Chapter Text
SHE GASPED FIRST.
It was not a graceful thing, not the soft intake of a waking sleeper, but a tearing breath that clawed its way down her throat and burned there. Dust scraped against her tongue. Her chest hitched, seized, and then she coughed — once, twice, a raw and scraping sound that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than her lungs, as though her body itself were trying to rid itself of whatever ruin it had swallowed.
The world did not return to her all at once. It bled in slowly, as if reluctant.
At first there was only blur : light and shadow smeared together like wet paint dragged by careless hands. No edges or shapes. Just a pale brightness pressing down on her closed lids and a dim, shifting darkness beyond it. Sound came next.... Or rather, one sound: the ringing. It filled her skull entirely, a high, merciless peal that left no room for anything else. It was as though unseen drummers had taken up their mallets and begun beating against the inside of her bones, slow and relentless. She wondered, distantly, if this was what it felt like to have one's head cracked open and still be forced to listen to the echo.
Beneath the ringing, she could just make out her own breathing — thin, shallow pulls of air that rasped in and out of her chest. Too slow, and labored. She tried to swallow and found her throat dry as old parchment. A small sound escaped her lips, something that might have been a moan, though she did not hear it herself. The ringing swallowed it whole.
She tried to move.
Nothing answered.
Panic stirred at once, quick and bright as a struck match. She willed her arm to lift. It did not. She told her legs to bend. They lay as heavy and distant as if they belonged to some other body entirely. For one moment she knew, knew with a cold and terrible certainty, that she had been broken beyond repair.
Paralyzed, she thought.
The word settled over her like a shroud.
Her mind skittered uselessly against the thought, recoiling from it even as it circled back again and again. Paralyzed. The ringing grew louder, or perhaps it was only that her fear hardened it. She forced her eyes shut, though she could not recall opening them. Think, she commanded herself. Think clearly. Panic would kill her faster than any injury.
Assessment first... Always assess.... Start small... Confirm function.... Confirm sensation...
Her fingers.
She focused all that she had into the tips of her right hand. Move, she begged them silently. Move.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then, faint as the twitch of a dying ember, she felt it: the slightest curl of her index finger. Another. It was clumsy, delayed, but it was movement. She repeated the command, and this time the response came quicker. Her fingers bent and unbent, stiff and unsteady but unmistakably hers.
Relief did not come as a rush. It crept in slowly, cautious as a stray dog.
Her toes next.
She strained toward them, reaching down the length of her own body with her mind. The distance felt impossibly vast. Move, please, move. There — her left foot answered first, a weak flex, then the right. Not graceful or strong, but alive.
A breath shuddered out of her that might have been a laugh if it had not caught halfway to becoming a sob.
Good, she thought, the word thin and brittle as spun glass. At least I didn't lose my limbs.
Lose them?
The thought struck her as strange even as it formed. Why would I have lost, and then the darkness shifted.
Memory did not return gently. It came in shards.
The ground trembling, a deafening crack that split the air. The sensation of falling — no, not falling, being swallowed. Weight pressing from every side, the taste of earth in her mouth, the scream she had meant to release but never heard.
Buried.
Her eyes flew open fully now, though they protested at once, the sun hung above her, pitiless and bright, a white blaze that turned her vision to molten gold, tears welled instantly, spilling sideways into her hair. She blinked furiously against the glare, and the blur began, at last, to thin.
Shapes emerged, jagged outlines, trim of broken earth framing a patch of sky. Clods of dirt scattered across her chest. She tried to lift her head and pain answered, sharp and immediate, lancing through her temple and down the back of her neck. The world tilted sickeningly. She stilled herself at once, breathing through her teeth.
Not paralyzed, and not dead... but half-buried beneath a fallen skin of earth and stone, blinking up at an indifferent sky while the ringing in her ears tolled on like distant funeral bells, reminding her how very close she had come.
The sky above her wavered, pale and pitiless, framed by a jagged crown of broken earth. For a moment she could only lie there and stare at it, as if the simple fact of seeing blue and green meant she had not yet crossed into whatever lay beyond.
The ringing began at last to lose its dominion over her senses. What had been a deafening peal ebbed into a thin, needling whine, clinging stubbornly to the farthest edges of her hearing like the dying echo of a struck bell. In the hush it left behind, other sounds crept forward — small, furtive, and altogether more menacing for their softness.
There was the faint trickle of earth slipping near her shoulder, grains of dirt whispering against one another as they shifted and resettled. A loose scattering of stones pattered down into the hollow that had nearly claimed her, each tiny impact loud in its quiet insistence. Beyond that, life went on with a kind of careless audacity. Birds called to one another in bright, lilting notes (mockingbirds among them, bold and tireless) flitting unseen through the canopy.
The trees answered with a long, dry sigh, their branches stretching and swaying beneath a sky too blue, too wide, too blindingly sunlit to bear witness to anything so small as her suffering.
And beneath it all, was the thunder of her own heart — pounding far too fast, far too hard, as though it meant to hammer its way through bone and flesh and flee this broken body altogether.
Don't thrash, she told herself. Don't panic... just assess.
Her chest rose and fell without resistance. No stabbing agony in her ribs, no wet rattle in her lungs. She flexed her fingers again, slower this time, and felt the grit grinding between skin and soil. Her right arm lay half-free along her side, dusted in earth, the sleeve torn at the elbow. The left was pinned to the wrist beneath a weight she dared not yet test.
Her legs were worse.
She could feel them (blessedly, she could feel them) but they were trapped from the thighs down, swallowed by packed dirt and scattered stone. Not crushed, not numb. Just held fast, as if the earth itself had decided to keep her.
Careful, she thought.
She turned her head an inch to the right. The motion sent a bright spike of pain through her skull, and black crept into the corners of her vision. She paused, counted her breaths, waited for the darkness to retreat. When it did, she tried again, slower.
The hollow around her was shallow but treacherous.
No voices, footsteps, or frantic shouting her name.... A new fear coiled in her stomach, colder than the first. Was she alone?
Her throat tightened.
Focus, Annie, she thought. Fucking focus, for God's sake.
The words were harsh enough to sting, but they steadied her more than any gentler comfort might have. She dug her fingers into the dirt and, with a slow and trembling effort, forced herself upright. The world tilted violently in protest. The ground seemed to lurch sideways, dragging the horizon with it, and for one sickening instant she thought she might pitch forward into the earth again. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathed once, twice, then blinked until the spinning lessened to a dull sway.
When her vision cleared, she saw it at last : a forest.
Not the sparse stretch of trees she might have expected near an airfield, nor the thin, scraggly growth along some roadside, but a dense wall of green rising on all sides. Branches tangled thickly overhead, leaves flashing in the relentless sunlight. The air shimmered faintly with heat. Everything was too alive, too vibrant. The green seemed almost cruel in its abundance.
Her throat burned.
She swallowed and immediately regretted it. The motion scraped like sandpaper, leaving her craving water with a desperation that bordered on madness. The mere thought of it (cool, clear water sliding down her throat) made her mouth ache. Oh, how she wanted water. Just a sip, just enough to quiet the fire inside her.
She turned slowly, scanning the clearing as memory pressed in again, harder this time.
A plane.
Cassandra.
Scotland.
The recollection came in jagged fragments. The hum of the engines, the seatbelt digging into her lap. Cassandra's voice — laughing, maybe? Or arguing? Then the jolt. A tremor that had rippled through the cabin, subtle at first. The way people had glanced up, uneasy but not yet afraid. The explosion of sound.
The side of the plane tearing open like a tin can under a blade. Wind screaming through the cabin. Bodies ripped from their seats as if plucked by an invisible hand. Oxygen masks dancing uselessly in the chaos. Someone praying, someone else screaming.
And then — "Help!"
The word tore out of her before she could stop it.
She froze, breath hitching, as though startled by the sound of her own voice. It echoed thinly into the trees and died there.
"Somebody help me, please!" she screamed again, louder this time, the plea ripping at her raw throat.
The effort cost her dearly. Her voice cracked and dragged, hoarse and unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone else entirely. It did not carry the way she wanted it to. It sounded small, fragile... mad, even.
She looked around wildly, aware of how she must appear : dust-streaked, wide-eyed reddened, half-buried moments ago and now clawing at the air like some deranged animal dragged from a trap.
No answer came, no returning shout, no crashing through underbrush, no human sound at all. Only the sigh of leaves and the distant chatter of birds. Her breath quickened again as she scanned the clearing more carefully.
Where were the others? Where was the wreckage?
There should have been debris scattered for miles : jagged metal torn like paper, luggage burst open across the earth, the acrid stench of fuel and smoke hanging thick in the air. There should have been fire, there should have been ruin! But no, there was simply ... nothing.
No twisted wing half-buried in soil, no smoldering fuselage, not even the faintest trace of burned earth. Just fucking grass and trees. Sunlight filtering through a canopy too serene for what she remembered.
Her stomach twisted. Now that she truly thought about it — where were the bodies? The survivors? The cries?
There was no smell of smoke. No heat beyond the honest blaze of the sun, or distant crackle of flame. Nothing but greenery. A thin thread of hysteria tugged at the edges of her thoughts. Was she losing her mind? Had she imagined it? No — no, she could still hear the tearing metal, still see the cabin splitting open.
Her brain, desperate for order, began assembling explanations.
Maybe she'd been thrown clear.
Catapulted from the wreckage when the hull ruptured. It wasn't impossible. The force had been unimaginable. Perhaps the main body of the plane had gone down somewhere else—miles away, even. Perhaps the others were together, injured but alive, waiting.
Yes. Yes, that made sense.
The gale had taken her, flung her like debris. The other survivors would be elsewhere — near the fuselage, where the worst of it lay. That was the most logical explanation... it had to be.
She clung to that thought as though it were a lifeline, because the alternative (that she was alone in a forest that bore no scar of the disaster she remembered) was too terrible to name.
"Can somebody hear me?!" she screamed again.
She staggered forward as she did, her foot catching on a root hidden beneath the grass. She lurched into the nearest tree, bark scraping her palm as she steadied herself against it. The forest answered her not with rescue, but with the startled flutter of wings. Birds burst from the branches overhead in a flurry of indignant cries, circling once before settling again, as if she were nothing more than some noisy intruder in their quiet dominion.
No human voice replied or crash of boots through brush.
Only the restless murmur of leaves and the distant, indifferent song of mockingbirds.
She swallowed hard.
Don't move too far, her mind warned her, clinging desperately to reason. Rescue would come. It had to. A plane crash would not go unnoticed. There would be search teams, ambulances, helicopters scouring the area. The sensible thing—the safe thing—was to stay where she was. Injured survivors who wandered off were the ones they found too late. She had read the case studies. She had lectured on them.
Stay put, stay visible... Conserve energy.
Someone would stumble upon her. Yes, they would.
She sagged back against the tree, its trunk rough and unyielding against her spine. The moment her weight settled, a blinding pain exploded through her shoulder. She cried out, the sound smaller this time, strangled. Her hand flew instinctively to the source.
Her jacket felt wrong beneath her fingers. Wet and sticky. She pulled her hand away and stared : blood. Not a smear, not a shallow scrape. Her palm was slick with it, dark and gleaming in the sunlight.
Her breath hitched. Slowly, too slowly, she shrugged the jacket off her shoulder, fabric dragging against whatever lay beneath. The movement sent a bolt of agony through her arm, white-hot and merciless. Spots burst across her vision.
Careful, Annie. Careful.
She peeled the fabric back enough to see, and there it was.
A shard of metal jutted from her shoulder, cruel and obscene in its precision. Not large, but buried deep enough that only a jagged edge remained visible, catching the light. Torn flesh puckered around it, blood welling steadily from the wound and soaking into the cloth she had worn.
She could only stare.
Then the training took over : assess. Control bleeding. Do not remove embedded objects in the field unless absolutely necessary. Risk of hemorrhage. Risk of shock.
She forced herself to breathe through the pain, the shard was likely part of the fuselage — shrapnel thrown free when the plane tore open. It had entered cleanly enough. That was something. No obvious arterial spray, and the bleeding was steady but not pulsing.
If she pulled it out, she could tear whatever fragile clotting had begun. She could bleed out within minutes.
You are a surgeon, she reminded herself. Act like one.
Her fingers trembled despite the command.
She pressed the heel of her hand gently around the wound, applying cautious pressure without disturbing the metal. The pain made her jaw clench so hard her teeth ached, her arm felt heavy, weaker than it should. Blood loss had already begun to take its toll.
"I'm not taking it out," she muttered hoarsely to herself, as though saying it aloud would anchor the decision. "Not here, certainly not fucking now."
She needed compression. Fabric, something to stabilize it.
Her eyes scanned the clearing again, slower this time, more clinical despite the haze pressing at the edges of her mind. No supplies, not even luggage. No medical kit fallen miraculously at her feet, either.
She leaned her forehead briefly against the bark, its cool roughness grounding her.
Stay calm. Slow the bleeding. Wait for rescue.
Because rescue would come...It had to.
𓅹
They didn't.
She waited four hours — she knew because her watch, cracked clean across the glass but stubbornly still ticking, told her so. The spiderweb fracture split the face diagonally, distorting the numbers beneath, yet the second hand kept its faithful march. Four hours of listening. Four hours of flinching at every rustle, every shift of shadow, every imagined echo of rotors in the sky.
No sirens, no voices or rescue. Fucking nothing.
She wanted to cry, to toss to beg, but she reminded herself to keep her energy.
The sun had begun its slow descent while she waited, dragging the light down with it, stretching the shadows long and thin across the forest floor. With every passing minute her throat grew tighter, drier, the inside of her mouth thick as cloth. Her tongue felt swollen. Each swallow was a punishment.
She needed water. Not in an hour, not eventually but now.
If she stayed, she would dehydrate. The blood loss from her shoulder had already left her lightheaded, her movements dulled at the edges. She could feel the faint tremor in her hands when she held them up. If she waited much longer, she would simply collapse where she sat—and this time, she might not wake again.
So she walked and walked, and walked.
At first it was slow and uncertain, she tore a strip from the lining of her jacket and fashioned a crude compression bandage around the embedded shard, binding it tightly enough to slow the bleeding without disturbing the metal. The effort left her breathless.
She chose a direction at random, for there was no sense to be made of the forest, and set one trembling foot before the other. It was walking or lying down to die, and she had not yet given herself over to dying.
Every step jarred her. Her shoulder burned where it had been torn from its proper place, hanging stiff and wrong beneath her tunic, every swing of her arm a fresh blade of pain. Her head swam sickeningly. A slow, heavy pounding throbbed behind her eyes, thick as a drumbeat at an execution. She touched her brow once and her fingers came away tacky; the blood there had dried to a dark crust, pulling at her skin. When she blinked, the world tilted. The trees seemed to lean in close, their black branches tangled like grasping hands.
Her ribs ached when she drew breath. Her knees threatened to fold. There was not a part of her that did not hurt. Even her bones felt bruised, as though she had been beaten with stones and left for carrion.
She was supposed to be in a hospital bed right now, under bright lights and clean sheets, not stumbling through a dark, whispering forest that felt far too alive.
The forest seemed endless.
Every direction looked the same : walls of green, trunks rising like pillars into a canopy that swallowed the sky. The deeper she walked, the more the world behind her felt distant, as though the path she had taken had already vanished.
She tried to remember the things her father used to tell her during their camping trips. His voice echoed faintly in her mind : always look around you. Listen to the forest. Be careful what you touch, what you eat.
He had always pointed things out as they walked — different sounds, different birds, which berries were safe and which ones would make you sick. At the time she had only half listened, more interested in wandering ahead or complaining about the bugs.
Now she wished she had listened better.
She slowed her steps, eyes moving constantly, trying to notice the small things the way he had taught her : the rustle of leaves, the shift of shadows, the distant cry of something unseen deeper in the trees.
After a while she stopped. Not because she had heard something threatening, but because a strange thought crossed her mind. Just curiosity, really.
Her lips were dry, cracked from hours of walking and breathing the heavy forest air. She pressed them together, wetting them slightly with her tongue before letting out a soft whistle, a small tune she remembered hearing earlier among the branches.
For a moment there was silence. She wanted a second or two, then the forest answered. From somewhere above, mockingbirds echoed the exact same melody back to her, repeating the tune as though mocking her attempt.
She blinked up toward the branches, startled despite herself. Then she shook her head lightly and continued walking. At least she wasn't dreaming.
As she moved forward again, she found herself whispering her own name under her breath. Over and over. Not loudly, but just enough to hear it. Almost as if she was afraid that, surrounded by so much endless green, she might somehow forget it.
By the time the last light bled fully from the sky, she was still moving. Dusk swallowed the greens and golds of the woods, replacing them with deep blues and charcoal shadows. The trees, which had looked merely dense by day, now loomed like silent sentinels. Branches twisted into unfamiliar shapes. Every snapped twig beneath her boot sounded too loud.
Night made everything worse. Her thoughts turned darker with it.
What if animals found her first?
The idea crept in uninvited. Wolves, perhaps — though she had no proof there were any here. She pictured them slipping between the trees, lean and patient, yellow eyes catching what little light remained. They would smell the blood on her. They would follow.
They would eat her flesh and be done with it.
A grim, detached part of her wondered if that might be the cleaner end. Quick. Natural. No thirst, no slow fading into delirium.
She gave a weak, breathless scoff at herself.
"Get a grip," she muttered, though her voice barely carried beyond her own ears. "Suicidal thoughts are not on the menu right now."
Yes, she may talk to herself, but she was still thinking, still reasoning... that mattered, right?
Gone were the bright, careless songs of daytime birds. In their place came the low, haunting calls of owls. The sound drifted through the trees in long, hollow notes that made the forest feel deeper, older. Something skittered in the underbrush to her left and she nearly stumbled in her haste to turn toward it, heart slamming violently against her ribs.
Nothing revealed itself.
Only darkness.
She lifted her gaze toward the narrow strips of sky visible through the canopy. A scatter of stars had begun to appear, faint but steady.
Was she even in Scotland?
The question struck her suddenly, disorienting in its simplicity. They had been flying there. She remembered that much. But after the rupture, after the fall, what direction had they been traveling? How long had the chaos lasted? Could the plane have veered? Could they have crossed back over water?
Was she somewhere in Scotland's highlands? Or stranded in the middle of England?
So far she had seen no roads. No distant glow of a town on the horizon, no fence lines, no power lines cutting through the trees. Nothing to hint at civilization.
Just forest. Endless forest.
Her legs trembled more noticeably now. Each step sent a dull throb up through her calves and into her hips. The weight of fatigue settled heavily across her shoulders, competing with the sharper pain of the embedded shard. Her head swam faintly, thoughts drifting for half-seconds at a time before she dragged them back.
Water, she reminded herself. Find water.
Running water meant people, eventually. Rivers led somewhere. Streams carved paths toward civilization. That was survival 101. Even she knew that.
She paused, closing her eyes despite the risk of losing balance, and tried to listen past the pounding in her skull.
Owls. Wind in leaves.
The soft rasp of her own breathing, no trickle of a stream, not yet.
She opened her eyes again and kept walking into the dark, every step an act of stubborn defiance against the quiet certainty creeping at the edges of her mind — that something about this place was wrong, and that rescue, if it had been coming at all, was no longer on its way.
She did not know how long she walked after that.
Time had become a shapeless thing, measured only in heartbeats and the dragging protest of her legs. The forest floor dipped gradually, so subtly she did not notice at first. The ground softened beneath her boots. The air shifted, too — cooler somehow, carrying a dampness that had not been there before.
She stopped, and held her breath.
There. Faint, almost imagined. A murmur beneath the owl calls. A low, continuous hush that did not belong to wind or leaves.
Water.
Her pulse quickened, a fragile flare of hope that felt almost dangerous. She turned slowly, angling her head, trying to catch the direction of it. The sound came again, clearer this time—a delicate trickle, persistent and alive.
She moved toward it, branches snagged at her sleeves. Roots clawed at her boots, twice she nearly fell, catching herself at the last moment with a hiss of pain from her shoulder. The shard shifted slightly with each jolt, sending sickening flashes of heat through her arm.
But the sound grew louder. The ground sloped more sharply now, drawing her downward into a shallow gully where the trees thinned just enough for moonlight to spill through. The silver glow pooled ahead, reflecting faintly off something that moved.
She stumbled the last few steps and nearly collapsed at the sight of it.
A narrow stream cut through the earth, no wider than a country path, its surface glinting under the fractured light of the moon. It was not grand, not roaring — just a ribbon of clear water slipping over smooth stones, whispering to itself as it passed.
For a moment she only stood there, staring. It looked unreal, like something conjured by a desperate mind. She crouched slowly at its edge, knees buckling as she lowered herself down. The smell reached her first : clean and mineral, edged with damp moss. Not brackish, not stagnant. Flowing, and good.
She extended a trembling hand and dipped her fingers into it. Cold.
The sensation shocked a broken sound from her throat, half-laugh, half-sob. The chill bit into her skin, she brought her wet fingers to her lips and tasted. Fresh. No salt, or foul tang.
She did not hesitate again.
Lowering herself fully to her knees, she cupped both hands and lifted the water greedily to her mouth. The first swallow hurt (her throat so dry that the liquid seemed almost too much) but then relief followed, profound and overwhelming. She drank again, and again. Water spilled down her chin, soaked into her collar, but she did not care.
She forced herself to pause after several desperate gulps.
Slow down, she warned herself. You'll make yourself sick.
She breathed hard through her nose, steadying. Then drank more carefully, smaller mouthfuls this time, letting each one settle before taking the next. Life returned in increments.
The dizziness lessened slightly, the pounding in her skull softened from a roar to a heavy thud. Her thoughts, though still frayed, aligned more cleanly.
She splashed water onto her face, gasping at the cold. It ran through her hair and down her neck, washing away streaks of dirt and dried blood. For the first time since she had woken, she felt something close to human again.
The stream moved on without ceremony, indifferent to her salvation. She stared into its current, watching the moon fracture across its rippling surface.
If there was a stream, there might be more. A larger river downstream. Perhaps even a road or settlement following its course. Water drew life, and ife drew people.
Then she glanced at her reflection.
The woman who stared back from the trembling surface looked wild : face smeared with dirt, hair tangled and matted, eyes too bright and too wide. Blood had soaked through the bandage at her shoulder, dark even in the moonlight.
Her gaze shifted upstream.
The forest loomed on either side, dense and black beyond the narrow silver ribbon. She was not safe yet, but she was no longer dying of thirst.
𓅹
She followed the stream.
If water ran this steady, it must lead somewhere. A larger river, a clearing. Perhaps even a road. Villages had always grown near water — she remembered that from her father and textbooks thick as bricks, from lectures about the rise of cities and the logic of settlement. People followed rivers, people survived by them.
So she walked along its bank, keeping the faint silver thread within sight.
The moon climbed higher, thin above the trees. The forest began to thin in increments so subtle she did not at first trust them. The underbrush loosened, the ground flattened.
Her legs trembled with everybstep, exhaustion clawing at her spine. More than once she swayed dangerously close to the stream, catching herself at the last moment. The cold water had helped, but it had not restored what she had lost.
Still, she walked. After what felt like another lifetime measured in breaths and pain, she noticed something else : a scent.
Not damp moss, not leaf rot. but smoke. Faint, so faint she wondered if she imagined it. She stopped dead in her tracks and lifted her head, nostrils flaring like some wary animal.
There it was again.... Woodsmoke. Not the acrid stench of burning wreckage, but the clean, domestic scent of hearth fire.
Her heart began to pound all over again, though now with something dangerously close to relief.
She moved faster than she should have, branches snapping underfoot despite her attempts at caution. The trees broke apart abruptly ahead of her, opening into a shallow rise.
And beyond it : light. Warm, golden points of light flickering against the dark. She crested the rise and nearly collapsed at the sight.
A village. Small, with no more than a handful of stone cottages clustered along a narrow dirt road that curved gently through the clearing. Low roofs sloped steeply, thatched or shingled in dark slate.
Chimneys breathed thin streams of smoke into the night air. Windows glowed amber from within, it looked... old. Older than it should have. No electric hum reached her ears, no distant rumble of cars. The road was not paved, and no streetlights lined it. Only lantern-glow and firelight, dancing gently in the glass panes.
For a moment, she only stood there, swaying. Civilization! She had finally fucking found it.
A choked laugh escaped her, half-hysterical and wholly relieved. "Thank God," she whispered, though her voice barely carried.
She stumbled forward down the slope, boots sliding in loose soil. The village remained still as she approached. No dogs barked, no doors opened. The only sound was the faint crackle of firewood and the distant rush of the stream behind her.
As she drew closer, details sharpened : the cottages were built of rough-hewn stone, their walls uneven but sturdy. Wooden doors reinforced with iron bands. Small, square windows. The road between them was packed earth, worn by use but not by tires — by feet.
Her brow furrowed faintly through the haze of exhaustion. Where were the cars? Where were the wires? She pushed the thought aside.
Help first. Questions later.
She staggered toward the nearest cottage and lifted her hand to knock. The motion pulled sharply at her injured shoulder and she winced, nearly blacking out again. She steadied herself against the door and struck it weakly with her fist.
The sound seemed too loud in the stillness. She waited, and nothing.
She knocked again, harder this time. "Please," she rasped, her voice shredded raw. "I need help."
For a long, terrible moment, there was no answer. Then, movement inside.
The scrape of a chair across stone. Slow footsteps approaching and the door opened inward.
Warm light spilled over her, blinding after so much darkness.
A figure stood framed in the doorway — broad-shouldered, cloaked in rough wool, face half-shadowed by the lantern held in one weathered hand. The light caught in eyes that regarded her not with shock, nor alarm —
Annie swayed where she stood, relief crashing over her in a wave so powerful it nearly dragged her under.
"I was in a plane crash," she managed, the words tripping over each other in their rush to escape. Her throat felt lined with sandpaper. "Please. I need — "
The rest dissolved on her tongue.
Her vision smeared at the edges, the warm light from the doorway stretching into a hazy halo. Oh, come on. Now? Her body couldn't possibly be shutting down now. Not when she'd finally found help. It felt like a phone blinking its last percentage of battery : no warning, just the inevitable slide into black.
She tried to fight it, she really did.
Her hand shot out to brace against the side of the house, fingers scraping over rough wood. The texture bit into her palm, grounding and splintered and painfully real. For half a second she thought she might steady herself. Her knees locked. Her breath came in shuddering pull.
Then her strength simply... gave.
Her legs buckled, and she tipped forward, weightless and slow, like a tree finally surrendering to gravity. The golden light spilling from the doorway swallowed her vision as she fell toward it.
And in that strange, stretched-out instant before she hit the floor, one absurd, jarring thought cut through the fog in her mind : the man's clothes looked wrong.