The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: Midwinter Eve

Gussie stopped the file.

The kitchen was so quiet I could hear the stove tick.

"Play it again," Warrick said.

She played it again.

My voice came six seconds after his.

I'd been reading out my position while his father flew into the rock.

"I was on the base radio," Gussie said slowly. "I heard Dad. I never heard Elden. I never heard you."

"We were low on the far side of the ridge," I said. "Base couldn't hear us. Only his plane could."

"So this puts you in the pass," Annalise said.

"It puts Seven-Kilo in the pass at two-fourteen, with Elden's voice on her radio."

"And Elden in your right seat."

"Which only my logbook says," I said. "And Dad has the logbook."

If we played this in that hall, Elden would stand up and point at me.

The Tennant pilot on the tape. The unbound one, who walked out on her family.

Warrick got up and went to the window.

He stood with his back to us a long time.

Then he came back and put his hand flat over mine on the table.

"He hummed," he said. "When the weather was good, he hummed. I'd forgotten that."

I turned my hand over and held his.

Gussie copied the file onto three phones and two thumb drives.

Annalise sewed the card into the lining of her parka with the cook's needle, in tiny stitches.

On Sunday the twentieth we flew south in the dark.

Ten of us in the Otter: Warrick, Gussie, Annalise, the cook, the trapper, the far-camp father, and four from the camps.

The other twenty had taken the jet out of Fairbanks the day before, on the coffee-can money.

The boy from the strip tried to come in a duffel bag.

The cook found him by the third zipper.

Gussie flew.

I sat right seat with my hands under my thighs for six hours, which nearly killed me.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Nameless Luna from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.