Departure(14)

The doctor’s most concerned about my leg, which apparently has a nasty gash from where it was caught in the plane. She’s bandaged it up and wants to keep an eye on it.

About all I can recall from last night is the euphoria of saving those people, the children especially, the ones I carried myself. Then the cold, and Nick’s arms pulling me, and nothing much after that.





Awoke feeling even worse. Pain meds must have worn off completely now. Nick sent some food, but I couldn’t eat it, so I gave it away. Must sleep.





A few minutes ago I spotted a kid walking past the fire, an Indian girl around twelve wearing a Disney World T-shirt.

That made me feel good enough to stand up and take a walk. My right leg is dodgy, sending spikes of pain through my body with every step, but it becomes manageable after a few paces.

It’s not as cold during the day, but overall, standing hurts a lot more than lying down.

What to do? Most people are huddled together, not talking. A few are dragging branches and wood in from the forest, feeding the dying fire. That seems as good an idea as any.

About a hundred feet into the woods, I hear a voice, one I know. One I detest.

“Don’t worry, it won’t be like this,” Grayson says in his usual hateful, condescending tone. “I’m going to hurt you when you least expect it.”

“I’m not expecting it now.” Nick sounds calm.

I walk closer, just far enough to make both of them out. Nick looks exhausted. Black bags hang under his eyes, which are hard, much more so than I remember. Grayson holds a large stick at his side. His back’s to me, so I can’t see his face.

I inch closer, and a branch pops under my foot. I look up to find both their eyes upon me.

“Jesus, you’re like a virus,” Grayson says. “You just won’t go away.” He waits, but I don’t speak. “I bet you’re loving this. Best thing that could’ve happened to you, isn’t it?”

Nick looks right at me, ignoring him. “You all right?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, for the love of god. Please excuse me while I go throw up until I die.” Grayson marches past me. “Tell your boyfriend to sleep with one eye open, Harper.”

A few seconds later I hear him pitch the stick into the fire.

Nick stands before me now, his face serious and tense. I wonder what’s happened.

“I put you up to it last night,” he says. “Going into that plane.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. If something had happened to you—”

“Listen, if I had it to do over again, I would do the exact same thing, even if I hadn’t woken up this morning, curled up by the fire. I’ve seen them, a few of the kids I hauled out of that plane. The risk was well worth it. To me, it was all well worth it.”

He nods, glances at the ground. His face is still solemn, but I can feel the tension flowing out of him, as if it were a wall of air brushing past me. “Where does it hurt?” he asks.

“Everywhere. My whole bloody body.”

He smiles and exhales, laughing for the first time. “Me too.”

He fills me in as we trek back to the fire, gathering loose branches as we go. Nobody’s cell phone works, which is strange, but not out of the question in rural England. He’s tried to get into the cockpit with no luck. He figures the pilots are dead; he’s had a look at the cockpit and it’s pretty tight, would have been deadly during the crash. Poor souls.

At the fire, I insist he take one of my blankets, and after a bout of protests, he relents. We sit in silence for a while. I’m dying to ask him what he does for a living, where he’s from, anything. I want to know what Nick Stone is like, you know, when he’s not rescuing plane crash survivors from an icy lake. I’ve never met anyone quite like him. He seems to have been delivered to Planet Earth from some other place, some place where normal human weaknesses and shortcomings don’t apply.

I’m about to launch into my first lame question, which I’ve rehearsed in my mind nine times now, when someone runs up to us, almost colliding with Nick.

It’s Mike, the guy with the green Celtics T-shirt. He focuses on Nick, speaking between pants. “We’re . . . in.”





9





It’s a struggle to keep up with Nick and Mike through the woods. With each step, I can feel the air temperature dropping and the pain in my lower leg rising.

When we reach the nose section, the two of them bound up an assortment of luggage and plane bits stacked to form a rough stairway. Nick pauses at the top and reaches down for me, as he did when we climbed into the plane in the lake.

I scramble awkwardly up the pile, and he catches my arm and pulls me to the threshold. My body crashes into his, sending waves of pain through me. Worth it. So worth it.

The other two swimmers—their names escape me—are there already, and someone I don’t know, a short, bald man wearing a black sweater. He peers over his small round glasses, fixing me with a skeptical gaze gaze as if he’s about to ask who invited a girl into his boy’s-club airplane tree house.

“Harper, this is Bob Ward,” says Nick. “And you remember Wyatt and Seth from last night?”