It’s a long, cold night. Somehow, even though we’re the only two people for probably five hundred miles, Imogen manages not to speak to me.

Even though I make her emergency rations for dinner. Even though I give her another water bottle, help her outside so she can pee because she refuses to pee into a container inside the plane.

Total, stony silence. It would be remarkable if it didn’t feel so completely awful.

We sleep on opposite sides of the plane, not that far away from each other. She’s wrapped in the parachute and a ton of coats; I’ve got the emergency blankets and the rest of the coats.

I think she actually sleeps. I barely do.

Because if we want any chance at survival, we need to leave this plane. It’s obvious by now that no one is coming. I’m not even sure if this plane had a flight transmitter — that’s the black box thing Imogen was talking about — and if it does, it’s obviously not working.

I’ve got some suspicions about that, but I’ve been trying not to think about them. Right now, it’s not that important why the plane went down, it’s important that we figure out what the fuck we’re going to do next.

If we stay here we’ll die. I’m almost certain of that. We’ll eat all our food, drink all our water, but that means that by the time we decide to head to a lower elevation and try our luck at finding civilization or a road or a fishing outpost or something, we’ll be fucked.

Unlike Imogen’s seminar, I’ve actually done some of this stuff. I’ve spent time alone in the cold forest, making shelters and building fires and trapping fish for food.

I’m not a Navy SEAL or something — I just flew their planes, I always knew I wasn’t a lifer — but I think I’ll be okay for a few days.

But I don’t even know if Imogen can get down the rocks to the tree line. She won’t let me look at her ankle, so I don’t know if it’s sprained or broken. I don’t know if her only option is to stay here.

And if it is, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I could leave tonight, I think. Then I wouldn’t have to face that decision. No one would ever know.

I stare at the tilted ceiling of the plane, watching my breath hover in the cold air.

It would be easy. Just go.

I roll over and try to fall asleep again. It doesn’t work.

“You never did tell me where we are,” Imogen says the next morning. She’s chewing on another of the disgusting granola bars as I heat some of the MREs that we kept in the plane’s emergency kit. They’re only a year past their expiration date.

“I don’t know where we are,” I tell her.

“You had that map out.”

“Do people look at maps when they know where they are?”

Imogen chews, swallows, glugs down some water.

We’re running low on that, I think but don’t say anything.

“I’m asking because I thought there was an outside chance you managed to figure it out,” she says, her voice cool. “God knows you were looking at that thing for long enough.”

“Sure, Imogen,” I tell her, settling back on some cargo. “I’ve known exactly where we are this whole time, and I’ve secretly been talking to rescuers via radio just to torment you, because I’d also rather be here, in this miserably fucking cold airplane, than back in Solaris sitting on a couch and watching movies.”

She colors, her cheeks going a splotchy pink.

“It wouldn’t be the first time you tormented me for no reason,” she points out.

“So my plan was, what, to wait until you showed up at the airport needing a ride? Then deliberately crash into this mountain miraculously without killing either of us, and then make you wait it out?”

She gets pinker, and I swallow hard. I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m cold and Imogen has always been able to do this to me, take any emotion at all and turn it up to eleven.

“No,” I say. “Maybe I’m behind your research grant to begin with. I dangled that in front of you just to get you here. I’ve been planning this for years,” I snarl, sarcasm dripping from my voice. “You’re that important to me, Imogen. It’s all true, I’ve been planning one more way to make you miserable all this time.”

She shoves at her glasses, face bright red, but she doesn’t show any expression. If I didn’t know better I’d think her eyes were glassy, but I’m sure it’s just the sunlight.

“I don’t know why you’d go to all that trouble,” she says, her quiet voice tightly controlled. “All you’d have to do to make my life miserable is show up somewhere. It’s not hard.”

“I wish I’d left without you,” I say.

Her jaw clenches, and she swallows.

“Nothing’s stopping you,” she points out, voice flat and cold as ever. “You can go freeze to death and once I get rescued maybe I’ll try to convince them that they should come look for you as well, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“You’re that certain,” I say. “You really think that if we just stay here, someone will magically come and rescue us.”

“It’s not magic,” she says, her voice dripping with disdain. “That’s the entire point of having radio contact, having the emergency beacon, all that stuff. That’s why the plane is bright yellow, Wilder, because everything I’ve ever read or been told has been to stay where you are if you get lost or stranded and let rescuers find you.”

Her voice is rising slightly in pitch as she keeps talking, edging on hysteria.

“We don’t have either of those things,” I say quietly, even though I know I should drop it for now. “We don’t have radio communications and we don’t have a transmitter. All we’ve got is a bright yellow plane in the middle of thousands of square miles of cloudy snow storm.”

“Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she says, disdain dripping from every syllable. “All planes have them.”

I clench my jaw, the disgusting taste of the MREs I’ve eaten for the last day rising in my throat, because I want to shout at her, ridicule her, tell her that we’re going to die here and it’s going to be her own fault that I’m the last person she sees.

If we had a transmitter, someone would be here by now. The storm has cleared. It’s been over a day since we were supposed to make contact again. No one is coming.

I don’t say anything to Imogen, I just stand from the cargo box where I’m sitting and shove it out of the way, then shove aside the one behind it and the one behind that.

“Those are fragile,” Imogen says. “Be careful.”

I ignore her. It doesn’t matter if they’re fragile, because her microscopes and shit are never getting used for their intended purpose. They’ll be up here forever, probably with our skeletons next to them.

I reach the metal back panel of the airplane, in the tail section, run my fingers over where the rivets are holding it all together. This plane is probably twenty years old, and between that and our hard landing, some of the metal panels have separated a little.

I walk back through the airplane, past Imogen’s nervous face, and fish the toolbox out from under a seat, then walk back.

I grab the hammer. I heft it in my hand, unsure that what I’m about to do is a good idea.

Do you want to find out, either? I think.

Easier to leave and never know, probably.

I ignore the thoughts and swing the hammer, claw side first, right into the place where two metal plates meet. There’s an ugly noise and in my peripheral vision I can see Imogen flinch, still sitting on the floor with her bad leg extended in front of her, half-wrapped in the parachute.

I pull with all my might, letting my anger at her fuel my strength, the knots bunching in my arms as I try to tear this goddamn plane apart, swinging the hammer and pulling and grunting over and over again, sweat pouring down my back as the metal shrieks apart, exposing the insides of the plane, wires and electronics and more metal.

God, it feels good. After being helpless for this long it feels good to do something, to have some small accomplishment even if the accomplishment is tearing a single piece off of a plane.

Finally, it’s nearly off, bent in half, and I swing the business end of the hammer at it with a clang, bending the panel back further, cold air leaking in from the hole I’ve opened in the plane’s interior skin.

I’m sweating, panting for breath. Tearing steel off a plane is hard work, and I toss the hammer onto the ground with a heavy thump, then stick my gloved hand inside a nest of wires and pull.

And pull. And pull until all of it’s out, on top of Imogen’s suitcases and cargo boxes, just wires and wires of different colors, different patterns. None of it looks particularly high-tech or fancy, just wires and wires.

“Any emergency beacons in here?” I ask. “You see anything, Imogen? Let me know as soon as you do, being the expert and all.”

I can’t turn and look at her. I think I know the look on her face, a combination of horror and anger, the same splotchy red-and-white as before.

“It has to be in there,” she says, her voice barely shaking. “I thought it was illegal not to have one, I checked that on the way—”

“Tell me more about what’s fucking legal,” I say, reaching my full arm back into the space and coming up with nothing. “Please, tell me how it should be here and isn’t because it’s against the law not to have one of these things that you’re going on about. Because it’s not back here, Imogen, and it’s not in the front either and this plane isn’t very big.”

I finally turn and look at her, the pink splotches draining from her cheeks, her brown eyes wide behind her glasses. Despite everything she’s sitting bolt upright on the floor, leg stuck out stubbornly in front of her, the look on her face like she’s barely holding back tears but hates me anyway.

“You checked the front?” she asks, her voice quiet.

I thought she’d shout. Maybe I was hoping for it, that we could really have it out right now, scream at each other for a while. But instead she sounds deflated, broken, and I feel like she slipped a shard of glass through my stomach.

“While you were asleep,” I admit.

I’m suddenly deflated, and I sit heavily on one of the plastic cargo tubs, drop my head into my hands because I was so busy proving Imogen wrong that I didn’t realize that I’m also fucked.

There’s no transmitter. No beacon. She’s right that there should be. It should have been either in a spot below the instrument panel up front or behind that panel in the back, but it’s neither and there’s really nowhere else for the thing to go.

I don’t have an explanation. I don’t have a reason it’s not there.

I don’t have a reason for anything. I can’t even tell Imogen why everything on this plane suddenly failed and it crashed, because I don’t know.

“Oh,” she says, her voice changing completely in that one word, and I instantly feel terrible again.

For this, for her, for everything I did ten years ago and everything I’ve done since and anything else I’ll do in my life. Even if Imogen is a difficult asshole sometimes who treats me like I’m an idiot, she doesn’t deserve to die here. With me, of all people.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was still hoping someone would show up.”

“I don’t think they will,” she says, her voice quiet and distant, suddenly kind.

“I don’t think so either,” I say softly. “I think either we leave and take our chances, or we die here in this tiny plane.”

“You’re not supposed to leave,” she says, mostly to herself, tilting her head back against the metal skin of the plane. “You’re never supposed to leave, that’s the thing everyone always says, you’re supposed to stay put…”

Her voice trails off into silence, and I don’t respond because I don’t know what to say.