“Do we have enough fuel?”
“Couple hours’ worth. Don’t worry about that. I’m just going to circle back around and backtrack a bit. Try to fly around the storm so I don’t have to fight the wind.”
I hated all of this. In minutes, all our forward progress was lost as we flew back over Sighi?oara, headed in the wrong direction. Just how far north was he going to fly in order to avoid the storm? Seconds ticked by, then minutes, and then we were entirely off track.
A sputtering sound rocked the cockpit. For a moment I thought it was coming from my headset, but when I pulled the padded rubber away from my ear, I heard something worse.
Silence.
The cabin was still shaking, but the unearthly sound of the engine had just... stopped.
No engine.
All the lights on the instrument panel faded.
It felt like being in Trixie the biplane when Huck was doing engine-stall tricks in the air. But this was no time for tricks, and Huck’s face had gone still.
He was scared.
The airplane suddenly took a sharp dip downward.
“Shite!” Huck shouted, pulling the plane back up until we were stable again. Then he fiddled with the instrument panel, and I recognized what he was doing, the same thing he’d done when we’d first gotten inside this nightmare cockpit: he was trying to start the engine.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he mumbled.
The engine didn’t respond.
He smacked the instrument panel violently. “May the devil break you into a thousand pieces, you rusty metal fucker!”
“Huck...,” I said. And then: “Huck! ” louder. “W-what is going on?”
“Engine failure. Probably the carburetor. I told you this was a terrible idea!”
And I knew we were going to die up here. I knew it, knew it, knew it!
“Okay, all right. It’s all right... I’m going to try to land it,” he said as he slowly forced the airplane downward. “Don’t panic. We’re gliding now. We can glide for miles. If I can just find a clearing or a road—a river even. Keep your eyes open for anything.”
“I would if I could see!” I told him as my stomach dropped along with the nose of the plane.
“We’ll have better visibility when we get lower. I just don’t want to clip a mountain.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll try my best, banshee.”
I blew out several huffed breaths, trying to calm myself, but it just made me light-headed.
But—oh! Huck was right: I could see things now. The dark mountains. And city lights. Couldn’t be Bra?ov; we’d gone too far in the wrong direction. “Lights over there,” I shouted.
“That’s Cluj, I think. Best not try to land there. Too many people.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers!” I snapped.
“Beggars don’t plow down a bunch of innocent people! We can’t risk hurting anybody. We need to find a highway or a field outside of town.”
“Where, then?” I said, squinting into the windshield. “All I see is mountains and forest outside the town. Which seems like a terrible place to die. If you’re going to kill us—”
“I’m going tosaveus, banshee. See that? On my side.”
