Nick Lake - Nowhere on Earth

EMILY BLINKED BACK into light.

Part of a tree was sticking through the broken window; a cedar, she noticed uselessly. Her head was throbbing. She brought a hand up to it. Her temple and cheek were sticky with blood.

Emily! said a voice. The voice of a young boy, from behind her, oddly muffled. Emily!

Aidan.

Instinctively, she rose to stand and was roughly pulled back. She wrestled with the buckle on her seat belt, but it was bent and twisted away from her in the strange, unrecognizable new contours of the plane.

She looked around. There: on the seat next to her were shards of glass from the broken window. She picked one up and used it to saw at her belt.

Emily!

She cursed the restraint. The glass cut hernot badly, but slippery blood loosened her grip on it. Coming. Coming, she said. Then the belt frayed and came apart. She lowered herself to the floornothing in her body seemed broken, but she couldnt be sureand crawled into the aisle. Aidan. Aidan was the priority.

That was when she saw: the back of the plane was gone. There was only a vast round hole, the tears in the fabric of the aircraft revealingin a way that was somehow disturbing over and above the fact of the crashthe insulation material inside the layers of metal. It opened a hole in her heart too. Wind whistled through. The rearmost row of seats was nowhere to be seen. The incline of the aisle continued uninterrupted into the downslope of the mountain, all low pines pooled with snow and deepening shadow.

It was still daylight, just, but up here, this far north and at this time of year, the night always folded itself into the day, swirled together with it. Time was a murky concept, the day an endless dusk, so it was hard to tell what time it was.

In reality, only a moment had passed since the plane had crashedshe thought. She had a concussionshe thought. She struggled to her feet and inched down the aisle. She noticed that she couldnt really hear her own movements. She looked into the row of seats behind her, where her little brother had been.

Nothing.

She swallowed a gasp, inaudible to her, like most everything else, her head jerking, casting her eyes around. But shed heard him. Shed heard him, hadnt she?

Emily!

The muffled voice again.

He was at the back, near the snow, a little dark bundle in his black puffy jacket. She hadnt buckled him in. Shed done her own belt automatically but not his. Stupid. Selfish. She half walked, half slid down to him, past random boxes and packages. The plane was mostly a kind of unofficial mail service.

The soft confusion of hood and collar resolved itself as he turned and looked up at her. His eyes were huge, his skin pale. Looking to her for reassurance.

It doesnt hurt, Aidan said. But Im stuck.

Emily kneeled. The floor of the plane had cracked, and like two tectonic plates sliding against each other, one part had pushed and jutted up over the other. Aidans leg was caught in the gap between the old floor and its new, violent configuration.

Emily had seen a YouTube video once of a woman lifting a car off a toddlerbut when she took the slanted floor and tried to raise it higher, it didnt move at all. Aidan didnt scream, but he sort of whimpered. Muscles she didnt know she hadand she knew her muscles welltightened around her heart.

Its OK, she said. Its going to be OK. Her voice was damped, as if wrapped in snow. Flakes of it were whirling in through the hole where the planes tail had been.

She saw a protruding metal bar, part of what had been the frame of a pair of seats. She pried it away from the rest of the structure, one end of it flattened, but still hard, still long.

Im going to lever the floor up, she said.

Aidan nodded. His pupils were large; frightened; animal. But at least they were both the same size. In Emilys ballet class back in Minnesota, a girl had fallen during a lift and hit her head, knocking herself out. Matching pupils were the first thing the paramedics had checked for.

She wedged one end of the bar into the gap, pushed it down as hard as she could, and was more shocked than she should have been when it met with a hard, jarring resistance she recognized as belonging to half-frozen earth. The ground under the plane. Then she leaned all her weight on the other end of the bar, and with a creak she felt more than heard, the raised section of floor lifted.