Chapter 16: THE PLANE — PART 1
The jungle never slept, but it had moods.
I'd learned to read them over the past two weeks—the way bird calls shifted when predators moved through the undergrowth, the subtle changes in insect rhythm that preceded weather changes, the particular quality of silence that meant the Monster was patrolling nearby.
Today the jungle felt expectant. Waiting.
I'd told Hurley I was going hunting, which was technically true. But the real quarry wasn't boar or fish or any of the small game Locke had taught us to track. I was hunting a plane.
The Nigerian drug runners' Beechcraft had crashed on this Island years before Oceanic 815, carrying Virgin Mary statues stuffed with heroin and a priest who wasn't really a priest. In the show, Locke and Boone had found it perched in a cliff-side tree, unstable and deadly. Boone had climbed. The plane had fallen. Boone had died.
Not this time.
I moved through the forest with the tracking skills I'd absorbed from Locke, reading the landscape like a map. The plane's location was burned into my meta-knowledge—a rocky outcropping about three miles inland, where the canopy gave way to exposed stone and a tree grew sideways from a cliff face, cradling wreckage like an offering to gravity.
The terrain steepened. Vines gave way to exposed rock. And there, exactly where I knew it would be, the Beechcraft hung suspended over a hundred-foot drop, its tail section tangled in branches that creaked with every breeze.
I stood at the cliff's edge and studied the situation.
The plane was more precarious than the show had suggested. The tree holding it was half-dead, its roots pulling free from the rock face in slow motion. Any significant weight—a climbing human, for instance—would probably accelerate the inevitable collapse.
Boone dies trying to reach the radio. Dies because Locke convinced him the Island wanted him to climb.
I photographed the scene in my memory, then headed back to camp.
---
"You found what?"
Boone's voice carried across the beach, drawing attention from nearby survivors. His face had gone pale beneath the sunburn—hope and grief warring in equal measure.
"A plane. Small one, twin-engine, been there for years." I kept my voice casual, pitched for the gathering audience. "It's tangled in a tree on a cliff about three miles inland. Looks like it might have a working radio."
"A radio?" Jack appeared from the medical tent, his eternal suspicion momentarily overshadowed by practical hope. "If we could contact rescue—"
"If it's functional. Big if." I met Jack's eyes steadily. "The plane's not stable. The tree holding it is dying. Anyone who climbs up there is taking a serious risk."
"I can climb." Boone stepped forward, that familiar recklessness in his stance. "Shannon used to—"
He stopped. The name hung in the air like smoke.
Shannon. Dead in the original timeline, shot by Ana Lucia in a terrible misunderstanding. But in my timeline, she's still alive. Still here.
For now.
"The plane isn't worth dying for," I said quietly. "We can find another way to reach what's inside."
"You don't know that." Boone's jaw set with the stubborn determination of a man trying to prove something—to himself, to his dead sister's ghost, to whatever demons drove him toward danger. "You don't know what I can handle."
"I know what that tree can handle. Which is not much."
The argument might have continued, but Locke emerged from the jungle like a spirit summoned by conflict. He'd been hunting alone again—his preferred mode—and his expression held the serene focus that always made me nervous.
"You found the plane," he said. Not a question.
"I found a plane. Don't know if it's the one you're looking for."
Locke's smile deepened. "There's only one plane on this Island, James. The Island showed it to me in a dream. I just didn't know where to look."
Of course he did. Of course the Island sent him visions. Because Locke's faith is the engine that drives half the tragedy on this rock.
"Then you know how dangerous it is."
"Danger is how the Island tests us. How it reveals what we're capable of."
I stepped closer, lowering my voice so only he could hear. "The Island wants Boone dead? That's the test?"
Locke's expression flickered—the first crack in his serenity I'd seen since the hunting trip. "The Island wants what's in that plane. The method of retrieval is up to us."
"And if the method kills someone?"
"Then they weren't meant to succeed."
The words hit like ice water. I'd known Locke's faith had dark edges—the show had made that clear enough—but hearing it spoken aloud, seeing the calm acceptance in his eyes, drove home how dangerous he really was.
He doesn't care if Boone dies. He cares about the plane. About the radio. About whatever destiny he thinks is waiting.
"We're not doing it your way," I said.
"That's not your decision to make."
"Watch me."
---
Boone found me at my camp site an hour later.
He sat without asking, the way people did when they'd made up their minds about something and needed an audience for the announcement. His hands twisted together—nervous energy looking for an outlet.
"Locke says you're trying to protect me."
"Locke says a lot of things."
"He also says you know things you shouldn't. That you've been... different since the crash."
Locke's been talking. Planting seeds. Building alliances or undermining mine.
"Different how?"
"The way you found Ethan. The way you track in the jungle. The way you—" Boone stopped, swallowed. "The way you look at people sometimes. Like you already know how their story ends."
"Maybe I'm just paranoid."
"Shannon said you saved her life. With the polar bear, I mean." His voice cracked slightly on her name. "She said you didn't hesitate. Like you knew exactly what was going to happen."
I remembered that day—the bear charging through the undergrowth, Shannon's scream, the single shot that dropped eight hundred pounds of muscle before it could reach her. The first time I'd killed something in this body.
"Lucky shot."
"Bullshit." Boone leaned forward, intensity replacing nervousness. "Everything you do is too calculated to be luck. The gun training. The census that exposed Ethan. Finding the caves, finding the plane, always being exactly where you need to be."
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to tell me the truth. About why you don't want me to climb that plane."
The question deserved an honest answer. But how could I explain that I'd watched him die in a television show? That his blood was on Locke's hands in a timeline that might or might not still exist?
"Because your sister is still alive," I said finally. "And if you die in that plane, she loses the only family she has left."
Boone's face went through something complicated. "Shannon and I aren't—we don't have the best relationship."
"I know. But she needs you anyway. Whether she admits it or not."
I know because I absorbed her memories when she touched me after the polar bear. Her gratitude triggered the same unwanted download that Claire's touch did. Shannon Rutherford, beneath all the spoiled princess performance, is desperately afraid of being alone.
"You can't know that."
"I know enough."
We sat in silence while the surf rolled and the camp bustled with evening routines. Boone stared at his hands, wrestling with something I couldn't see.
"Locke's going to the plane tomorrow," he said finally. "With or without me."
"Then I'm going too."
"To do what?"
"To make sure nobody dies trying to reach a radio."
Boone nodded slowly. "Okay. Then I'm coming."
"Boone—"
"You said my sister needs me. Well, she also needs answers. If there's a working radio in that plane, if there's any chance of rescue..." He met my eyes. "I'm not going to climb. But I'm not going to sit here either."
I couldn't argue with that. Wouldn't have, even if I could.
"Fine. But you listen to me out there. Not Locke."
"Deal."
We shook on it. His grip was strong, desperate, the handshake of a man grasping for something to believe in.
I hoped I wouldn't disappoint him.
---
The jungle swallowed us at dawn.
Locke led—his territory, his obsession, his claimed right to determine the pace and direction of their pilgrimage. Boone followed three steps behind, his movements tight with controlled anxiety. I brought up the rear, watching both of them with the particular attention of someone expecting everything to go wrong.
The terrain climbed. The vegetation thinned. And somewhere ahead, a dead priest's plane waited in a dying tree.
The pilot died anyway. Some deaths are fixed.
But not all of them.
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