can—the cockpit crumpled, as if a cardboard box had been mashed up and straightened again. The other wing was quickly sinking into the water.
As he fought his way over the slick, crackling ice, his mind fed him the weirdest kaleidoscope of images. God, the one people prayed to all the time, was nothing but a spoiled toddler, smashing airplanes into the earth for the hell of it.
Then a vague memory from his parents’ living room, back when he was little and his dad played the classics on repeat: a black-and-white King Kong swatting at model airplanes, which bizarrely morphed into the scene in that movie he couldn’t get enough of even as a kid, where Fay Wray’s breast fell out of her ripped dress and she was left, helpless, struggling against the giant. He’d never been able to look away, for so many reasons. The boob, first of all, ’cause even back then, he’d been a boob man—but also her helplessness, flailing in that enormous ape hand, had done things to him.
Yeah, well, today, he wasn’t panting from excitement as he touched the plane’s perfectly intact, shiny tail, but from his own powerlessness.
If the pilot was dead in there, he’d—
Shit, he had no idea what he’d do, but whatever it was, it would be big. Huge. So cataclysmic that God would feel the aftershocks, wherever the hell he was.
He thought of the secrets he harbored, thought of his sacrifices in the line of duty, to his country, to humankind itself, and then he thought about how maybe humans weren’t worth it after all.
Sucking in a breath that hurt his lungs, he ignored the roar of the nearing helicopter and stepped onto the float, holding on tight as the plane sank another foot into the water.
