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.

Mara found the emergency kit jammed under her seat. Inside was a flare gun, two flares, a knife, and a half-working flashlight. "Okay," she breathed. "We've got tools. Let's figure out exactly what we have before we decide anything." Dell dumped his backpack out beside her.

Map in hand, they marked the tower, the river, and their own position. "Ninety miles, but the beacon's our line straight to people," Mara said. They packed the kit, took a long look at the wreck, and started walking north into the trees with the radio leading the way.

Three days of hard walking later, footsore and thin, they crested a ridge and saw the tower below, its light still blinking. They half ran, half stumbled down to it. The radio inside crackled, then a voice. Help was a single call away, and they had finally made it.