The light began to fade, and the low, thick clouds dampened the sound around them. It was the purest silence she’d ever experienced.
She stopped for a moment, aching for a lungful of air, and took a series of shallow breaths, nearly hyperventilating in her desire for oxygen. Then she dragged him the rest of the way and propped him up against a rock wall under the overhang. The wind wasn’t as bad here, she discovered with relief. Returning to the plane, she rifled through his bag and came away with a thick coat, mittens, a knitted hat, and an old blanket. She put all of these on him, then draped the blanket over him.
Still he didn’t stir. She set off to find something to burn.
Thankfully she didn’t have to go far for wood. They’d downed enough dead trees on their way. She walked to the plane, grabbing her tool bag with all the books, and assessed the tree that had pierced the windshield. Branches had broken off around the crumpled nose of the aircraft, so she gathered these first. But as soon as she lifted them, she felt the sogginess of the wood. They’d been sitting out in the snow for a long time, and fear stole over her as she realized she might not be able to start a fire at all. She looked around for anything else that would burn. Their clothes were synthetic, the plane metal. If she couldn’t get the wood to catch fire . . . She pushed the thought aside and gathered an armful of branches and small twigs, as well as her tool bag, bringing them all back to the overhang. Gordon was still unconscious.
Thirst pulled at her. She drank the last of what she had left in her water bottle. She’d have to filter more later.
Opening the survival guide, she read the steps to building a fire. She took the smallest twigs and ground them to powder, then sprinkled them on the smaller pieces of wood, forming a little interwoven piece that the book referred to as a bird’s-nest shape. Then she arranged the bigger branches into a pyramid, with an opening in the side. She pulled out her pocket torch and lit the bird nest. It caught, and in her excitement, she took too deep a breath and cried out in pain. Using two sticks, she transported the bird’s-nest into the hole in the wood pyramid. She blew gently on it.
But it didn’t catch. When the tinder burned out, the wood hadn’t caught.
She tried it again, but the same thing happened. The small pieces would catch, but not the sodden logs.
Referring back to the book, she followed its suggestion to look for slanted trees that might not be wet on their undersides. She left the overhang, tromping through the deep snow. Her feet felt frozen inside her wet boots, and her hands had grown red and painful in the bitter cold.
She crested a small ridge, below which stood a gathering of trees. Some of them had partially fallen, leaning against their neighbors. The book said to tear off bark from the underside, but these trees had lost theirs long ago. They now stood as white, sun-bleached skeletons, silhouetted against the fading western light.
Taking out her multitool, she shaved off pieces of wood. They would make good tinder, but even on the underside, these trees were wet. Lifting her arms sent a searing pain throughout her ribs. She scraped off more and more wood from a few of the drier-looking trees, then headed back to the overhang.
There she repeated the fire-building steps, creating the bird’s nest, transporting it to the new pyramid she’d built of shaved wood. But it just wouldn’t catch. Her fingers ached in the cold, so much so that she could barely curl them. Soon they felt useless.
She leaned back against Gordon, tucking her hands under her arms in an effort to thaw them. As soon as some feeling returned, she tried again. But the wood was just too wet to catch. She picked it up and shoved it as far under the overhang as she could. Maybe it would dry out. But she knew that in this cold, with no direct sun, the chance was remote.
This just wasn’t going to work. She had to get help. They would die out here if she didn’t.
Rowan. She had to reach Rowan.
Pulling out her PRD, she used the code system he had installed. She knew he was so far away, had no idea how he’d be able to help. Maybe he knew people nearby. Another pilot, maybe.
She typed out the message using their encryption method. “Rowan, I need your help. Plane crashed. Desperate situation. Lives in danger. Won’t make Rover rendezvous. All might be lost. At the following location.” She uploaded her coordinates and pressed send.
To cover all her options, she also sent a message to Willoughby. She didn’t include her location in case Willoughby had been compromised, but she asked him to contact her.
She huddled up next to Gordon and pulled up the new videos they’d found at the forested site. She clicked on the first entry. Raven’s familiar face smiled out at her, but he was older, probably in his late teens. A title glowed at the bottom of the display: Video Log—Carbon Sink Project 1.1.
Raven wore a big grin on his face. “My parents and I are about to start tending to the carbon sinks—the forests of trees planted by Rovers two generations ago. The trees have grown to a pretty good height, I hear. We’re off to check on a forest that was planted on the eastern side of the country, southwest of New Atlantic. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and can’t wait to get there. After the forest was established, it was populated with a few species that went extinct in recent history—bears, deer, wolves, rabbits, and some
