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come back around.”
    “Lake?” Cyrus asked.
    “We’re just over it. That town out there is at the far end.”
    Cyrus leaned forward and stared at the ground. Then he looked out of his side window. Nothing. All blackness.
    Diana tapped a little screen down at knee-level between them. And there it was. Small 3-D mountain ranges made of green lines, clicking slowly forward. A flat space was growing between them, broadening and extending. Cyrus hadn’t paid any attention to the screen before because he hadn’t known what it was, and no one had told him to.
    “Nothing’s that flat but water,” Diana said. “I normally hate these things. I’d rather fly with my eyes. But it’s nice on a night this dark, and without a lit strip.”
    Cyrus nodded, as if he had often flown and landed at night, let alone without a lit runway to land on.
    He brought the plane lower and lower, until they were just below a thousand feet, and halfway out over the invisible lake. Then he went into a slow right turn.
    “Tighter,” Diana said. “We’re between mountains here.”
    Cyrus banked harder, pointing his right wing down at water he wished he could see. His altitude dropped, but Diana didn’t seem worried.
    When he straightened out, he was below five hundred feet and aiming his plane at … he had no idea.
    “Do you want to take it in?” Cyrus asked.
    Diana looked at him and smiled. “You’re doing fine.”
    “Yeah, right until I smack us into a mountain.” Cyrus exhaled. The cockpit was cool, but his forehead was suddenly damp.
    “Lower your gears and come in slow.” Diana made it sound so simple. “Then I’ll tilt the rotors and set her down.”
    Cyrus climbed slightly, just for his own sake, leveled back off, and then slowed until he thought they were going to stall.
    “Nice,” Diana said. And then she took over.
    Cyrus flopped back into his seat, wiped his forehead, and tried not to pant. He felt the plane scoop and slow even more as the engines rotated up. It felt like they were in a helicopter, in a plane that could twist and slide and shuffle through the air as slowly as he could walk.
    And then Diana flipped three switches, and spotlights on the wings and nose of the plane bathed the lake surface in icy halogen. Cyrus could see smooth dark water shooting past beneath them.
    “Seriously?” Cyrus said. “Those were there the whole time and you didn’t say anything?”
    “You didn’t need them,” Diana said. “They would have just distracted you.” She flipped a joystick down out of the instruments and pointed at it. “Find us a parking spot.”
    Where Cyrus swiveled, the spotlights swiveled. And up ahead, wedged between the still black water and a jutting mountain clothed in firs, there was a small cluster of cockeyed cabins. Huge cedar trees loomed between them, draping shadows over roofs and chimneys with heavy limbs, shielding structures from the spotlights where they could. Off to the right of the camp, there was a mountain stream descending into the lake, and beside it a small meadow.
    “Right there,” said Cyrus, but Diana had already seen it.
    As the plane rose to hop the trees and settle in the meadow, down below the front door of a little cabin opened, and an old man rolled out onto the tiny porch, seated in a wheelchair.
    He had a long rifle in his lap.

 four 
    EMPIRE OF BONES
    C YRUS WOKE FACEDOWN on a bare mattress that smelled like dog. He blinked his eyes into focus and managed to lift his head. There was a brown Australia-shaped stain just beneath his face. The entire southern half of the continent had been flooded with his drool.
    The mattress hadn’t looked nearly so disgusting last night. With a little darkness and a lot of exhaustion, any flat surface can look pretty good. Last night, Cyrus would have given the grimy cabin floor four stars, let alone the bottom of a bunk bed.
    Cyrus pressed himself slowly up onto his elbows. His right calf was shrieking with every heartbeat, which