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controls or looking at her. “I’m taking us up to sixteen.”
    The air smoothed out as they climbed above the bumpy thermal layer. She looked down, doing the math in her head. They were two and a half miles high. The
Titanic
had sunk almost that deep in the ocean, about two and a quarter miles. That was a long way down, she thought, thinking of the glittering ocean liner with its lights extinguished, drifting down, broken and dark, all life gone. She shivered, suddenly cold, and reached for her jacket. She paused before putting it on, though, watching the first giant earth-wrinkle slide past beneath them.
    The engine coughed.
    The bottom dropped out of her stomach as if she were on a roller-coaster ride. Her heartbeat was suddenly thumping hard in her chest. Bailey leaned forward again. “What was that?” Her tone was a little tight, edged with alarm.
    He didn’t answer. His posture had changed, going from relaxed to completely alert in a millisecond. That alarmed her more than the slight break in the engine’s monotonous drone. She gripped the edge of the seat, her nails digging into the leather. “Is something wrong?”
    “All the readings are normal,” he replied briefly.
    “Then what—”
    “I don’t know. I’m taking us down a little.”
    A little
was right, she thought numbly, staring at the enormous, jagged mountains that abruptly seemed way too close beneath them, and coming closer. He couldn’t take them down very far or they’d be skimming the mountaintops. But the engine seemed to have smoothed out; if that little hiccup had signaled anything serious, wouldn’t it have continued?
    The engine coughed again, hard enough that the airframe shuddered. Bailey sat frozen, watching the blur of the propeller blades, listening to the motor as she willed the sound to even out again. “Keep going, keep going,” she urged under her breath. “Just keep going.” She imagined the steady sound, pictured the propeller turning so fast she couldn’t see it. In her mind the plane lifted up and over the mountains, if she just concentrated fiercely enough it would actually happen—
    The engine sputtered a few times…and stopped.
    The silence was sudden, and complete. In wordless shock she watched the blur of the propeller slow, become distinct blades, and then it…stopped.

5
    “S HIT!”
    Captain Justice spat the word through clenched teeth; his hands moved swiftly as he tried to restart the engine, tried to keep the nose up. They were so close to the mountains that if the nose dropped, they would go straight in. The landscape below was a study of stark, inhospitable contrasts: snow-covered crags and boulders, the snow so white it was almost blue, the shadows so dark they were black. The slopes were steep and jagged, dropping away in sharp, almost vertical angles. There was nowhere to land, nowhere even remotely flat.
    Bailey didn’t move, didn’t breathe. She couldn’t. The awful paralysis of absolute terror and helplessness seized her body, her voice. There was nothing she could do to help, nothing she could do to change the outcome. She couldn’t even scream a protest; all she could do was watch, and wait to die. They
were
going to die; she saw no way out of it. In a few minutes, maybe even a few seconds, they were going to crash on the rocky, snow-covered top of this mountain. For now, for a precious frozen moment, they seemed to float in place, as if the plane hadn’t quite given in to the laws of gravity—or the mountains were playing cat-and-mouse games with them, letting her feel a faint, unreasonable hope before snatching it away.
    “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”
    Dimly she heard Justice on the radio, calling out the distress signal, their plane designation, and current location, then he cursed viciously and fell silent as he fought the inevitable. The plane dropped suddenly, a move that sent her stomach climbing into her throat, and she squeezed her eyes shut so she couldn’t see the rocky peaks