The Cessna came down hard in a patch of black spruce. For a long minute Mara heard nothing but her own heartbeat. Then her cousin Dell coughed in the seat beside her, alive, his glasses cracked but still on. The radio was dead except for one thing: a clean tone, repeating, over and over, on an old frequency. A tower beacon. Somewhere out there, someone had left a light on.

"That beacon means people," Mara said. She grabbed the map from the broken dash and found a tiny mark: an old ranger tower, maybe ninety miles north. "We walk toward it. We follow the signal." Dell wiped his cracked glasses and nodded, already pulling on his boots.

An hour in, Dell stopped dead. Fresh tracks crossed the trail, huge and clawed. "Bear," he whispered. The prints were wet. Whatever made them was close, and it was moving the same way they were, toward the beacon.

They backed away slow and quiet, the way Dell's dad had taught him, and looped wide around the tracks. It cost them an hour, but the bear never came. By evening the beacon was louder, and the tower's blinking light showed through the branches.