Prologue
The first thing was the sound. Not the crash, because that was already over, or if it wasn’t over then it was somewhere I couldn’t get to. A high thin ringing sat in both ears, and under it something popped, soft and wet, the way a pan sounds when oil jumps. Heat was on my face. I thought, for a second, that I was still in the seat and somebody had left the vent pointed wrong, and then the heat moved, and it had a smell in it.
I opened my eyes and shut them. The light was wrong. Orange, low, coming from the front of the cabin and also from somewhere under the floor, which didn’t make sense and which I didn’t have room to think about. My mouth tasted like metal. When I swallowed, my throat caught, and the cough that came after was small and hurt all the way down.
Blood was on me. I knew that before I looked. It was on my mouth and in my eyelashes, warm when I blinked, and it had soaked the collar of the team warm-up so the fabric pulled at my neck. I got one hand up. The hand shook so hard I had to press it to my chest to keep it still, and then I didn’t want it there, because the chest was wet too. I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist and looked at the smear and couldn’t tell anything from it. It was just blood. It could’ve been mine. It could’ve been from the hit, from my nose, from my teeth. I ran my tongue along them and they were all there, which felt like a stupid thing to be glad about and I was glad about it anyway.
The seat belt was still clicked. That took me a while. My lap felt pinned, and I kept pushing at the air in front of me like the problem was out there, and then my fingers found the buckle and the buckle was slick and my thumb slipped off it twice. The third time it gave. The belt snapped back and my weight went forward and the world tipped, hard, and I had to grab the seat in front of me so I wouldn’t go into the aisle on my face.
Dizzy wasn’t the right word. The aisle wasn’t where an aisle should be. The floor sloped down toward the front, and the overheads on the right had come open, and a bag hung out of one of them by a strap, swinging a little even though I couldn’t feel a wind. Smoke sat up high, a dirty layer, not thick enough to hide the ceiling and thick enough that breathing through my mouth made my eyes water. I coughed again and this time something in my ribs answered, a bright line of pain under my left arm. I pressed there. My hand came away redder. I still didn’t know if it was mine.
I got out of the seat because staying in it felt like waiting. My legs didn’t want the job. The left one held. The right one sent a sick white buzz up from the knee when I put weight on it, not a break, or not a break I could afford, just wrong. I went down to my knees in the aisle anyway. The carpet was gritty with something that wasn’t carpet. Plastic, maybe. Glass. It bit through the leggings. I didn’t look at my hands after I put them down. If I looked at them I was going to stop, and the front of the plane was where the air was moving, a hotter pull, and behind me the way we’d come from was dark in a way I didn’t like.
Crawl. That was the whole thought. I crawled.
The ringing didn’t let up. Under it I could hear the fire, a low continuous sound, and a tick from somewhere in the walls, and my own breath, too fast. A shoe was in the aisle. Just the shoe. I went around it. A tray table hung crooked off its hinge and I had to shove it up with my shoulder to get past, and the shoulder sang, and I made a noise I didn’t mean to make, small, embarrassing, gone into the cabin. Sweat or blood ran into my eye. I blinked it out and kept my head down and counted the seat legs as I passed them, because counting was something my head could do while the rest of me shook.
I was almost past the next row when the shape stopped making sense.
Two seats had come together. Not folded, not reclined. Crushed, the armrests gone, the cushions driven in until the gap between them was a slot about the width of a backpack stood on its end. Something was in the slot. I saw the color first, team navy, the same warm-up I had on, and I thought it was a bag that had fallen and gotten wedged, because that was the thought that fit. Then the bag had a hand.
The hand was palm-up on the ruined armrest, fingers curled in like they’d been caught mid-grab. The nails had the pale polish Courtney had passed around in the hotel, the one that was supposed to last through prelims. I knew the polish. I didn’t know the hand. There was a ring, a thin gold one, and it didn’t tell me anything, because half of us wore something on a finger for pictures. The wrist went back into the gap, and the gap had the rest.
I stopped crawling. My arms stayed locked under me. The heat was worse here, coming forward along the floor, and the smoke had dropped a little, and none of that got bigger than the slot between the seats.
The head was turned sideways and down, jammed where the seatback had folded. I could see the ear, and the hair matted flat to it, dark with blood so the color underneath didn’t mean anything. Blonde or brown, I couldn’t have said. The face was mostly not a face from this angle. The cheek had split along the bone. One eye was open and didn’t have anywhere to look. The mouth was open too, a small way, and there was no sound in it, and that was the part that made my stomach drop out, the quiet. People make noise when they’re hurt. Even in sleep they make noise. This didn’t.
I said, “Hey.” It came out wrecked. I swallowed and tried again, smaller. “Hey. Move.”
Nothing. Not a flinch. A thread of blood ran from the hairline to the jaw and off the jaw onto the navy sleeve, and it caught the orange light, and it kept going, slow, which meant some part of this was still settling. I put my hand out without deciding to. Two fingers on the wrist, beside the ring. The skin was warm. That was from the cabin. Under it there was no tap, no push, nothing answering. I pressed harder, the way they show you in the videos Coach made us watch before fly days, and my hand was shaking too badly to trust, so I held my breath and tried to go still and there was still nothing.
My body wanted to get away from it and also wouldn’t. I leaned in, stupid, like a closer look was going to turn the mouth into somebody I could name. The nose was wrong. Flat, pushed toward the ear. I made it as far as the collar, the little embroidered cicada we all had over the heart, torn half off, and then my stomach rolled and I turned my head and gagged onto the carpet. Nothing much came up. Water, acid, the metal taste. Spit hung off my lip. I wiped it with the same wrist I’d used on my mouth and smeared it around and didn’t care.
“Okay,” I said. To the aisle, not to the seats. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Okay. Okay.”
I couldn’t pull them out. The seats had them. Even if my arms worked, even if the knee worked, the gap wasn’t a gap you reached into and undid. I knew that and I still hooked my fingers in the hanging tray hinge and yanked, once, like the row was going to give if I asked it mean enough. It didn’t. Pain shot through the rib and I folded over it and stayed there, breathing through my teeth, eyes on the carpet and not on the hand.
Leaving felt like a decision somebody else should make. I made it anyway. I put my palm on the floor past the row, past the polish and the ring and the open eye, and I dragged my knee forward, and I did not look again. The heat got stronger as I went. The smoke tasted like plastic. Behind me the cabin ticked and popped, and under the ringing there might have been other sounds, shifting, a cough that wasn’t mine, and I didn’t turn my head to sort them. The aisle was in front of me. The air was in front of me. If I stopped to see who else was in the seats I was going to stay on the floor, and the floor was getting harder to breathe on, and my hands were red, and I still didn’t know if any of it was mine.
