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give out. I catch myself on the door, holding myself up. After running for hours across a solid glacier, and then sitting without any kind of stretching, my legs feel like two planks joined by loose chains.
    I nearly fall a second time when I grip the side of the door with my burned hand. Steadying myself, I turn my gaze back to the eruption. A mile-high wall of darkness moves steadily toward us, no longer a true pyroclastic flow, but suffocating and blinding and impossible to fly through. It would choke the plane’s engine and its passengers. A column of twisting volcanic ash rises up into the upper layers of the atmosphere, moving out in all directions, including directly above us. It’s creating a luminous, and ominous, sunset. Furious lightning cuts the sky like multi-headed Hydras lashing out at unseen foes. The lava spewing from the Earth’s depths isn’t visible from here, but I know it’s there, heating up and rapidly melting the glacier. I know, because the result of that rapid melting still rushes toward us, outpacing the cloud. Water turned to mud after sliding over miles of terrain, flowing downhill with enough force to carry bus-sized boulders.
    “Can you make it?” Holly asks, squeezing my arm with one hand while holding onto her door with the other. She looks as unsteady as me.
    “I have to,” I say, and I take a shaky step.
    Kiljan, displaying his Nordic strength, limps to the hangar, outpacing the rest of us despite his injured toe. When he reaches the hangar door, he doesn’t even try the knob, he just puts his shoulder into it and barrels through. A moment later, the large garage door at the front of the hangar rolls up, revealing the plane: a white and red Cessna. It’s a single-prop airplane, not too dissimilar from the one I trained on. But it’s not going to work.
    There’s only room for four people.
    Kiljan emerges from the hangar, airplane keys in hand.
    “This won’t work.” I point at the plane with a shaking finger, my feet growing steadier with each step forward. “There’s only four seats, and even that will be cramped.
    He hurries up to me, places the keys in my hand, and says, “Good luck to you.”
    “Wait. What?”
    “I was never coming with you,” he says. “My home. My family.” He looks to the east and doesn’t need to say anything else. If he didn’t abandon us on the glacier, he’s not going to leave his family, who are apparently located downhill—soon to be downstream.
    “Thank you,” I say, and we part ways, him rushing back into the superjeep, me hobbling to the hanger.
    Reaching the airplane is hard enough, but climbing inside nearly undoes our beaten group. It takes a team effort to get all of us inside the cramped cabin, Holly and I in the front, Diego and Phillip in the back. The well maintained plane smells like cigar smoke, but the engine turns over on the first try. I start going through the pre-flight checklist that was drilled into me. “Flight controls, free and correct. Altimeter, set. Directional gyro, set. Fuel gauges—”
    “There’s no time for all that!” Phillip shouts, thrusting his hand at the view through the front windshield like he’s trying to fling off a glob of peanut butter. The flood of viscous mud rolls over the valley wall straight ahead, oozing out in all directions, rolling boulders, and heading steadily toward the airstrip. When it envelopes the chain link fence fifty feet from the runway, I push the throttle forward, and the RPM gauge snaps to life.
    I don’t bother looking for a headset to drown out the buzzing propeller. There’s no time for that. Maybe not enough time to take off. We roll clear of the hangar doors, and I shove the throttle forward. The engine coughs once, making my heart skip, but then it roars to life. The airfield on both sides becomes a blur, but I can clearly see the superjeep keeping pace beside us until it reaches the gate, makes a hard right turn and speeds away in the opposite