Falling

There is a point in every crash where time stops being a straight line.

Vega had always thought that was a figure of speech. In the sixty-one seconds between the missile and the trees, she learned it was a literal description, and that the human brain, offered a choice between panic and arithmetic, will sometimes pick arithmetic out of sheer spite.

Starboard engine gone. Port engine at forty percent. Descent rate, call it four thousand feet a minute. Altitude, nineteen thousand when it hit. So under five minutes. Probably under four.

The cabin was a screaming white box. Somewhere behind her the pilot was shouting numbers into a radio that nobody answered. Overhead lockers had burst open and spilled their guts: laptops, blankets, a case of mineral water. A serving tray went by at the speed of a thrown knife. Silas, three seats away, was braced against the bulkhead with his shirt torn open and a thin red line across his forehead, calmly saying a string of words that she would have been very interested in translating under other circumstances.

Beside her, with his hand clamped around her wrist like a manacle, Roman Ashcombe said nothing at all.

She turned her head.

He was looking at her. Not at the window, not at the flames. His gray eyes were fixed on her face with a steady, almost studious attention, as though memorizing it. His jaw was tight. His lips were bloodless. He was holding on to her, she realized, not to steady himself. He was holding on to keep her from being thrown.

"Roman," she said.

"Do not speak."

"I—"

"If we survive this," he said, very low, and very clear, "you will have an apology from me that is two hours long."

"For what?"

"I have not decided. I will think of something."

She laughed. It was a wild, cracked, hysterical sound, and it was the last clear thing she heard before the plane hit the trees.

…

Sound came back first.

It came back as a ringing. It rose from nothing, a thin high note like a wet finger on a glass rim, and under it, slowly, there was a second sound, a patient, creaking, ticking noise like a giant clock winding down. Dripping. Something hissing. A bird, somewhere very close, shrieking a single outraged phrase over and over.

Smell came next. Burnt rubber. Jet fuel. Crushed leaves. A rich, green, humid reek of rotting flowers.

Then pain, in the usual order. She started with her feet and worked up.

Feet: present. Knees: yes. Hips: sore, but obedient. Ribs: left side, three or four, and they had opinions. Neck: she moved it carefully, left, right, and a bolt of white fire went up the base of her skull. Okay, not broken. Pulled. She flexed her hands. She was alive.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying on her back in a sort of cave. Green light poured through a gash in the ceiling, thick and dim, like the light in an aquarium. Broken seat frames were stacked around her at odd angles. The cabin had split along its length, peeled open like a tin of sardines, and through the rent she could see enormous trunks, black with moss, going up and up into a ceiling of leaves.

Jungle, she thought. Canopy. We went through the top. A hysterical corner of her mind added: Nice landing.

She sat up, and the world swung. She waited for it to stop.

"Roman?" Her voice came out as a croak.

Nothing.

"Roman."

She twisted. Her seat belt was still fastened; it had held. She fumbled with the buckle, and it came undone with a click, and she half fell, half crawled into the aisle, where the carpet was sodden and the floor tilted at a drunken angle toward the open wound in the fuselage.

The seat beside hers was empty.

For one terrible second she thought: He's gone. He was thrown clear. The thought did something to her stomach that she had no time to examine.

Then she saw the foot.

It protruded from beneath a collapsed section of overhead panel, a polished black shoe, toe pointing at the ceiling. A trouser leg ran up from it, dark with something that was not water. She went toward it on hands and knees, over a pile of seat cushions, past a broken tray table, with her ribs screaming and her breath sawing in her throat.

"Hold on," she said. "Hold on, hold on, I'm coming, don't you dare—"

She hauled the panel up.

Underneath, wedged between a splintered seat frame and the wall of the cabin, lay Roman Ashcombe.

…

He was unconscious. That was the first thing she checked, because it mattered most, and she laid two fingers against the side of his throat and held her breath until she found it: a slow, thready, irregular beat.

Alive.

Okay, said the part of her that did arithmetic. Triage. The way Dad taught you.

She took him in.

Head: a deep gash above the left temple, still bleeding, not arterial. A lump already rising. Pupils: she lifted an eyelid; they were uneven, the left a pinpoint, the right wide. Concussion. Probably bad. Neck: she checked it carefully, running her fingers down the cords, and he did not stir. Left shoulder: wrong. It had a hollowness to it, a flat place where the round should be. Dislocated. Ribs: she pressed, lightly, and felt the grind of bone under her fingertips and the horrifying give of something that should not give. Three at least. Maybe more.

Then the leg.

It was the right thigh. A strip of twisted seat frame, steel as thick as her thumb, had come through the cabin wall and gone into the muscle just above the knee. It had not gone through. It was lodged there, like a cruel splint, with his trouser leg soaked in blood from the hip to the shin.

She sat back on her heels.

For five long seconds she looked at it, and she did not breathe, and she felt every sound in the jungle recede to a great distance.

If I pull it out, he'll bleed to death. If I leave it, he'll bleed anyway. If I move him, it might sever the artery.

And that smell.

She had been so busy with the wounds that she hadn't let herself notice the smell. Now it reached her, sharp, chemical, sweet. Fuel. She looked down the length of the cabin, past the torn seats, past the broken bulkhead. The port wing lay twisted across the jungle floor sixty feet away. A thin silver rope of liquid ran from its ruptured tank down a slope of leaf litter toward the fuselage.

And at the far end of the rope, in a little cleft of rock, a tongue of orange flame had just begun to lick at a root.

Oh.

…

She could have left.

It was important to be honest about that, later, when she thought about it. She would lie awake and turn it over and over, like a stone, and each time it came out the same.

She could have left.

She was standing. She was mostly whole. The cabin gaped, and the jungle beyond it was thick and green and forgiving, and nobody on earth would have blamed her for taking a few steps into it. She had Juno in Zurich, safe, with a pool and a cheese plate. She had the contract, which said two years, but contracts were paper, and paper burned. She had nine hundred dollars in her boot and a head full of exits.

She knew how to vanish. She was the best in the world at it.

Fish swim in the deep ocean.

The fire reached the root and caught.

Birds fly in the high sky.

She looked at the man on the floor.

He lay in the green dimness with blood on his face and his jaw slack and his hand, the right one, the good one, still curled in the shape of her wrist. There was a pale line across his knuckles where he had gripped her. In the light from the torn roof his eyelashes cast long shadows on his cheek, and he looked, for the first time since she'd met him, like what he was: a thirty-four-year-old man who had spent his whole life being strong because there was no one else to do it.

He said he'd see that I had a clear exit, thought Vega.

He didn't say he'd be in it.

"You stupid," she said aloud, in a cracked, furious voice, "stupid bastard."

She went to work.

…

It took forty seconds she did not have.

She stripped her jacket, tore the sleeve, and wound it as a tourniquet above the wound, pulling until her arms trembled and the fabric sank into his flesh. She took her belt and looped it through the back of his collar. She braced one boot against the seat frame, and with a grunt that tore something in her side, she got both hands on the steel rod and heaved.

It came out.

The sound was awful. It was wet and long and deliberate, like a boot pulled from mud. He made a noise in his throat, low, animal, not conscious. Blood welled up in the hole and she jammed the heel of her hand into it and leaned her whole weight on the wound and counted.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

It slowed.

Come on. Come on, you son of a bitch.

It slowed again. She looked up. The fire had spread. It ran across the floor of the cabin now in a bright orange ribbon, hissing along the spilled fuel, throwing wild shadows on the green. Heat touched her face. The air began to waver.

She got her arms under his.

He was heavy. He was far heavier than she'd have guessed, long and dense and all muscle, a dead weight in her arms, and she had broken ribs and a pulled neck and about two hundred pounds of man to move. She hooked her elbows beneath his shoulders and leaned back. And she pulled.

An inch.

Pull.

Another inch.

"Help," she called, to anyone. "Silas! Silas! Anyone!"

Nothing answered her but the crackle of burning plastic.

She dragged him toward the gash in the cabin wall. His heels left twin trenches in the carpet. Her breath came in whoops, her vision narrowed to a tunnel, and in the middle of it she heard her own voice talking, quietly, steadily, with a calm she did not recognize.

"I've got you. You're fine. I've got you. You're not allowed to die on me. You owe me a two-hour apology. You said so. I heard you. I'm holding you to it."

The tunnel got darker.

Thirty feet.

The heat was a wall. She felt her eyebrows singe.

Twenty.

Something in the engine compartment gave a deep, hollow, sucking cough, like a throat clearing.

Ten.

She heaved him through the opening, over the lip of torn metal, and into the green. They landed in a heap in the wet leaf litter, in a thick tangle of ferns and roots, with her arms around his chest and her face in his collar. She got to her knees. She got her shoulder under him, and she crawled, backward, with the last of her strength, away from the fire.

She had gone perhaps fifteen yards when the world exploded.

It was a vast, flat, soundless blast of orange. The shockwave came through the trees like the hand of God, flattening ferns, tearing leaves from branches, and picking them up together and flinging them down in the dirt. Something hot sang over her head. She curled around him, shielding his head with her body, and for a long moment there was nothing in the universe but light and noise and the weight of him under her.

Then, slowly, it faded.

The ringing returned. The jungle crackled. Ash fell around her like black snow.

She raised her head. Behind her, where the plane had been, a column of black smoke stood in the green, rising straight up through the hole in the canopy into the pale blue sky.

Beneath her, against her chest, she felt a movement. It was very faint, a shallow and ragged breath, and she held her own, and felt it again.

"Okay," said Vega, aloud. She was shaking all over. Her face was wet. She did not know whether it was sweat or blood or something else. "Okay. Okay. You're okay."

He did not answer.

She put her forehead down on his chest and did not move for a very long time.