by Jack Heath
'You must miss your friends from your old school,' he said.
'Yeah,' Doug said.
Jarli's phone beeped. LIE
Doug groaned. 'That stupid app.'
'You don't miss your friends?' Jarli asked, surprised.
'I only really had one friend, OK?' Doug said. 'And we didn't go to the same school. Everyone in my class hated me. I don't know why. They made fun of me when I got good grades, then they made fun of me when I did badly. The teachers tried to help and only made it worse. Moving to Kelton was lousy, but at least it got me out of that school.'
'Sorry,' Jarli said.
Doug just grunted.
They didn't talk after that. Not until they reached the tree.
Jarli stared up at it.
'The parachute's gone,' he said.
Doug followed his gaze. 'You sure this is the right tree?'
'Yeah.' Jarli looked around. 'Pretty sure.'
Doug's phone beeped. LIE
'After all your whining,' Jarli said, 'you're using my app too?'
'I'm not using your app—I'm using Truth Premium.'
'That's even worse,' Jarli grumbled. 'You're giving money to whoever stole my idea.'
'Either way—you're not sure this is the right tree.'
'Not yet. Why did you turn your phone back on?'
'In case we die,' Doug said. 'Someone can follow the signal and find our bodies. I don't want my parents waiting in an underpass for the rest of their lives, wondering if I'm gonna show.'
Jarli couldn't tell if he was kidding. 'Great.' He pulled his phone off the handlebars and they trampled across the grass towards the tree. When they got there, he brought up a different app. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary camera app. Then Jarli switched it to infra-red mode.
On the screen, the world became a swirling mass of colours. Doug was a white blob surrounded by a quivering halo of red and yellow. The trees and dirt were a mixture of blue and black.
'What's that?' Doug asked.
'Infrared,' Jarli said. 'Most new phones have it built into the camera so they can estimate distances. It's used for augmented reality apps. But it's also handy for detecting heat.'
He panned the phone across the dense bush behind them. All cold.
'I was hoping I'd be able to see the pilot's footprints,' he muttered, 'or the places where she touched the trees. But it's been too long. The trail's gone cold.'
'So what do we do?' Doug asked.
'We use another part of the spectrum.' Jarli swiped to a different filter, and the landscape on the screen changed colour. 'Now it's showing static electricity instead of heat. Look!'
The tree where he thought the parachute had been looked fuzzy. The nylon must have rubbed against the branches, leaving a static charge.
'It's the right tree,' Jarli said.
Doug looked impressed. 'So where's the parachute gone?'
'I told the cops it was here. They must have taken it.' Jarli pointed to an animal trail which was also lit with static. The pilot's uniform must be made of synthetic fibres too. 'The pilot went this way. Come on.'
As they pushed through the scrub, the hairs on Jarli's arms stood up in the cold dry air.
'You said the plane had one passenger,' Doug said.
'The police thought so, yeah.'
'How do we know we're not following the passenger's trail, rather than the pilot's?'
'If the pilot crashed into your house deliberately, it makes sense to hide in the bush,' Jarli said. 'A passenger wouldn't do that. They'd go to the cops.'
'But they haven't, right? Do you think they died in the crash?'
'I don't know. Maybe.' There hadn't been a body in the plane, but it was possible that the fire had cremated it. Jarli didn't want to think about that.
He had to keep glancing down at the phone screen as they walked, which meant his eyes couldn't adjust to the darkness. The bush was like a wall of blackness. The foliage above him blocked out the moon. Branches kept coming out of nowhere, scratching his hands and his face.
'How are we going to steal the pilot's phone?' Doug whispered.
'Maybe we won't have to. Maybe we'll overhear her calling somebody. We can record the conversation.'
'How will that help?'
Jarli shrugged. 'I dunno. Maybe she'll say, "Hello, Viper. Yes, I know your real name is Sam White. Yes, I crashed the plane into the house just like you told me to. No, the police don't suspect a thing."'
'That seems . . . unlikely.'
'Well, I'm an optimist.'
They kept stumbling through the bush. Jarli tried to move quietly, but the darkness made it hard. Dry twigs crunched underfoot. Leaves rattled around his ankles. Even his breaths felt loud.
There was a bright patch up ahead—as bright on the screen as Doug or Jarli himself. Jarli swiped back to infrared, and the shape clarified. It was a woman, lying in the leaf litter, perfectly still.
Jarli pointed silently at the bright spot on the screen. Doug's eyes widened.
He looked like he was thinking the same thing as Jarli. Maybe the pilot had been injured during the crash. She had made it this far into the bush before she collapsed. Now she was unconscious, or dead.
'Maybe she's just sleeping,' Jarli whispered. But that sounded like the kind of thing a parent would tell a little kid after spotting a dead animal on the side of the highway. No-one would just lie down and sleep in the middle of this scary place.
Their plan was useless now. They couldn't film this person doing anything criminal, and it would feel wrong to steal her phone. In fact, they should probably try to help her. But would Doug be willing to help the woman who destroyed his house?
Doug spoke first. 'We have to check,' he whispered. 'If she's OK.'
Jarli nodded, relieved. He and Doug might have more in common than he had thought.
They crept towards the figure on the ground. It was too dark to see her in real life, but the bright shape on the screen was getting bigger and bigger.
Soon Jarli had to stop, because he still couldn't see properly and he was afraid of tripping over the woman. According to the phone, she was right under his feet.
The bright screen made it hard to see anything else. Jarli turned the phone around, shining the light on the shrubbery around his feet.
'Where is she?' Doug whispered.
'She's here somewhere,' Jarli replied. The person-shaped blob on the screen was right here. He bent down and reached into the undergrowth. Thanks to the darkness and the thick vegetation, it was an excellent hiding place.
The words—HIDING PLACE—caught in Jarli's brain, like a cardigan snagging a nail.
A hand shot out of the undergrowth and grabbed his arm.
'Get down, you idiot!' a voice hissed, and a strong hand dragged Jarli onto the ground.
There was a flash in the distance.
A gunshot rang out.
Doug hit the dirt with a thump.
PART TWO:
FUGITIVES
I programmed the app to be slightly suspicious of phrases like 'and then' or 'after that'. Liars start at the beginning and finish at the end. People telling the truth jump around all over the place.
—Documentation from Truth, version 2.2
BLACK BOX
Six Hours Earlier
'Cabin crew, prepare for landing,' Priya Lekis said.
In fact, there was no cabin crew today. No passengers listening to her announcements. No co-pilot sitting next to her, double-checking everything she did. She'd done this so many times that the words came out anyway. Her plane wasn't on autopilot, but her mouth was.
Her hands fluttered over the controls. Adjusting the flight path here, the altitude there. The engines droned in her ears, muffled by the headphones. She felt the fluid moving in her skull as the pressure changed, reminding her that this wasn't a simulation—she had to do simulated flights each year to keep her license.
Kelton was on the horizon. She'd never been there before. Landing at an
unfamiliar airport made her nervous. The flight simulator didn't even have Kelton programmed in.
Priya was being extra careful, and not just because she didn't have a co-pilot. Today, without passengers or luggage, the plane was light. The wind kept nudging the nose back and forth.
She still found it ridiculous to be flying an empty plane. According to the accounts department, all the seats had been sold—to a single passenger. The passenger, STEVEN FUSSELL, had checked in on his phone. But he hadn't turned up at the airport.
'You have to take off,' the ground-crew chief had told Priya.
'You're kidding,' she'd replied. 'There's only one passenger. We're not going to wait for him?'
'He's the only passenger on this flight, but not on the next one,' the chief said. 'They need the plane at the other airport. They don't need a flight crew or a pilot, but they need that plane. You have to go.'
'Alright. What a waste of fuel.'
Before she took off, she hadn't even bothered to close the cockpit door. Now she kept glancing anxiously over her shoulder at all the empty seats behind her. It was weird. She kept imagining faint voices. Like she was flying a plane full of ghosts.
To be fair to the chief, this journey hadn't used much fuel. She was looking at the readings now. She'd started with a whole tank, and it was still two thirds full.
It didn't take much power to keep an empty plane in the air. But still. What kind of weirdo bought every seat on a plane and then didn't turn up to claim any of them?
'Too much money,' Priya muttered. Then she remembered that the flight recorder—the so-called 'black box'—was listening.
Better not crash, she thought wryly. They'll hear me being unprofessional.
Then all the lights in the cockpit went dark.
She didn't panic right away. Sometimes the lights flickered. It had scared her in flight school, but not now. They always came back on.
She waited a second. Two seconds. Three. The lights stayed off. Her heart beat faster and faster as she checked the navigation: dead. Weather readout: dead. Landing gear: dead.
The droning of the engines dropped in pitch and faded away to nothing. Now she was just gliding, with no power. And this was a 6000-kilogram tube of steel. It wouldn't stay in the air forever. The nose was already starting to dip.
Priya: dead.
She pushed a button on her radio and tried to sound calm. 'Emergency, emergency. This is Priya Lekis, captain of flight DA115. Come in, over.'
There was no response.
She tried again: 'Emergency! I am experiencing catastrophic power failure on flight DA115. Come in!'
Not even a crackle. Radio: dead.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. It wouldn't switch on. Whatever had killed the plane seemed to have killed the phone as well. Some kind of freak electrical storm, maybe?
Without the readouts, she couldn't tell exactly how far down the ground was. But before everything went dark, it had been just over 10 000 feet. That meant she had less than five minutes to land this thing.
Feeling sick, she fiddled with the controls. She couldn't control the air brakes or the rudder. She couldn't bring the engines back to life. No way to slow down or change direction. She was going to hit the ground at 700 kilometres per hour. Game over, as her grizzled old instructor would have said.
She'd done engine failure and emergency landings in the simulator, but not a complete power blackout. This was supposed to be impossible. There were backups. There were backups of those backups.
Priya scrambled out of her seat and lifted a trapdoor behind her. Noise flooded the cockpit. Underneath the trapdoor was a set of cranks and pulleys, shuddering in the shadows.
Those cranks controlled the rudder, the airbrakes and the landing gear. Priya's instructor had learned in the days when flying was dangerous, and he'd had to use the cranks once. 'It was a bumpy landing,' he'd told her, 'but it was a landing.'
Priya peered through the windscreen. There was a highway to the left of Kelton's centre. Long enough, and straight enough. Not too much traffic. She bent down and wound one of the cranks around and around, trying to steer the plane towards the highway.
After thirty seconds of winding the stiff crank, her arm was burning. Sweat poured into her eyes.
She stood up to check her progress.
The plane hadn't changed direction at all. She was still headed straight for Kelton. A small town, but a town nonetheless. With a school, a hospital, a shopping district. If she crashed there, people would die.
She reached back into the trapdoor and kept winding the crank. The floor was sloping now. This glide was becoming more and more like a fall.
Priya stood up again, trying to see how much the aircraft had turned.
Not at all. Kelton was dead ahead, no more than two thousand feet below. And she saw something weird—a light. A single sharp spark, bright enough to hurt Priya's eyes. It was mid-afternoon, so the only other lights in the town were traffic lights. This wasn't a traffic light. It was too bright, too blue.
The plane was headed straight for it.
Priya had heard rumours of a laser weapon designed to bamboozle aircraft navigation systems. It was like the bogeyman—a story pilots told each other to scare the newbies. But maybe it was true. Perhaps the plane hadn't just malfunctioned. Maybe it had been hijacked remotely.
Priya tried some of the other cranks. Airbrakes. Landing gear. Nothing worked. It was as though something had glued all the metal parts of the plane together. None of the important bits would move.
She was going to have to bail out.
The thought terrified her. Skydiving was a risky sport, and unplanned parachute jumps had a miserable survival rate. The closer to the ground she got, the more dangerous it would be, because the parachute needed time to slow her down. A jump from below a hundred feet was almost always fatal.
Priya ran to the equipment locker and wrenched it open. Parachute packs were stacked inside. She'd never used one before, but it was supposed to be idiot-proof.
She talked to her radio as she put on the pack, just in case someone could hear her. 'Emergency, emergency. This is Priya Lekis, captain of flight DA115. I have lost control of the aircraft. I suspect it has been remotely hijacked. I have no choice but to evacuate. If anyone can hear me, please evacuate the path in front of the aircraft. I repeat, evacuate the path in front of the aircraft.' She swallowed. 'Or shoot the plane down, if you have to.'
She tightened the straps over her chest and ran for the emergency exit. Her hand hesitated over the bright red handle. All pilots were terrified of cabin depressurisation. Even a small hole in the hull could suck all the oxygen out of the aircraft. After eight seconds, passengers would be too confused to put on their oxygen masks. Within fifteen seconds they'd be unconscious. Four minutes until total brain death. Game over.
Priya told herself that the plane was too close to the ground for the oxygen to be sucked out. Cabin pressure was not an issue. She took one last hopeful glance towards the controls—still dark. Then she sucked in a deep breath and pulled the handle.
There was a scream as the seal broke around the edges of the emergency exit. It was deafening, even through her headphones. The rushing wind turned the plane into the world's largest flute. Priya wrenched the whole door inwards, twisted it, and then hurled it out into the daylight. It was immediately sucked away.
Priya peered through the gap, squinting against the wind. The ground was both too close and too far away for comfort. But the longer she waited, the more dangerous it was.
She leapt out of the plane.
A wall of air hit Priya, sending her spinning. The sun and the ground swapped places, over and over. The wing of the plane whooshed past overhead, so close that it pulled her into its wake for a moment. Then the plane was gone, and it was just Priya, alone in the sky with the thundering wind.
No time to lose. She needed to rip open the pouch on the side of the pack, but her freezing fingers were shaky and numb. The
trees below grew and grew. Landing on grass would be OK. Water was bad. Trees were death.
She finally managed to tear the pouch open and grab the drogue inside. She pulled it out and let go.
Nothing happened.
Priya screamed as she hurtled towards the ground—
With a tremendous ZZZZIP, the parachute slithered out of the pack above her. The wind filled it up and the nylon ropes went taut. All the straps jerked tight over Priya's chest, bruising her ribs and pushing all the air out of her. It felt like hitting a wall.
But she didn't stop. She was still falling, alarmingly fast.
There was a road nearby. Paddocks on one side, trees on the other. Even landing on the asphalt would be better than hitting those trees. She yanked on the ropes, trying to steer herself towards it.
The chute tilted, but not enough. Her kicking feet were still over the deadly branches.
'Come on!' she yelled, tugging harder.
BOOM! The plane hit the ground on the horizon. Priya felt like she was going to throw up. What had it landed on? How many people had been hurt?
She had almost reached the road. She braced herself for impact—
But it never came. The chute snagged a tree next to the road. She swung back towards the trunk, covering her face just in time.
WHAM! She hit the tree, arms first. Something snapped in her shoulder, and pain flooded up her neck. She recognised the sensation from a childhood fall—her collarbone had snapped. She had kept the X-ray under her bed for years, a source of quiet pride.
Priya dangled there on the creaking nylon ropes, helpless.
But alive.
She looked around. She couldn't believe it. A total power failure during a flight was unlikely, and surviving it was even more unlikely. Just wait until her instructor heard about this.
As she finally pulled her headphones off her sweaty ears, she heard engine noise. Distant, but coming closer. Someone could already be coming to pick her up.
Priya grabbed a branch with one hand and balanced her feet on another. She started unbuckling the straps across her chest.