Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  To everyone who builds, designs, and makes

  Contents

  Code Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Transcript, Aero Horizon Flight 16

  1: Javi

  2: Yoshi

  3: Molly

  4: Anna

  5: Javi

  6: Molly

  7: Yoshi

  8: Anna

  9: Javi

  10: Molly

  11: Yoshi

  12: Anna

  13: Javi

  14: Molly

  15: Yoshi

  16: Anna

  17: Javi

  18: Yoshi

  19: Molly

  20: Javi

  21: Caleb

  22: Anna

  23: Javi

  24: Yoshi

  25: Molly

  26: Anna

  27: Javi

  28: Molly

  29: Yoshi

  30: Anna

  31: Yoshi

  32: Javi

  33: Molly

  About the Author

  The Game

  Sneak Peek

  Copyright

  RETRIEVED FROM AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL RECORDINGS, FAIRBANKS, ALASKA.

  FAI = Sam Tennison, Fairbanks Air Traffic Control

  Captain Frank Benoit, AH16

  First Officer Alexis Card, AH16

  Flight Attendant Pete Meriwether, AH16

  21:13:42.7

  FAI: Aero Horizon 16, things are looking bumpy ahead of you.

  CAPTAIN: We see it. How deep?

  FAI: You should be through in two minutes.

  CAPTAIN: Thanks, Fairbanks.

  FAI: No problem.

  FIRST OFFICER: Pete, can you sit them down back there?

  FLIGHT ATTENDANT (INTERCOM): Us too?

  (pause)

  FIRST OFFICER: Everyone.

  21:15:24.3

  CAPTAIN: Are you seeing this?

  FIRST OFFICER: (unintelligible) … flash of lightning?

  CAPTAIN: But it’s just sitting there.

  FIRST OFFICER: We’ve got an electrical—

  CAPTAIN: Losing everything!

  FIRST OFFICER: Battery kicking in.

  CAPTAIN: Okay. Okay. Instruments are back.

  FIRST OFFICER: What WAS that?

  CAPTAIN: I’m taking us lower. We need to get under this.

  21:15:50.1

  (alarm)

  FIRST OFFICER: Bird strike. We have bird strike.

  CAPTAIN: At 28,000 feet? There’s no birds up—

  FIRST OFFICER: On engine three. Flame condition.

  CAPTAIN: Shut it down.

  FIRST OFFICER: I’m trying.

  FAI: The status of your aircraft, please.

  FIRST OFFICER: We have fire in number three. Won’t shut down. Losing speed …

  (stall alarm)

  (auto-pilot disengage alarm)

  CAPTAIN: We are in manual. Descending.

  FIRST OFFICER: Okay.

  CAPTAIN: I have the controls.

  FIRST OFFICER: Smoke in the cockpit.

  (multiple alarms)

  FAI: Horizon 16, we have an emergency inbound runway available.

  CAPTAIN: We’re unable.

  FLIGHT ATTENDANT (INTERCOM): We have smoke in the cabin.

  FIRST OFFICER: Right ahead! Another one!

  FAI: I’m sorry. Say again?

  CAPTAIN: We—What IS that?

  (sound of metal tearing)

  FIRST OFFICER: It’s in here with us! It’s in here with—

  (sound of rushing air)

  CAPTAIN: She’s (unintelligible) gone.

  (sound of tearing metal, rushing air)

  21:16:14.2

  FAI: Horizon 16, radar contact is lost.

  (unintelligible)

  FAI: Horizon 16, are you still on?

  (rushing air)

  FAI: Horizon 16?

  (radio contact lost)

  End of transcript. Cause of crash as yet undetermined.

  No black box found. No wreckage found.

  No survivors found.

  Next question,” Molly said. “How many miles of wire are in this airplane?”

  “Um, a lot?”

  “Put your brain to work, Perez. Estimate!”

  Javier Perez sighed. “If I get close, will you stop bugging me with these questions?”

  “Nope. You need the distraction.” Molly clutched her book of airplane trivia and grinned. “I’ve got at least fourteen hours’ worth. Enough for the whole flight!”

  “You wanted to sit by her!” Anna said from the row behind, and Oliver laughed beside her.

  Javi groaned, wishing the plane would take off so he could lean back and pretend to sleep.

  Telling Molly that he was afraid of flying had been a terrible idea. Because that made it her job, as team leader, to distract him—with engineering problems, of course. At Robotics Club every afternoon, Molly always talked while she worked, explaining what she was doing, challenging others to do the same. For her, making robots wasn’t just a hobby, it was a conversation.

  The funny thing was, the distraction was actually working. Once Javi’s brain had latched onto her question, the plane became more than a huge unknown carrying him away from home for the first time ever. Now it was an engineering problem.

  How many miles of wire? Javi thought.

  The four members of Team Killbot, along with their adviser, Mr. Keating, were sitting in economy. Brooklyn Science and Tech had lots of rich people who donated money to the school, and when the team had qualified for the Robot Soccer World Championships, some millionaire had stepped up to pay travel costs.

  But first class to Japan for five people? Nobody had that much money to give away.

  Even so, this was what Mr. Keating called “fancy economy,” designed for fourteen-hour flights. Javi’s seat was surrounded by buttons and lights and a video screen. All of which were connected to wires, right?

  He’d already tested the buttons on his armrest. They controlled the angle of his seat, a reading light, the screen. There was a button for summoning a flight attendant, and a rocker switch with volume symbols. There was even a little remote control for games (which also seemed to be a phone, in case you needed to call someone from halfway across the Arctic Circle).

  Javi found himself wanting to strip it all down, to see those wires, motors, and gears out in the open. He’d been taking things apart as long as he could remember, starting when his mother had let him take apart her busted microwave when he was five years old.

  He imagined the wires under the cabin floor, snaking up and around the curves of the chair. And another bright web above him, bringing power to all those lights and air blowers in the ceiling—

  “Conjectures?” Molly prompted. “Conclusions?”

  Javi’s brain buzzed. Each seat would need at least a hundred feet of wire, and there were about five hundred people on the plane. That was ten miles right there, on top of the ailerons and engines, the cockpit crammed with gauges, the extra wires needed for the huge business class seats a few rows ahead.

  Too much to calculate, so he multiplied his first guess by ten.

  “In the whole plane, maybe a hundred miles of wire?”

  “Not too bad.” Molly waved her book. “But it’s more like three hundred. A technical tour de force!”

  “Okay, wow,” Javi said, though amazement was the surest route to more trivia questions. “It seems like a waste, using a machine this complicated to fly our dinky little robots to Tokyo.”

  “The Killbots are not dinky,” Molly said. “They’re the reigning US champions of robot soccer, junior division!”

  Javi shrugged. “May I remind you that the other team’s robots got broken in shipping? We lucked into this
.”

  “We would’ve won anyway.” Molly’s expression dared him to argue.

  Javi wasn’t sure. He’d seen videos of the robots built by the unlucky finalists from New Mexico—scuttling four-legged scorpions that whacked the soccer ball with their tails. In stark contrast, the Brooklyn Killbots were toasters on wheels. Mindless bullies that swarmed the ball, knocking other players out their way.

  “Like how five-year-olds play soccer,” one of the judges had muttered in the semifinals.

  And there were, what, maybe twenty feet of wire in each Killbot?

  Not exactly a technical tour de force.

  Last night, Javi’s whole family had gathered for a send-off dinner: uncles, aunts, and cousins all telling him how proud they were. His mother had told stories of him helping on her superintendent rounds when he was little, fixing locks and faucets at age seven. But for the whole dinner he’d felt like a fraud.

  What kind of engineer was afraid to get on an airplane?

  “Next question,” Molly said. “How many Aero Horizon flights have ever crashed?”

  He stared at her. Was she just trolling him now?

  If building robots had taught Javi anything, it was that way too much could go wrong with machines. No matter how carefully he tested them, the Killbots were always doing unpredictable stuff in the middle of a match.

  He thought about those three hundred miles of wire in the airplane, the millions of rivets and seals and screws, the engines and tanks full of flammable fuel. All those parts that could break, warp, fail, or explode.

  “I’m going to go with … two?” he said hopefully.

  “Nope,” Molly said. “Zero!”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. No crashes in the whole fleet, in forty years.”

  “Huh.” Javi felt a relieved smile reach his lips, and his irritation with Molly faded. Even when she was trolling him, she always had a plan. “Thanks.”

  She shrugged, as if to say that his fears were forgotten. “Just enjoy the flight, Perez. We’re going to win for real this time.”

  Javi gave her a fist to bump. “Team Killbot!”

  Mr. Keating leaned forward from the row behind. “Um, guys. Maybe no more discussion of airplane crashes?”

  “Actually,” Molly said, “we were discussing the total absence of airplane crashes.”

  “Still,” Mr. Keating said firmly. “Some people are nervous about flying.”

  “Not us engineers.” Molly smiled at Javi. “Next question …”

  “Last question,” Javi pleaded.

  Molly looked like she was about to argue, but then a ping went through the cabin, and a voice announced that the doors were closing.

  Javi swallowed. Last night, he had imagined himself jumping up and running off the plane when this moment came. But thanks to Molly’s distractions, he was managing to sit here quietly.

  “Fire away,” he said.

  “This is my favorite one.” Molly clutched the trivia book close, guarding the answer. “What do flight attendants call it when the oxygen masks drop down?”

  Javi frowned. “There’s a name for that?”

  “It’s secret flight attendant slang. Let me give you a hint: The oxygen sensor gets tripped, right? And suddenly all those rubber masks fall out of the ceiling. Everyone’s freaking out, screaming like animals. So what do flight attendants call it?”

  “Um, a really bad day at work?”

  “Nope.” Molly gave him a pleased smile. “They call it a ‘rubber jungle.’ Get it? Because everyone goes primal, and there’s all those masks hanging down like vines! And usually it’s just an accident, because of a broken sensor.”

  Javi tried to smile back at her, but now he was thinking about those hundreds of masks up in the ceiling, each tightly wound in its little compartment, like snakes ready to spring out and start a panic.

  Just one more thing that could go wrong.

  The kids a few rows back were talking about airplane crashes again.

  Yoshi Kimura could hear the girl closest to him even over the announcements. She kept sharing fascinating technical details about the plane. This was the problem with his mom buying his ticket so late. He’d been stuck only a few rows from the economy section—all those people who thought sitting in a tin can for fourteen hours was exciting.

  Yoshi couldn’t wait for the plane to take off, for the roar of its engines to drown out everyone’s voices and leave him with his own glum thoughts.

  For the hundredth time, he wondered what awaited him at the end of this flight. His father had promised a punishment as epic as it was long-delayed, but had left the details to Yoshi’s imagination.

  An attendant appeared and said in careful English, “Would you like something to drink before takeoff, sir?”

  “Mizu, onegaishimasu,” Yoshi replied, and was pleased when she looked surprised. Japanese people always thought he looked too Western—too much like a hafu—to speak in a flawless accent. But he’d lived his first ten years in Tokyo, before Mom had given up and moved back to New York.

  The attendant bowed, slipped away, and returned with a tiny bottle of water. Yoshi drained it in one gulp, but his throat stayed dry.

  The weird thing was, he’d been much calmer on his way here to New York, nine months ago. Even with a priceless four-hundred-year-old sword in his baggage—stolen from his own father—he hadn’t been worried.

  Of course, back then he hadn’t known he was breaking the law just by taking the family katana out of Japan. His father had always told Yoshi that it would be his one day but had never mentioned that it was an official Cultural Property, a national treasure too precious to leave the country.

  The sword was in the hold of the airplane now, safely sheathed and in its travel case. And insured for four hundred thousand dollars, an amount that was somehow more impressive than words like Cultural Property.

  On the phone yesterday, Yoshi had asked his father what would happen if Japanese customs took a close look at it. Could they arrest him for bringing it back into the country?

  “You should have thought of that before you stole it” was all Father would say. Yoshi hadn’t pointed out that the whole reason for taking the sword was so he’d never have to go back to Japan again.

  But that plan hadn’t exactly worked, had it?

  The announcements finally ended, and soon the plane was rumbling down the runway, gaining speed, and lifting into the air. It leaned into an unhurried turn as it climbed, slicing through the sky like a vast, graceful blade.

  When at last it reached straight and level flight, Yoshi reclined his seat all the way, until it was as flat as a bed. He curled up under the blanket, wrapped in noise-canceling headphones, staring at a tablet full of anime.

  He had to binge-watch everything now. His father was almost certainly going to take his screens away when he got to Tokyo. No computers, phones, or TV for a month had been Yoshi’s punishment for failing a calligraphy test at age nine.

  Whatever his father had in mind now would be much worse than that and would last all summer. Which meant disappearing from his New York friends’ lives. By September, everyone would’ve moved on to new shows, new music, new manga. And Yoshi would be forgotten. He’d be a foreign kid, starting all over again, just like three years ago when he’d first arrived.

  He would always be foreign, it seemed, always on the wrong side of the Pacific Ocean.

  The flight attendant came by and lightly touched his shoulder, probably to ask about dinner. Yoshi just shook his head, retreating further under the covers. He didn’t want her to see that his eyes were glistening.

  He found himself hoping that the airplane never made it to Japan.

  The white stretched out beneath Molly Davis in endless sheets.

  In some places the snow lay in waves, like sand dunes carved smooth by the wind. In others, ice rose up from colliding floes in jagged, broken spires. The sun was just above the horizon and cast long shadows across rippling white.

>   Molly shivered, looking at all that ice. According to the flight tracker map on her video screen, the plane was well above the Arctic Circle now.

  No cities. No roads. She hadn’t seen anything but arctic white in ages.

  Which raised an interesting question. If Javi’s worst fears came true and the plane crashed, would the passengers freeze to death before help arrived?

  Molly looked around the cabin. It was June, so nobody was wearing anything heavier than a sweater. And those flimsy airplane blankets wouldn’t even keep you warm in a movie theater.

  Maybe you could make survival tents out of the life rafts pictured on the safety card. Or keep yourself warm with jet fuel. Was there a way to burn it steadily? Or would you just blow yourself up, along with what remained of the plane?

  She turned from the window to ask Javi for help with the problem, but he was still asleep.

  That was annoying. He’d been jittering like a bag of windup teeth all morning, but now that Molly was bored he was unconscious.

  It was better than him sulking, she supposed. Ever since Team Killbot had won the championship by default, he’d acted like they weren’t really winners. Like they deserved for things to go wrong in Tokyo. Well, the other finalists’ bad luck wasn’t Team Killbot’s fault.

  That’s what you got for making fragile robots. You could ship the Killbots a thousand miles in the back of a bouncy UPS truck, and they’d probably work just fine. They were simple. And they kicked butt.

  That was how good engineers built things.

  Molly looked back at Oliver and Anna, hoping that one of them was awake. Nope, they were asleep, too. Even Mr. Keating was snoring.

  Turned out that fourteen hours was a long time. Molly hated having no one to talk to. At home when Mom got quiet, Molly sometimes even talked to herself, answering her own questions. Anything was better than silence.

  She looked down at the ice and shivered again.

  Javi let out a sputtery snore, and Molly wondered if she should get some sleep, too. Team Killbot’s first match was the day after they landed, and she had no idea what jet lag felt like. Javi wasn’t the only kid at Brooklyn Science and Tech who’d never flown before.

  She shut the window shade against the endless white and settled back into her seat. The airplane pillow smelled weird, so she dropped it on the floor and scrunched up her sweater.