What They Were Looking For
Mia put the plane down on a flat strip of sand between two low hills. It was not a landing anyone would call good, but the wheels held and nobody was hurt. Sam sat with his hands flat on his knees for a long minute before he could speak.
“The radio,” he said.
“Dead since the engine,” Mia said. She was already climbing out. “But they've got our route. They'll come.”
The impact had pushed the left wheel deep into the sand, and the plane sat with one wing low. By noon the heat inside the cabin was extreme, so they sat in the thin shadow under the high wing and drank half a bottle of water each. Four bottles left. A bag of dried fruit. A small signal mirror that Mia had carried for eleven years and never once used.
At two o'clock Sam stood up.
“There's a road,” he said. “I saw it before we came down. Ten kilometers north, maybe less.”
Mia didn't look up. “From two thousand feet, everything is ten kilometers.”
“So we just sit here.”
“So we just sit here.”
He walked anyway. He got about fifteen minutes out before he turned around, and what turned him around was the view behind him: the plane, white and completely the wrong color against all that sand, visible from anywhere. He was already hard to see. The plane never would be.
The helicopter came at ten past five, low and unbelievably noisy, and it came from the wrong direction entirely. Mia was on her feet with the mirror before Sam had worked out what the sound was.
Later, in the back of it, he asked the man beside him how they had found them so fast.
“We weren't looking for you,” the man said. “You can't see two people from up there. We were looking for the plane.”
Mia was watching the desert go past the window, and she didn't say anything at all, which Sam thought was extremely generous of her.