LITMIR.BIZ

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was to fly straight through it.

      At which point Marco should have radioed back to Tahiti with his position and begged feverishly for help or at the very least advice—a precautionary measure he refused to take. After having lost two decent pilot gigs and a wife to the good folks at Tanduay, he was in no hurry to lose anything else. No, he could make it, he told himself in Chavacano, the Castilian-inflected dialect of his native Zamboanga back in the Philippines. A few bumpy minutes would pass, and then they would burst triumphantly on through to clear, sunny skies. It simply had to be so.

      And the truly amazing part—Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado’s plan went almost exactly as planned. He shouted back to his three passengers that there would be some turbulence ahead and that they ought to fasten their seat belts. He bit his lip and righted the stick. He muttered a quick prayer to the benevolent Pilar, patron saint of Zamboanga, whose beatific face graced a paper card he had taped to the dashboard, and he plunged the little craft headfirst into the storm.

      Oh, it was bumpy all right. A series of nauseating dips and teeth-grating climbs, shaking that nearly wrenched the shoulders. Some of the overhead luggage spilled out of the compartments; a bag of contact lens supplies skittered down the aisle. The French girl hid her head in her husband’s shoulder, and the American in the strange office clothes turned a legitimate shade of maritime green. “Por favor, Pilar,” Marco muttered aloud in his desperate Chavacano. “Grant me this one favor, and I will give up drinking for good—I’ll be a better person, I’ll even try to get my wife back. I’ll never touch the bottle again.” And it appeared that the forgiving Pilar actually listened; up ahead, a break appeared in the clouds. The fierce bumps shrank to gentle nudges. A great wash of apricot sunlight illuminated the path that had been laid out before them. “Ay, gracias, Pilar. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” In fact, so grateful was Marco, he decided right then and there to honor her kindness with a fresh bottle of Tanduay as soon as he got—

      And then the lightning struck. Like a megawatt hand swatting an escaping fly, that great arc of electricity reached out from the storm clouds just as Marco, Étienne, Sophie, and Barry were on the verge of leaving them behind forever. They had almost cleared their pitch-black hurdle and made the lemon-drop safety of the open sky beyond—almost, but not quite. The bolt deafened all aboard for a bright white moment and left a taste like tinfoil ringing in their mouths. When the electric fog cleared, Marco, Étienne, Sophie, and Barry all came to the horrifying realization that not only was the plane’s single engine aflame and its radio circuitry kaput, but they were also pitched and falling at a death-dealing angle. And to make matters worse, the bolt’s electric fangs had taken a smoldering bite of the plane’s left wing. No gentle glides, no stone-skip landings. Instead, the most horrific, spiraling, downward trajectory a human being can imagine, with nothing but a carbon-hard sea rising to meet them and a fading drone to serve as their dirge.

      Sadly, Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado died upon impact. The sheer force of the collision between plane and sea ripped his seat from the floor and crushed his body against the dashboard. His corpse was thrown in the tumult far from the rest of the wreckage, where it sank beneath the waves and into Pilar’s benevolent embrace.

      Étienne was the unfortunate recipient of the twisted steel bottom of the pilot’s seat—when it pitched forward, it also scythed upward, nearly severing one of his legs and gouging out a chunk of his side.

      Sophie was spared a similar fate by inches; the same jagged steel that cut through his organs only narrowly missed her throat. She suffered a mild concussion, and somehow lost her shirt, but was relatively unhurt when her mortally wounded Étienne unbuckled his belt and tumbled forward into the water. She went in after him, screaming his name.

      As for Barry, he and his seat had both been sucked backward when the plane’s tail exploded around him. He was treated to a series of disorienting reverse somersaults through the water before he regained some sense of up, unlatched his seat belt, and began swimming toward it.

      None of this should be especially surprising given what has already been disclosed about Barry and Sophie’s predicament. But it does explain why the rescue that they craved was at first slow—and then utterly absent—in coming. Marco, in his poor and Tanduay-warped judgment, had piloted them almost three hundred miles off course in his vain attempt at besting the storm.

      And nobody—barring Barry, Sophie, and the benevolent Pilar, patron saint of Zamboanga—had the slightest inkling of this fact.

9

      “Ouch, hold up a second.”

      “Merde, what is it now?”

      “I stepped on a piece of shell.”

      Barry executed a few hops on one foot to extract the sharp little shard of conch from his heel.

      “Are you ready?” Sophie asked with more than a hint of annoyance.

      Barry took a few limping steps. “I think it went pretty deep.”

      Sophie did another one of her exasperated exhales through pursed lips. “Putain,” she muttered as, glazed in sweat (it was significantly warmer on this day), she undid a few buttons of the borrowed shirt. “By the way, why were you dressed like this? These are office clothes. You looked ridiculous back at the airport.”

      Barry sat in the sand to take a closer look at his foot. “I know, I came straight from the office.”

      “You left for Tahiti from your office and didn’t change your clothes?”

      Barry shrugged. “It was my last day of work, and I didn’t feel like going back to my apartment.”

      “So you went directly to the airport?”

      “Yeah, pretty much. I’d bought the tickets the week before, but I jumped in a cab and went straight from work.”

      Sophie mumbled something derogatory about Americans and bloused out the shirt with her fingers to let some of the heat escape. “Well, it’s absurd, wearing a shirt like this on vacation.”

      “I’m not wearing it, you are. And you’re welcome to give it back anytime you like.”

      Sophie snorted. “Of course not. You will stare at my breasts.”

      “What?” Barry snorted as well, and punctuated it with a laugh. “You actually think your tits are on my mind at the moment?”

      Sophie shrugged, the same forcedly indifferent shrug she had mastered back at the cafés of the tenth when one of her friends confessed to an affair, or being in love with her psychiatrist, or having eaten an entire Saint Honoré all by herself. “Why not? You’re a man, non? Unless women don’t interest you.”

      “Yes, women interest me,” Barry replied, both his foot and his pride momentarily wounded.

      “There, you see? I keep the shirt. Merci beaucoup.”

      Sophie plodded off defiantly across the sand, and Barry, having the courtesy to at least wait until she was out of earshot, muttered something derogatory about the French and ill-tempered women both. He rose to his feet, though, and hobbled after her, having realized as soon as she escaped his view that it was better to be in the company of an “uppity French bitch” than to be shirtless and hopeless and utterly alone. Plus, there was a raft, possibly stocked with freeze-dried astronaut ice cream, waiting just past the sun-drenched palms.

      When the bright orange rubber of the raft came into sight, Sophie was already crouched over it, undoing the fastenings on a waterproof satchel. Barry approached and knelt beside her.

      “This is it?”

      “Oui. This is the kit.”

      “What’s inside it?”

      “I’m in the process of finding out. And the raft still works. I checked. It deflated because the plug came loose, not because it had a hole.”

      “Well, that’s good

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