As Haibu looked up at the blue sky from his prone position surrounded by the flaming ruin of the airplane he could not but feel a little responsible. He should have know not to temped fate like he did.
An hour into the flight, the cabin had settled into a drowsy rhythm. The initial excitement of takeoff Mutsumi gripping her armrest with white knuckles, the chatter of thirty-odd students all talking over each other had faded into something quieter. Pockets of conversation still bubbled up here and there. Somewhere behind him, Atsushi's braying laugh cut through the ambient engine hum every few minutes. A cluster of boys three rows back kept leaning across the aisle to talk to Mami Miura, their voices pitched in that particular way guys got when they thought they were being charming.
Haibu ignored all of it.
He sat with his head tilted back against the headrest, eyes half-closed, letting the vibration of the fuselage travel through his spine. There was something about flying he'd always liked. Not the airports, not the security lines or the recycled air but the actual sensation of being suspended above everything. His father had once told him, during a bush flight over the Serengeti in a twin-engine Cessna that rattled like a tin can, that the sky was the one place humans weren't designed to be. "That's why it feels different up here," he'd said, adjusting his aviator sunglasses. "Your body knows it's somewhere it shouldn't be. So your brain goes quiet. It stops worrying about the small things."
His brain had gone quiet now. The pressurized cabin hummed around him, steady as a heartbeat. He could feel the faint pull of altitude in his sinuses, taste the flat metallic tang of filtered air. The overhead reading lights cast small warm circles down onto passengers' laps while the rest of the cabin sat in that particular blue-grey dimness unique to commercial flights.
Beside him, Mutsumi hadn't looked up from her textbook since they'd reached cruising altitude. She sat with her legs crossed beneath the fold-down tray, the heavy book propped against the seatback in front of her. Her brown hair fell forward around her face like curtains, and every so often she'd push a strand behind her ear without breaking concentration. The camouflage jacket she wore hung open, her white undershirt pulled taut where the seatbelt crossed her chest. Her Stetson sat upside-down in the overhead bin she'd been reluctant to store it there, checking twice that it wouldn't get crushed by someone else's carry-on.
He shifted slightly, leaning just enough to see past her shoulder and out the oval window beyond.
The world outside existed in two clean layers. Below: an endless carpet of white cloud cover, thick and sculpted, bright enough to make him squint. Above: open blue stretching to the edge of forever. The sun hung somewhere behind and above the aircraft, painting the cloud tops with that particular golden warmth that only existed at thirty thousand feet. Shadows pooled in the valleys between cloud formations, giving them depth and weight, turning them into something that looked solid enough to walk on.
He watched for a while. Let his breathing slow. His father would have appreciated this view the old man had a habit of pressing his face to every airplane window like a kid, no matter how many times he'd flown.
Something moved.
Haibu's eyes sharpened. The shift was subtle at first a flicker at the periphery, like a smudge on the glass. He leaned closer to the window, his shoulder brushing against Mutsumi's arm. She didn't notice, absorbed in her reading.
The shape moved again a dark ripple against the bright canvas of cloud and sunlight.
Haibu's chest tightened. He kept his breathing even, controlled, the way his father had taught him when tracking dangerous game. Don't react. Don't telegraph your awareness. Just watch.
His eyes swept the sky beyond the window in careful quadrants. Upper left. Upper right. Down to the cloud layer. Back up. The movement had been quick, organic not the clean geometric lines of another aircraft or the lazy drift of a weather balloon. Something had crossed his field of vision, something that shouldn't exist at this altitude where the air thinned to almost nothing and the temperature sat well below freezing.
He shifted his weight fractionally, trying to angle closer to the window without disturbing Mutsumi. Her shoulder pressed warm against his as he leaned. The textbook in her lap showed detailed anatomical diagrams of beetle mandibles, her finger following lines of text dense with Latin nomenclature. She'd always had this ability to shut out the world when something caught her interest—a useful trait for an entomologist, probably maddening for anyone trying to get her attention. Work well for him here though.
Haibu's gaze tracked outward. The wing stretched below the window, white with the airline's logo painted in fading red. Rivets studded the metal surface in neat rows. The flaps sat in their neutral position, and beyond them, the engine cowling gleamed dully in the scattered light. Everything looked exactly as it should.
Except it didn't.
His instincts honed through countless hours spent watching animals that could kill him thrummed with wrongness. The same prickling awareness he'd felt crouched in African grassland while a lioness circled downwind, or standing waist-deep in cold Alaskan rivers while brown bears fished upstream.
He scanned the empty air. Searched the cloud formations for breaks or disturbances. The sun glared off the white expanse, making his eyes water slightly. For several long seconds, nothing moved except the steady churn of the engine and the slow drift of cloud cover below.
Maybe his father was wrong. Maybe brains didn't go quiet at altitude maybe they started inventing things to worry about instead.
Haibu blinked hard, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. When he looked again—
Nothing.
Just wing and engine and sky.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, felt the tension in his shoulders ease a fraction. Trick of the light. Had to be. At this altitude, birds couldn't survive their lungs would collapse, their blood would freeze in their veins. Even the hardiest raptors topped out around twenty thousand feet, and commercial airliners cruised well above that threshold.
The cabin around him hummed on, oblivious. Someone's phone chimed a few rows back they must've forgotten to switch it to airplane mode. A flight attendant moved down the aisle with practiced efficiency, collecting empty drink cups and crumpled napkins. The intercom crackled briefly but stayed silent.
Haibu settled back into his seat, let his head rest against the cushion. His heartbeat slowed back to normal. He felt vaguely foolish for the spike of adrenaline, the way his body had tensed like he'd spotted fresh leopard tracks on a trail.
Mutsumi turned a page, the paper whispering against her fingers.
He closed his eyes. Counted his breaths. One. Two. Three.
When he opened them again, someone stood on the wing.
The words died in his throat before they could form. His mind went blank not with fear, but with the absolute incomprehensibility of what he saw.
A figure. Humanoid. Standing casually on the aircraft wing as if gravity and physics were suggestions it had chosen to ignore. The wind at this altitude should have torn anything loose into the slipstream, should have peeled skin from bone and scattered the pieces across miles of empty sky. But the figure stood steady, unmoving except for the slow sweep of something behind it that caught the light.
Haibu's eyes refused to focus properly at first, kept sliding off details as if his brain rejected the input. He forced himself to look. To really see.
The proportions were wrong. Too tall impossible to gauge accurately through the curved window glass. The body curved in ways that read female, unmistakably so, with an hourglass shape that bordered on exaggerated. But that wasn't what held his attention.
Wings.
Massive translucent wings stretched from the figure's back, four of them arranged in an X-pattern that glittered like stained glass in the sunlight. They didn't beat or flutter they simply held position, rigid as steel blades, the membranes between the veins refracting light into rainbow patterns. Each wing had to be longer than Haibu was tall, the edges sharp and defined.
A tail extended behind the figure, segmented and tapering, moving with slow deliberate sweeps that suggested controlled power rather than nervous energy.
The figure's head turned.
Haibu's breath stopped.
Its head was aimed directly at him.
Haibu couldn't measure the seconds that passed while those eyes held him. Time stretched and warped like the air currents outside. His body had locked in place muscles rigid, chest barely moving, every survival instinct he possessed screaming contradictory orders. Run. Hide. Don't move. The figure on the wing didn't shift, didn't acknowledge him beyond that steady, unblinking stare through the layers of pressurized glass and impossibility.
Bad altitude sickness. The thought surfaced from somewhere deep in his brain, grasping for rational explanation. He'd read about it hypoxia could cause hallucinations, made people see things that weren't there. Mountaineers at extreme elevations sometimes reported phantom companions walking beside them, or dead relatives calling their names from empty ridges. Maybe the cabin pressure had failed. Maybe his oxygen-starved brain had conjured this thing from his subconscious, pulled together.
His body moved without conscious decision. He leaned forward, drawn by some magnetic pull he couldn't name. The seatbelt dug into his lap as he pressed closer to the window, his shoulder pushing hard against Mutsumi's arm.
"Haibu?"
Mutsumi's voice cut through the static in his head. Her hand touched his forearm, fingers curling gently against the fabric of his jacket. He barely registered the contact. His entire being had focused down to a pinpoint of awareness centered on that impossible shape standing where nothing should be able to stand.
"What's—"
In that moment Haibu saw the plane from the outside.
The wind screamed around him.
Haibu remembered he felt it before his mind could process what was happening. Pressure. Constriction. Something wrapped around his torso with impossible strength, squeezed the air from his lungs in a single crushing embrace. His vision blurred. The cabin tilted at a sick angle, or maybe his sense of orientation had shattered completely.
Cold.
The temperature plummeted so fast his skin went numb. Ice crystals formed on his eyelashes. His lungs seized, refused to draw breath from air too thin to sustain life.
He was outside.
The realization hit with the same force as the wind tearing at his clothes. He hung suspended in open sky no plane around him, no walls, nothing but endless blue and the white carpet of clouds thousands of feet below. The roar of displaced air threatened to burst his eardrums. His mouth opened in a soundless scream as the pressure differential inside his skull made everything else irrelevant.
His ears popped.
Both of them, simultaneously, with twin spikes of pain that lanced through his head like ice picks driven through his temples. The agony cleared his vision for a heartbeat, let him see with terrible clarity exactly what held him.
Wings. Translucent and vast, refracting sunlight into colors that shouldn't exist. They beat now powerful incredibly fast strokes that cut through the thin atmosphere with surgical precision. The membrane between the veins caught the light, turned it into rainbows and prisms that danced across his retinas.
The body pressed against his back radiated heat despite the freezing temperatures. Curves that registered as distinctly female molded against him, soft in some places and hard in others. The arms—or forelegs, or whatever they were had wrapped completely around his chest, held him pinned like prey caught mid-flight.
Movement caught his peripheral vision.
The plane.
Haibu watched helpless, frozen, his body temperature dropping with every passing second as the aircraft he'd been sitting in moments ago tilted nose-down. The clean white fuselage gleamed in the sunlight, pristine except for the ragged holes torn through both sides of the cabin. Right where he'd been sitting. The metal edges curled outward like flower petals, sharp and bright against the darker interior.
The plane fell.
Not the controlled descent of a landing approach. This was gravity asserting itself with casual violence. The nose dipped steeper, picking up speed. The engines whined high and desperate, the sound carrying even over the wind screaming past Haibu's ears. Tiny shapes tumbled from the breaches in the fuselage. Luggage. Seat cushions. His stomach clenched. Maybe bodies.
His classmates were in there.
Mutsumi. Chitose. Even Atsushi. His classmates all strapped into seats while the aircraft spiraled toward the cloud layer below.
The cold sank deeper into his flesh, settled into his bones. His fingers had gone completely numb. His lungs burned with each shallow breath of air too thin to sustain him.
The world spun.
Haibu thrashed against the grip pinning him, his body moving on pure animal instinct. Every lesson his father had drilled into him stay calm, assess, think through the panic shattered like ice against rocks. His arms flailed uselessly against the wind resistance, trying to pry at whatever held him. His legs kicked at nothing, burning oxygen his body couldn't replace.
Get free. Get away. Get down.
The thoughts came fragmented, broken by the screaming cold and the pressure building behind his eyes. He twisted violently to the left, then right, vertebrae popping as he wrenched his spine against the constriction around his ribs. His vision darkened at the edges not from unconsciousness but from the sheer wrongness of existing at this altitude without protection.
The grip tightened.
Four points of contact now. His oxygen-starved brain struggled to process the information. Two arms no, four. Wrapped completely around his torso from behind, overlapping each other like the coils of a constrictor. The upper set pressed just below his shoulders. The lower gripped his waist with crushing strength that would've cracked ribs if applied any harder.
His head snapped back as he bucked against the hold. Something soft enveloped the back of his skull two massive swells of flesh that yielded under the impact, cushioning his thrashing. The sensation registered through the panic as distinctly warm, distinctly female. Breasts. Enormous ones that his head sank into with each violent jerk backward, the soft tissue conforming around his skull like pillows made of heated silk.
Haibu's brain couldn't reconcile it. The cold had numbed his face until he could barely feel his own features, but the heat radiating from those massive mounds pressed against the back of his head burned through the ice. They compressed and released with each desperate movement he made, impossibly soft and yielding despite everything else about his captor suggesting inhuman strength.
His chest hitched. The thin air barely registered in his lungs. Each breath came shallow and useless, his body consuming oxygen faster than he could replace it. Black spots danced across his vision. The wind tore tears from his eyes before they could freeze.
The plane kept falling below them, growing smaller with every second.
Movement between his legs.
Haibu felt it slide upward something long and segmented and impossibly strong. The tail. His numbing mind supplied the word without comprehension. It curved up from below, threading between his thighs with disturbing precision. The segmented surface felt smooth and hard, each section slightly wider than his wrist. It pressed against the inseam of his jeans as it traveled higher, the tip curling forward toward his stomach.
Terror spiked through the hypothermia.
He thrashed harder, his body burning through its last reserves of energy. His fists beat against the arms holding him useless, pathetic impacts that did nothing except make his knuckles ache. His legs kicked frantically at the air, trying to dislodge the tail winding between them. The movement only made it worse. The segmented length slid higher, pressed more firmly against places that made his mind go white with panic.
"Stop—fuck—let—"
The wind stole his words. Ripped them from his mouth before they could form completely. His throat burned from trying to force sound through air pressure that wanted to collapse his windpipe.
The tail curled tighter. Its tip reached his stomach now, pressed flat against his abdomen just above his belt line. The segments moved with deliberate control not thrashing or flailing but positioning with clear intent. Each piece of chitin or whatever material composed it fit perfectly against the next, creating a smooth continuous surface that radiated warmth despite the freezing temperatures.
His head sank deeper into the soft masses cushioning it. They compressed around his skull on both sides, enveloping him completely. He could feel them shift and bounce with each beat of the massive wings above, the flesh moving independently like they had their own weight and momentum. The heat coming off them made his frozen scalp tingle as sensation tried to return.
The lower set of arms adjusted their grip. Slid slightly downward along his torso, repositioned themselves around his waist with frightening precision. The hands if they were hands splayed across his stomach and lower back, each finger impossibly long and tipped with something hard that pressed through his jacket. He felt the points dig in just enough to promise worse if he kept struggling.
They flew farther from the falling plane.
Haibu twisted his head to the side, desperate to keep the aircraft in view. His neck strained against the soft prison of flesh surrounding it. Through the gaps between those massive swells, he caught glimpses of white fuselage spiraling downward. Smaller now. Much smaller. The distance between them grew with each powerful stroke of wings he couldn't see but could feel through the body pressed against his back.
His classmates. Mutsumi with her textbook and her shy smile. Chitose trying to maintain order even as everything fell apart. All of them trapped in that metal tube as it plummeted toward the clouds.
He had to get back. Had to help. Had to—
The tail between his legs constricted.
Haibu gasped as the segmented length quickly wrapped around his legs than squeezed his thighs together, locked his legs in place with casual strength. The tip pressed harder against his stomach, flattened his shirt against his abs. He could feel each individual segment now—smooth, warm, pulsing slightly with what might have been a heartbeat or just the vibration of flight translated through chitin.
His vision tunneled. The black spots merged, ate away at his peripheral awareness. His lungs hitched uselessly, pulling at air that offered nothing. The cold had worked its way so deep into his core that he'd stopped shivering the worst sign, the one his father had warned meant hypothermia was winning.
Consciousness started slipping.
Haibu's struggles weakened. His arms dropped to his sides, fingers too numb to curl into fists anymore. His legs hung limp in the tail's coiled embrace. Only his eyes kept moving, tracking the falling plane as it disappeared into the white cloud cover below.
Gone.
Haibu's fingers scraped uselessly against chitinous plating, searching for purchase, for weakness, for anything that might give him leverage. His hands slid across surfaces that alternated between hard exoskeleton and yielding flesh—textures his oxygen-starved brain couldn't fully process. The cold had robbed him of fine motor control. Each movement felt distant, disconnected, like he was operating someone else's body through a terrible lag.
The tail's tip traced slow, deliberate circles against his stomach. Each rotation drew wider than the last, spiraling outward from his navel with maddening precision. The segmented length kept his thighs locked together, squeezed tight enough that he felt the muscles protest. But the tip moved independently, exploring the flat plane of his abdomen with what felt disturbingly like curiosity.
It slid lower.
Haibu felt it reach his belt line paused there for a heartbeat that stretched eternal then dipped beneath the waistband of his jeans.
His mind screamed but his body had nothing left to give. The hypothermia had sunk claws into his core, dragged his consciousness toward a gray fog where nothing mattered except the seductive promise of stillness. His arms hung at his sides, heavy as lead weights. His chest barely rose with each shallow breath.
Fight. The word surfaced from somewhere deep and primal. Move. Do something.
His hands twitched. Fingers curled fractionally, nails scraping against whatever surface they rested on. He forced them to move, commanded muscles that had forgotten how to respond. His right arm lifted an inch. Two. The effort burned through reserves he didn't have.
Lower.
His palm slid down along smooth heated chitin, following the curve of what might have been a hip or the junction where abdomen met thorax. The anatomy made no sense but his hand kept moving, searching blindly for anything that might help him escape.
Warmth.
Different from the general heat radiating off the body pressed against him. This registered as wet heat, slick and yielding. His palm encountered it first a surface that parted around his touch, drew his hand inward through layers of moisture that clung to his frozen skin.
His fingers sank into something impossibly soft.
The texture overwhelmed his numbed senses. Silken folds that gripped his hand, pulsed around his wrist, radiated heat that made his frozen joints ache as circulation tried to return.
Haibu's fingers spread reflexively, seeking stability in the disorientation. Two of them pushed deeper without conscious thought, penetrated through yielding flesh that contracted around the intrusion. The heat intensified. Liquid warmth coated his fingers to the second knuckle, thick and slick and unmistakably organic.
The internal muscles around his fingers clenched rhythmically. Squeezed and released in waves that pulled his hand deeper, coated his palm in slickness that dripped down his wrist. The heat bleeding into his frozen skin bordered on painful given the sudden temperature difference.
The body against his back went rigid.
Every muscle locked simultaneously. The arms around his torso constricted hard enough that Haibu's ribs creaked. The massive breasts cushioning his head compressed into solid masses. Even the tail between his legs tightened fractionally before—
The grip around his chest loosened.
Not much. Barely a fraction. But Haibu's oxygen-starved lungs expanded that tiny fraction into possibility. His chest heaved, dragged in a marginally deeper breath of thin air that did almost nothing but felt like salvation anyway.
The creature's entire body had relaxed into whatever sensation overwhelmed it. Haibu felt the change through every point of contact muscles going slack, the crushing pressure around his ribs easing, even the tail between his legs loosening its coiled grip fractionally.
Now.
The thought cut through the fog with crystal clarity. His body moved before conscious decision finished forming. He twisted hard to the right, wrenched his torso against arms that no longer held him like steel bands. His frozen joints protested. Vertebrae popped. The motion tore his hand free from the wet heat surrounding it with a sick slurping sound he felt more than heard.
His shoulder slipped through the gap between the upper and lower sets of arms.
He thrashed. Bucked. Threw every remaining scrap of energy into one violent spasm of motion. His body twisted like he'd seen fish do when hooked—desperate, mindless, pure survival instinct overriding everything else.
The arms tried to recapture him. He felt them scrabble against his jacket, fingers catching fabric. But the momentum carried him forward and down, his torso pulling free even as his legs remained trapped in the tail's coils.
His hips rotated. The tail squeezed reflexively but the angle was wrong now, couldn't maintain its grip through his violent rotation. The segmented length unwound from his thighs as he spun, slithered across denim that was already freezing in the thin air.
Haibu fell.
The arms released completely. The massive soft prison surrounding his head vanished. His body plunged into open sky with nothing to slow the descent except air resistance that barely registered at this altitude.
The sky tore itself apart in every direction at once.
Haibu tumbled through open air, his body spinning without axis or orientation. Up became down became sideways in rapid succession. The horizon wheeled past his vision blue, white, blue again but his eyes couldn't track the rotation. His brain had lost all ability to process spatial information. The world existed only as color and velocity and the screaming wind that battered him from every angle.
He tried to spread his arms. Some distant fragment of training surfaced—skydivers maintained stability by creating drag, by positioning their bodies to catch air. His arms flailed outward but the thin atmosphere at this altitude offered nothing to push against. His limbs waved uselessly, made him spin faster instead of slowing the tumble.
The cold bit deeper. Without the creature's body heat pressed against him, the freezing temperatures attacked with renewed ferocity. Ice crystals formed on his eyebrows, his lashes. His wet hand Still coated in the creature's slickness went numb so fast he couldn't feel his fingers anymore.
Something grabbed his ankle.
The jolt nearly dislocated his hip. His body snapped straight for a heartbeat as his downward momentum fought against whatever had caught him. The vertebrae in his spine compressed, then stretched. His head whipped backward hard enough that his vision went white.
Then the grip failed.
He tumbled again, spinning faster now from the angular momentum imparted by the brief catch. The sky and clouds traded places with nauseating speed. His stomach lurched into his throat. Bile rose but the wind tore it away before it could leave his mouth.
His ears roared. Blood pounded through vessels that protested the rapid pressure changes. Another pop sharper this time, accompanied by a spike of pain that lanced through his skull. His sinuses felt like they might explode.
Fingers scraped across his back.
Four distinct points of contact, hard enough that he felt them through his jacket and shirt. They scrabbled for purchase, found none, slid across fabric moving too fast to grip. His tumbling carried him away before they could lock on.
The attempts came faster now.
A hand closed around his wrist held for maybe two seconds before the rotation wrenched him free. Something wrapped his waist from behind, constricted briefly, then lost its grip as he spun. Each failed catch added new vectors to his chaotic descent. He cartwheeled through the air, limbs splayed at impossible angles.
His left arm hyperextended during one grab. The shoulder joint screamed protest but didn't quite dislocate. His head snapped forward and back with each attempt, his neck muscles straining past safe limits. The whiplash would have incapacitated him if he'd had enough oxygen to feel it properly.
Consciousness wavered. The black spots that had been eating at his vision merged into solid darkness broken only by occasional flashes of color. Blue. White. Something translucent that might have been wings passing through his peripheral awareness.
Hands gripped his jacket collar from behind.
The tumbling stopped instantly. His body jerked to relative stillness still falling, but no longer spinning out of control. The sudden cessation of rotation made his inner ear rebel. Vertigo hit like a physical blow. His head lolled forward, chin hitting his chest.
He felt the pull. Upward pressure transmitted through his jacket as whatever held him tried to arrest his descent. The fabric dug into his armpits, constricted around his throat. His body swung like a pendulum, legs dangling beneath him.
The jacket shifted.
Haibu's semiconscious mind registered the movement as distant and unimportant. The collar slid upward along his neck, caught under his chin. His arms hanging loose and unresponsive began sliding backward through the sleeves. The leather moved across his numb skin with dream-like slowness.
His shoulders emerged from the sleeves. The jacket bunched around his biceps, then his elbows. Cool air hit his torso through the thin white t-shirt underneath. The vintage aviator jacket that had cost more than he wanted to admit slipped down his forearms toward his useless hands.
The grip holding it tightened. He felt the creature try harder the pressure on the leather increased, fingers or claws digging through multiple layers. But physics didn't care about intent. The jacket kept sliding, millimeter by millimeter, aided by gravity and his dead weight and the frictionless barrier of near-freezing sweat coating his skin.
His hands slid free.
The jacket tore away from his body completely. Haibu dropped again, his white undershirt immediately plastered against his torso by wind that cut through the thin cotton like it wasn't there. The cold attacked with renewed violence. His exposed arms turned the color of fish belly within seconds.
He tumbled once more. Slower this time, his body too depleted to spin with the same violent energy. He rotated lazily through the thin air, arms and legs trailing behind him like a rag doll tossed from a window.
The sky wheeled past. Blue. White. Blue.
Haibu's thoughts fragmented into disconnected images. His father adjusting aviator sunglasses in an African sunset. Mutsumi's smile when she found a rare beetle. The vintage jacket hanging in a shop window in Tokyo, cream fur collar bright against black leather. The jacket had made him feel older. More capable.
He really liked that jacket.
Darkness swallowed him.
He just had to say this trip would go perfectly. Had to roll those dice. Well if you could roll worse than snake eyes Haibu Mori just did.
The metal around him radiated heat like a cast-iron skillet left on a fire. Haibu sat with his back against a section of fuselage that had peeled away from the main body of the aircraft, the aluminum surface warm enough that he felt it through his thin t-shirt. Sweat traced lines down his temples despite the shade provided by the canopy overhead. The jungle pressed in from all sides dense, green, alive with sounds he couldn't identify.
Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Time moved strangely when your brain was still trying to process the fact that you'd survived something that should have pulverized every bone in your body.
He'd woken face-down in soft earth, leaves stuck to his cheek, the taste of dirt and blood in his mouth. For maybe thirty seconds he'd just laid there, breathing, waiting for pain that never quite materialized beyond a collection of aches and bruises that felt almost insulting in their mildness. His shoulder throbbed. His neck complained when he turned it too far to the left. A spectacular bruise was already forming across his ribs where the creature's arms had wrapped around him.
But he was alive.
The wreckage spread out in a rough circle around his position twisted metal, shredded seat cushions, sections of wing embedded in tree trunks like modern art installations. The main fuselage had broken into at least three major pieces that he could see from here. The tail section jutted from the undergrowth about fifty meters to his right, the airline's logo still visible on the vertical stabilizer. Smaller debris littered the jungle floor luggage split open and spilling clothes, overhead compartments cracked in half, oxygen masks dangling from severed tubes.
The silence bothered him more than the destruction.
No emergency beacons. No voices calling for help. Just the ambient sounds of the jungle and the occasional creak of stressed metal settling into new configurations.
Haibu pushed himself to his feet, swayed slightly as his inner ear adjusted to vertical orientation. His boots still miraculously on his feet crunched through scattered safety cards and crushed plastic cups. He moved carefully through the debris field, eyes scanning for any sign of movement.
Nothing.
He circled the nearest section of fuselage, peered through a ragged hole torn in the side. Seats hung at wrong angles, some ripped completely from their mounting brackets. Luggage from the overhead bins had exploded throughout the cabin, creating a layer of personal belongings that covered everything. But no people. No bodies.
The observation should have brought relief. Instead, it just added another question to the growing list his mind couldn't answer.
How did he get here?
Haibu stopped walking, pressed his palm against a tree trunk to steady himself. The bark felt rough and real under his hand solid, comprehensible, following rules he understood. He focused on the texture while his brain tried to work through the impossible logistics.
The creature had grabbed him. Pulled him from the plane. They'd been flying he remembered the wings beating, the terrible cold, the way his consciousness had flickered like a dying bulb. Then nothing. A gap in his memory where awareness should have been.
Next thing he knew, dirt and leaves and his body intact enough to stand.
The plane must have changed course before breaking apart. Had to have. Maybe the pilots managed to pull up, redirect toward land before whatever structural damage the creature caused became catastrophic. Or maybe that thing ended up flying back towards the airplane and he didn't realized it at the time.
Neither explanation satisfied him, but both beat the alternative of trying to calculate the odds of falling from cruising altitude and landing within walking distance of a crash site by pure chance.
Haibu's gaze swept the canopy overhead. Thick leaves filtered the sunlight into a green-tinted twilight. Vines hung between massive tree trunks that rose like cathedral pillars. The vegetation looked tropical broad leaves, dense undergrowth, the kind of jungle his father would have identified within seconds based on tree species alone.
They should have been over ocean. Hours of nothing but water between their departure point and the island destination. Yet here he stood surrounded by trees and earth and humidity thick enough to taste.
He walked back to the fuselage section he'd claimed as a base point. The metal had cooled slightly in the minutes he'd spent exploring. He crouched down, examined the ground around the wreckage with the same careful attention he'd learned tracking animals. Boot prints his own, from when he'd staggered away after waking. Disturbed earth where debris had impacted. But nothing that suggested other survivors moving through the area.
First rule of wilderness survival when separated from your group: stay put. Let rescue find you. Don't wander off and make yourself harder to locate. Haibu's father had drilled that into him during their first hunting trip.
The rational part of his brain knew search and rescue would mobilize quickly. A commercial aircraft didn't just vanish from radar without triggering immediate response. Military satellites tracked flight paths. Ground stations monitored transponder signals. When those signals went dead, people noticed.
Someone would come looking.
The logic held. Even if the creature that grabbed him defied every law of physics and biology, even if the crash location made no geographic sense, the basic principles of survival remained constant. A commercial airliner vanishing from radar would trigger immediate response. They'd track the last known position, calculate probable crash sites based on trajectory and fuel consumption, dispatch teams.
Being near the wreckage meant being where those teams would look first.
Haibu straightened, rolled his shoulders despite the protest from strained muscles. The decision settled something in his chest gave him a concrete task instead of spinning in circles trying to answer questions that had no rational answers.
Build a signal. Make himself visible from the air. Wait and hope that any other survivors would see it and come towards it.
The thought of his classmates flickered through his mind. Mutsumi with her textbook. Chitose maintaining order even as everything fell apart. Atsushi being a bastard right up until the end.
Were they in the other sections of wreckage? Had they made it to the ground at all?
Haibu pushed the speculation away before it could take root. Wandering through the jungle looking for survivors would accomplish nothing except getting himself lost. If they'd survived, they'd either be here at the crash site or making their way toward it. If they hadn't...
His hands curled into fists.
No. Focus on what he could control. Signal fire. Shelter. Water. The basics that kept people breathing until rescue arrived.
He wouldn't think about corpses scattered through the jungle. Wouldn't imagine Mutsumi's body broken against a tree trunk or Chitose's glasses shattered in the undergrowth.
The sun filtered through the canopy in slanted beams that promised afternoon heat. Somewhere in the distance, something screamed—animal, bird, he couldn't tell. The jungle pressed closer, dense and green and utterly indifferent to his survival.
Haibu Mori took a breath, tasted humid air thick with rot and growth, and started gathering materials for a fire that would burn bright enough to see from the sky.
Than a loud feminine cry pierced the air and all of thoughts left his head as he ran towards it.