Nowhere on Earth Read online

“Tastes like fish to me,” said Bob, but he was smiling.

  “This is a world of wonders,” said Aidan. He closed his eyes as he ate the fish. “You are so lucky to have all this. I will miss it.”

  Bob cleared his throat. “Do you…do you have to leave?” It was a question that could be understood in more than one way.

  “Yes,” said Aidan. “I do.” Slowly he set his plate down. “I am…in the literal sense of the word, alien to this place. It is not good for me to stay too long. I would disrupt the order of things. Everything must be in its place. Order must be preserved.”

  “Oh,” said Bob. “OK.”

  Aidan stood and went over to him. “You showed me how to fish, so I will give you a gift.”

  Emily looked up, saw Aidan put a hand on Bob’s shoulder.

  “You’re going to heal him?” she said.

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said Aidan. “At least, not in the way you mean. I am only going to show him something.”

  “Show me what?” said Bob.

  “This,” said Aidan.

  And then Bob was out of the room: not like he passed out, more like he was just gone. Emily could sense it, like his body was now a shell and there was nothing inside, his consciousness was elsewhere.

  Gone.

  CHAPTER 34

  MINUTES PASSED.

  Aidan took his hand away.

  Bob came back, through the door of himself, and opened his eyes and looked out. Tears flowed like meltwater from his eyes, like a glacier that has been warmed by the sun, and has become a river.

  “Really?” he said.

  “Really,” said Aidan.

  Bob closed his eyes.

  “What?” said Emily. “What did you show him?”

  “It is impossible to explain,” said Aidan. “And now I am tired. We will sleep. Another time, I will show you too.”

  She smiled at him. “OK,” she said.

  Bob was smiling too, through his tears. “Thank you,” he said to Aidan. “That’s the best gift I ever had.”

  Aidan nodded. “You’re welcome. Thank you for helping to get me home.”

  And with that, he climbed onto the bed and rolled over and closed his eyes.

  Wait, thought Emily. We’re not leaving? Something in her gut told her this was wrong. She was glad Bob had experienced…whatever he’d experienced, glad she’d had that moment with Aidan, floating in the snow, but they had to run.

  Or Aidan was going to end up on an operating table.

  What could she do, though? It was dark and cold out there. In here, the kid was warm. And resting.

  Bob tried to help with the cleaning up, but Emily wouldn’t let him. “Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  And she did: she took care of the dishes. But she wasn’t sure if she could take care of anything else. Aidan looked so small, curled up there, so fragile. Bob was asleep now too, lying back in a chair. His breathing rattled in his chest. It was pitch-dark outside the windows. No. She wasn’t sure she could take care of anything at all; not really.

  She kept her eyes open. What was she going to do—really? She had only thought as far as getting Aidan out of town, if she was honest with herself.

  She could: go with Aidan to space.

  She could: run away to New York, to dance. Maybe go to Juilliard, and learn to do it professionally.

  She could: live in the wild with Bob and catch fish for every meal and sleep every night in the cabin, and cook everything with fire, for the rest of her life.

  She couldn’t: say goodbye to Aidan.

  But she couldn’t go back, either.

  She was trapped.

  Story of her life.

  She lay there a long time, looking at the whorls in the wood of the ceiling—spirals, galaxies, eyes.

  Then the noise outside—and she knew. Sound of footsteps on gravel. The men were coming for them, right now. Aidan’s eyes snapped open. They glittered in the half dark.

  Her gut feeling had been right. They’d stayed here too long.

  CHAPTER 35

  OUTSIDE, A TWIG snapped. The camp robber was chittering in alarm. It hadn’t done that when she and Bob and Aidan had arrived: it was as if it had concluded they were safe, that they would be at home here.

  It had been nice to have somewhere to feel at home.

  What wasn’t nice was the knowledge, in the dark, that the man, or men, had caught up with them. She looked at Aidan.

  “Lie still,” she whispered. “Don’t move.”

  Then Emily shook Bob’s shoulder, and he grunted.

  “Someone’s here,” she said.

  Just then there was a crunch outside: a boot on pebbles, perhaps.

  As Bob sat up, she pulled on her sweater. It was dark, but that didn’t mean much: seemed like it was dark in Alaska except when it was summer. She looked at her G-Shock: 1:00 a.m.

  She went over to the door and quietly lifted the assault rifle, thumbing off the safety. She debated opening the door. What if she did and died in a hail of bullets? On the other hand, if she waited, she was letting whoever was outside set the agenda. Her thoughts went sideswipe in her head: flick, flick, flick. Options. She could stand behind the door, ambush them—but that wouldn’t work if they tossed a smoke bomb or a flash grenade into the place.

  In the end, she opened the door in one swift movement and slipped outside, the cold threatening to seize up her lungs.

  She couldn’t see anyone.

  Then: a sound from over by the storage shed. The camp robber flew overhead and landed on the eaves of the cabin, chirruping loudly, head turning wildly from side to side.

  Emily held the gun ready to fire and inched around the frame of the cabin, toward the rear. She could hear someone…no, at least two people—their clothes rustling as they moved. Securing the perimeter, she figured.

  She had only one chance, and that was to take them by surprise.

  She took a deep breath, frosty air hurting her lungs, and stepped around the corner, barrel of the rifle in front of her. A man was turning away from the shed, a man in black tactical gear holding a gun, and she looked at him through the sight, aimed for his chest, and started to squeeze the—

  “Emily?” came her mother’s voice, from beside her.

  CHAPTER 36

  IT WAS TOO late not to pull the trigger. Emily yanked the gun up and to the left, and a burst of semiautomatic bullets fireworked up into the trees, glowing. The sound was colossal, shocking, a physical presence in the world. The figure in black in front of her dived to the ground and then rolled up onto all fours, tense, and was Emily’s father.

  She stared at him, her ears ringing.

  It wasn’t a gun, she realized—the thing he was holding. It was some kind of handheld GPS tracker, a grayscale map showing on it.

  He said something then. She didn’t hear the speech, but she saw the question mark in his frown and the set of his face.

  Emily shook her head, partly a vain and instinctive attempt to clear her ears, partly to say she couldn’t hear him. Her mother was standing to her right, dressed in warm outdoor gear, seemingly frozen in shock. Her pretty, lean face and graying hair, her green eyes and Bible-group smile, all of it so out of place, so…domestic. So familiar, amid the mountains and the burning helicopter and the death.

  Emily lowered the rifle and—always remembering the training she’d received from the man now standing in front of her—flicked the safety catch back on.

  As soon as the gun was down, her mom unfroze herself, came over to her, and hugged her; a little stiffly, a little awkwardly. “Oh, Emily,” she said.

  Surprised—her mother had never been a hugger—Emily tensed, then closed her eyes and relaxed.

  “Oh, Emily,” said her mom again; the sound coming through to Emil
y’s brain now, but distorted, as if the air were hardening in the Alaskan spring into something thicker, something more like ice. “We knew you’d moved from the crash site, so we hoped, but…”

  “You were looking for me?” Emily said. Her own voice was strange and deadened, filtered through bone.

  “Of course,” said her dad. He was breathing deeply, steadying himself—his body no doubt coursing with adrenaline after nearly getting shot. He was wearing a heavy backpack, and he rolled his shoulders and neck, relieving tension.

  “And Aidan,” said Emily. “Right?”

  “Who’s Aidan?” said her mother.

  A pause.

  Interesting, thought Emily eventually.

  Awful.

  Interesting and awful. But, of course, now she had to cover, explain herself, which was a whole other layer to the weirdness.

  “ ‘The man,’ I said,” Emily improvised. “The pilot, I mean.”

  It was not a good improvisation, but she was counting on her parents being slightly deafened by the gunfire too.

  “Oh, right, yeah,” said her dad. “He’s with you?”

  “Yes,” she said. A sudden horrible thought occurred to her: her dad, going after Bob for taking her away on the plane, abetting her, or whatever the police word was. She’d never known him to be violent, but he was trained, after all, had been in battles, lots of battles—he’d been Special Forces, and even now he couldn’t talk about some of the missions he’d been on. “He didn’t know,” she added hurriedly, “that we were on the plane. We…stowed away.”

  “ ‘We’?” said her dad, puzzled.

  “Me, I mean.”

  A pause. “I figured,” he said. “The manifest for the flight didn’t mention any passengers.” Another pause. He looked around—at the cabin, at the woods, at the lake. “You walked here?” he asked. “Last radar position was about fifteen miles that way.” He pointed, up where they had come down from.

  He was strong, her dad, like someone made partly of metal; someone partly engineered: cables in his forearms; girders in his neck when he turned it. The only weak thing about him was his shot knee, but, of course, that was the part he obsessed about. Always ordering different straps and elastic-bandage things, always trying to be invincible.

  Emily noticed, almost for the first time, it seemed, that there was gray in his military-short hair at the sides; fine lines around his mouth.

  “Most of the way,” said Emily. “We…sort of sledged downhill on the plane wing for part of it.”

  “Smart,” her dad said. “That’s my girl. Where did you get that assault rifle, though?”

  Emily glanced down at it. Think, Emily. “It was in the cabin,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “In a gun safe?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “Some of these hunters…,” he said.

  “Let’s just be glad she didn’t shoot you, Jake,” said Emily’s mom with a weak smile.

  “True,” he said. He smiled at Emily. “We’d better work on your aim under pressure,” he said, half joking. Then he seemed to hear himself. “I mean, glad you didn’t shoot me. But…if I had been a bad guy…Well. You’d have missed.”

  He stopped talking, like he could tell he was being weird. Emily felt weird too. The whole situation was weird. She’d been getting away from them—that was the point. Getting Aidan away from the men in black, mainly, of course—but also…

  Getting away from them.

  Except…

  Except a part of her was kind of glad to see them.

  A pause, as they all stood there in the light, cold breeze from the lake.

  Emily didn’t know what to do in this situation, how to be. What would happen when they saw Aidan? Would the memories just come back?

  Her mom turned to her eventually.

  “But, Emily,” she said. “Why did you run away? From home?” Her eyes glittered—the start of tears. “We thought you’d died, Ems. We knew you were on the plane, we found that out after they lost radar contact. Can you imagine? We thought you were gone.”

  “I…,” started Emily, but she couldn’t go on.

  “We can discuss all this later,” said Emily’s dad, skin taut around his mouth. “Let’s just make sure everyone is OK first.”

  Emily was looking at the tracker in her father’s hand. “You…followed the plane’s black box?”

  “Well, Bob Simpson’s SPOT tracker,” he said. “I got the serial number from the air operator.”

  Huh. She had been right. But now she thought: Where are the men in black, then? Or white. Why hadn’t they got here too?

  A thought occurred to her: a positive one, for once. What if the others—because there were presumably others, a whole office or section or brigade of them, or whatever the word was—what if they didn’t know that Emily and Aidan had got away? She had blown up the helicopter: What if it had held the satphone or radio or whatever they were using for communication?

  And what if the men—the men from the helicopter—had all died? What if that was all of them, the one she’d shot, maybe frozen up there because he hadn’t been able to walk…the one the avalanche hit…the one the bear knocked off the mountainside…

  The one flattened by the explosion.

  What if they were all dead, and no one had radioed for help, because of the helicopter going boom?

  If that was true, then the men back at base—if there was a base—might still be assuming that their helicopter-load of special operatives had got the prize. Or they might be looking for them, their signal having gone dead, but not sure where they were.

  It was something to hope for.

  Emily realized with a jolt that she’d never really thought they would make it to Anchorage, to send the signal, to get Aidan out of here, off this planet. Now a chink of hope shone through the darkness.

  “Earth to Emily,” said her mother.

  “Hmm?” she said.

  “You were away in space there,” said her dad.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. Away in space. Where Aidan should be. But instead he was inside the cabin. Sitting in there with Bob. Waiting. She glanced at the door. “You should come inside,” she said. “Where it’s warm.”

  For an hour, maybe, she was thinking—and then they would have to move on, because if the men weren’t all dead, they would surely catch up. How was she going to explain to her parents the need to keep going? To get to the research radio facility? She would have to think of something.

  Emily took her parents around to the door and knocked on it first.

  “It’s OK, Bob,” she called out. She had visions of opening the door and being brained by a frying pan or something. That was assuming the man could stand—he wasn’t doing well, and that was another thing she needed to work out and handle.

  She tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. She remembered there was a wooden beam that could be slotted across it on the inside to lock it.

  “Who was it? Out there? I heard gunshots.” Bob’s voice, from inside.

  “My parents,” she said.

  “What?”

  “They tracked the GPS signal.”

  “I…Wow.”

  “I told you they were outdoorsy,” she said.

  “No kidding.”

  Her mom was shivering slightly. Stars dusted the sky above.

  “Can you just open the door, Bob?” said Emily. “It’s not warm out here.”

  “Yes, of course. Sorry.”

  The door swung inward, and Emily went in, followed by her mom and dad.

  “Bob,” said her dad, nodding to the pilot, who was leaning on the door. His tone was as chilly as the air outside.

  “Mr. Perez.”

  “What happened to the De Havilland? How did you—” began Emily’s d
ad, but the question went uncompleted.

  Her little brother was sitting on the bed, in jeans and bare feet; the stove was still glowing. Emily had woken up twice in the night to feed it more wood.

  Aidan looked up.

  CHAPTER 37

  SOMETHING COMPLICATED HAPPENED to Emily’s mom’s face. A rearrangement. A recalibration. Then she gasped, ran over to Aidan, and went down on her knees, wrapping her arms around him. “Oh, my boy,” she said. “Oh, my boy.”

  Emily’s dad took a little longer. He did a strange thing—an almost robotic thing. His head leaned to one side, as if receiving new instructions, like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, and then snapped back upright.

  “Aidan,” he said, relief in it, and recognition too, and confusion, as if parts of his mind were processing different pieces of information.

  As if his brain knew two things at once, and only one of them could be true.

  “You’re OK!” said Emily’s mom, who was still hugging Aidan. “We’ve been looking for you all the time; we never should have let you out of our sight, we…” The rest was inaudible, her face buried in his hair.

  “He really OK?” said her dad, looking at Emily.

  Emily only nodded, still thrown by the reversal, from outside, when they hadn’t even recognized her brother’s name. Her dad walked over to him, mussed his hair, smiling.

  And, though she was only half willing to admit it to herself, she felt a pang of jealousy. She wanted it all: all their love; all their solicitude. Her dad had never mussed her hair.

  “We were so worried, we were so worried,” her mom was saying, like a mantra.

  “Lucky he had his big sister looking out for him,” said her dad. “Like she always has. Unlucky that she took him on that plane in the first place. That’s something we’re going to have to talk about. Something we don’t understand.”

  Emily watched her mother, rocking back and forth with a thing in her arms that she thought was her son—whom she hadn’t remembered only minutes before.

  Yes, she thought.

  Yes, there was quite a lot they didn’t understand.