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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Split Sky
The sky split with a sound like a giant sheet ripping. Then there was only snow and silence.
Nina’s ears rang as she crawled from the crumpled plane. The fuselage smoked in small, stubborn threads that instantly froze into lace. The wind gnawed. Caleb staggered out behind her, his expensive parka bright against the white, his teeth bared like a scared animal. Dr. Harris didn’t stagger. He lay half-in, half-out, gray-faced and breathing in short, tight gulps.
“Leg,” he said when Nina knelt. “Not… good.”
Under his flight suit, the bone had broken wrong. She swaddled the leg with torn foam and a scarf, then found two straight struts from the shattered wing and braced the splint. Her fingers went numb in minutes. A mosaic of small, useless details filled her head: how the snow hissed against metal, how the ravens stayed far away.
“Radio?” she asked.
Caleb shook his head. “Dead. Everything’s dead.”
“Not us,” Nina said. She said it because someone had to.
They found a patch of spruce and stunted willow, the trees tilted like old men leaning into gossip. Nina dragged tarps and emergency blankets there, then stripped branches with a jackknife and built a roof low and mean. She had learned in school that plants here wore their lives like armor. She imagined being one of them, thick-skinned and patient.
By dusk, the shelter was up. The air smelled of sap and fear.
“Rescue could take days,” Dr. Harris said, voice ragged. “Storm’s coming.”
“Then we hope,” Caleb said, glaring at the blank white horizon. “And we make a fire.”
Nina found dry heartwood low in the trees, a motherlode of tinder fed by dead needles under the snow. She cupped a spark with her hands and breathed it to flame. The warmth was small and perfect.
They ate a handful of jerky, a bit of trail mix, two bites of candy each. The wind blew and the trees clicked their teeth. Far out in the white, a fox trotted past with its head low, a red punctuation mark in a blank sentence.
Wolves howled late, thin and distant. Their voices threaded through the chill. Caleb hunched closer to the fire and didn’t look at anyone.
