Farid dragged me to the exit, his fingers still hard as iron against the skin of my arm. The air outside was warm and humid. I had entered here through the finger dock, but now there was a ten-foot drop to the gray water below.

Adriana was still back there.

He pulled the toggle on my vest. Its angry hiss filled my ears as it inflated, enclosing my neck and making it impossible to look back.

"Ready?" he asked.

In my mind, Adriana's eyes still stared at me.

"But, that woman—"

A shove in my back made me fall forward. I lost contact with the plane, and warm water splashed into my face. It burned in the wound at the top of my head. I swallowed some of it, its salty taste making me gag. The vest pulled me up, and I resurfaced.

What went through the flight attendant's mind as she was submerged and realized I wasn't going to rescue her? How did it feel when water entered your lungs?

"Come," Farid said, treading water at my side. "We need to get away from that thing."

What did she think when we abandoned her?

Quick strokes carried Farid away from me. I followed. He was making for a yellow, inflatable raft with some people on it.

When I reached it, I grasped a handle at its side. I didn't have the strength to climb, so I just held on to it.

A metallic creak made me turn my head to see the plane. Only its tail fin and part of the forward hull remained above the waterline, the parts connecting them hid below the waves.

The craft was a whale, heading for the deep—with death in its belly. Yet, in contrast to a whale, it sank tail first.

A flurry of raindrops struck the sea and hammered my hurting head.

The tail sank deeper. The front end was still afloat.

"An airplane shouldn't sink so quickly," a man said. "What's going on here?"

"Sucks," someone answered.

The tail fin sunk away.

Air, smoke, and spray escaped through the front exit with a wail—the plaintive cry of a creature about to seek out its last resting place.

Then it sank, exhaling its last bubbles and taking its ghastly freight with it.

Adriana was one of them. How many others were still in there? How many didn't make it?

"Merde." A man's voice.

The French swearing was followed by silence. The only sound was the splatter of raindrops hitting water and the near-silent sobbing of a woman lying on the raft, a few yards away from me. The sea's undulating surface was pockmarked by their impact, all the way to where it merged with the gray of the rain-logged, hazy atmosphere.

"Bruna?" Farid had clambered onto the raft and crawled its length to the other end. The red-haired woman who had made the scene in the aircraft was lying there on the yellow plastic. Another woman with a long, dark braid was kneeling at her side and looked at her legs. Bruna groaned when she touched her.

For a moment, or for hours, no one said anything. I was still afloat in the water, one hand grabbing the rim of the raft.

"What's the plan now, pilot?" A familiar voice interrupted the mute shock. It was the lavatory seeker. His stare was focused on a black woman wearing the airline's uniform.

"I'm not the pilot. He's dead... After having saved our sorry asses." She swallowed. "I'm the co-pilot."

"I see," he said. "So, what's the plan now, co-pilot?"

"We wait." She shrugged. "We're supposed to stay at the site of the crash. That's the most likely place where they'll be looking for us."

"Do they know where we crashed?"

"I dunno," the co-pilot said. "We lost contact when the engines failed. Everything went dead then. All electronics, it was weird. George... he's the pilot, he went into a glide. We changed course towards the nearest airport, Guam. He was trying to restart the engines. He's... he was a wizard with this stuff, but it didn't work. And then, there was the explosion, right before the crash."

She shook her head, her dark, wet hair covering one of her eyes.

"So," lavatory-man said, "you lost contact, then you changed course, glided into a cover of clouds, sailed some hundred miles, and managed to explode the plane. Do we have a radio on this... ship?" He gestured at the raft, which was quite a featureless body of inflated, yellow plastic about a man wide and much longer.

"No. It's just an evacuation slide."

Sick of the guy's ranting and everyone just staring at him, I seized a loop on the raft's top and pulled, the effort making my head pound. Someone grabbed my belt and helped me out of the water.

"Thanks."

The young man who had given me a hand looked at my hairline and frowned. "Are you okay?"

I wiped my brow. My fingers came away bloodied. I touched my scalp—my hair was wet. I didn't know if it was water or blood, but my exploring hand found a major bruise along the top of my skull.

I shrugged.

"So, no one else knows where we are. And we're waiting for them to find us." The lavatory-man's voice dripped with sarcasm. He was still facing the co-pilot.

"Do you have a better idea, mister...?" she asked.

"I'm Chris," he replied. "How far is it to Guam?"

"More than a hundred miles, at least. But there are a couple of islands towards the south of here; they're closer."

"How close?"

"How should I know?" she yelled, then she took a deep breath. "Some miles, maybe?"

He eyed the rain-shrouded seascape and the gray of the sky. "And where's south... maybe?"

"Look, man, we were kind of busy in that cockpit. We tried to bring the aircraft down without killing us all. There wasn't enough time to study maps after that explosion."

"It is there." The young man who had pulled me from the water held a phone in his left hand. His other arm pointed in a direction to the right of me. "South." He wore a red shirt and spoke with a thick French accent.

"Does your phone have a map?" Chris asked. He reached for the device.

The French guy pulled it away. "No. I don't have reception here. Just a compass."

"So we go south then," Chris said. "That's a plan, at least." He looked at the co-pilot. "Does this thing have paddles?"

"No," she replied. "As I said, it's an evacuation slide. It's not a rowboat. And we're supposed to stay at the site of the crash."

"Yeah," he nodded. "Right beside the wreck, correct?" He pointed at the featureless surface of the water where there was no trace of the airplane except dispersing debris. "I say we use what little strength we have to get closer to an island. Right?" He looked at the others, who just stared back at him, and then at the co-pilot.

She looked at the crash site, her lips a thin line. "It probably doesn't matter." She shrugged.

"Okay," he replied. "Let's use our hands."

~~~

There were seven of us on the raft.

Farid sat beside Bruna. The woman with the braid was with them. She looked like an Indian or Pakistani to me. Bruna had stopped her moaning. I craned my neck to check on her, but a bolting headache stopped me.

The rest of us paddled—Lavatory-man Chris, the co-pilot, the French guy with the phone, and myself.

I doubted that we made much progress against the wind coming against us from the south.

We swapped names, all except Bruna, who seemed to have lost consciuosness.

I didn't say much, except giving them a "Megan" when they asked for mine.

The French guy's name was Yves.

They talked, but I didn't listen. The throbbing in my head was trying to make my skull explode. And the constant, unsteady bobbing of the raft made knots in my stomach. The memory of Adriana's eyes didn't help matters.

Someone touched my shoulder.

"You don't look good," Yves said, his dark eyebrows knotted. He was paddling beside me. "You are white in the face."

I just nodded and dipped my hand in the water.

At least, the rain had stopped. Ahead, the air had cleared, and a shaft of bright sunlight had torn a rift through the clouds. Where it touched the water, it became a pool of liquid gold. And right at the fringe of that dazzling spot of light, there was something else.

Something that wasn't water.