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.

"Before we go anywhere, we leave a sign," Dell said. They scratched a big arrow into the dirt by the wreck, pointing north, and wrote the date and "WALKING TO TOWER" on a torn map flap pinned under a rock. If rescue found the plane, they'd know which way to look.

Two days north, a low plane buzzed over the trees and waggled its wings. The pilot had found their wreck, read the arrow, and tracked them down. He dropped a bright bag with a radio and a note: "Sit tight. Chopper inbound." Mara hugged the radio like it was a person.