The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: The Trade

He stood on the ice beside the float of my old plane, in his good parka, and waited for me to come to him.

I didn't.

I stopped at the edge of the shore, where the snow met the lake, and let him walk.

Behind me I heard snowmachines.

Then the base truck, and another, and boots crunching down the bank.

By the time my father reached the shore, half the Coldfoot pack was standing behind me in the gray light.

The cook. Gussie in her coveralls. The trapper on his machine with the engine still ticking.

The boy from the strip, in pajama pants and a parka.

Nobody had called them.

They'd heard a strange engine land on their lake, and they'd come.

My father looked at all of them.

Then at me.

"You look well," he said.

"I am well."

"You're thinner."

"I'm grounded. The cook is fixing that."

Somebody behind me snorted.

He shifted the logbook against his chest.

It was the old blue one. I could see the coffee ring on the cover from the morning I'd set my cup down on it at Prudhoe.

"Tennant Air is finished," he said. "By February."

I didn't answer.

"The Crewes pulled every High seat contract the week you walked. Mail, freight, the Juneau runs. Elden says he can't be seen paying a family with a rogue in it."

"I'm not in it."

"He says that too."

He looked down at the logbook.

"The fuel company wants cash now. The hired man has dented both floats and a wingtip. The Kenai lodges went to another outfit."

"I know. I'd have told you they would."

"I know you would."

He said it quietly, and for a second he sounded like the man who'd put my hand on a yoke when I was nine.

Then he held out the logbook.

Not to me. Toward me. It stopped in the air between us.

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