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.

By dusk the radio battery was fading. The tone stuttered, dropped, then came back weaker. "If it dies, we lose our only guide," Mara said. Ahead, through the trees, she spotted a thin line of smoke rising into the gray sky.