Free The Blue (The Complete Novel) by Joseph Turkot Page B

foot in place and launch up. And in the sky, springing up two feet into the air, a sheen of silver flashes, catching my eye. I land and stumble with a blast of pain that coils around the insides of my leg and through my stomach. As I roll, I breathe deeply, trying to suck air back into my lungs and calm myself so I don’t make another scream. The pain turns to a burning and I struggle to catch my breath for what feels like a minute. Russell hollers over at me to see if I’m okay, and then he says I landed on the wrong leg. He says he should have told me—leave and land on the same leg. I tell him it’s fine, but all I can think about is the silver flash I saw and the stabbing rhythm of nerve fire. And I swear that I saw more than just a glint of silver: I saw a shape. And already my mind works it over—the pointed angle rising from the surface of the floe, the long cylindrical body. I want to tell Russell to look, because he still hasn’t noticed, but I rise to make sure I saw it right first. I try to stand back up, carefully, putting all my weight on my left side. I balance myself upright long enough to look again. The silver looks just like a bright spot of light, painful to look at, because it’s reflecting direct sunlight under the patch of blue sky. But then, I shield my eyes, blotting out just enough of the glare. And there it is—I can make out the shape again. A triangle on the end of a rod. Voley crashes and slides along the ice next to me, able to keep himself stable even with three legs. Then Russell jumps, and we’re all one floe closer to the blue. And I tell Russell: it’s a plane.
     
    What? he says, confused, like I must not be seeing things right. Then I tell him to look where I point, and he sees the silver again. Use your hands to block the glare, I tell him. I wait, anxiously, leaning on his shoulder while he tries. It’s almost like I’ve forgotten my hunger entirely as I wait, a hopeful wait for the sign of dawning comprehension on his face, the noise of recognition from his lips.
                My mind begins to work over the possibility—that we’re heading toward a plane. That maybe it’s the same plane we saw fly over us. And it crashed, right on top of the ice pack. Tried to land on the biggest floe it could find. But even still, crashed or not—there’ll be supplies. There will have to be something. Maybe even some kind of radio. And I think of Dusty, and how he’d probably know how to get the radio on a plane working again. But in either case, there’ll be something. Maybe even—and I try not to think of it, because it antagonizes my stomach to the point of fury—maybe even food . There would have to be some kind of food. Unless —I try to stop my mind from spinning into madness, into painful cravings, but I can’t— unless there are survivors. And they left the wreck only after taking everything there was in it. And now it’s just a useless shell of metal, waiting for the floe underneath to break apart so that it can travel down to the murky grave that’s been its ultimate destination since it was first built. But before my imagination runs further, into hallucinations of the specific kinds of food we’ll find there, Russell’s face catches my attention. He smiles first, and then he looks at me, eyes widening, his skeletal face contorting into something like happiness, and then he says it: You’re right—a plane!
     
    And it’s as if Russell takes over my mind, saying out loud all the same things I was thinking. We start to walk across the slushy floe toward the next break and he voices each and every fantasy that I only dared to imagine: There will be an inflatable raft in it, he says, And there will be food. He says there will be fuel too, and maybe even another map. Something that will tell us where they were going. Where we have to go next. He doesn’t say a word about survivors, or what they may have taken from the plane. I want to ask him if this