Page 3 of Born for Starlight

“Grant?” I puffed out his name, getting ready to turn my head.

“I’m here.” Grant’s voice was wrong. Tight, and strained, but working very hard to sound normal.

I turned toward him and my world tilted sideways for a second before it settled.

His leg was bent in a direction legs don’t bend. Below the knee, a piece of white showed through torn fabric, and there was blood, more of it by the second, dark and soaking into the seat beneath him.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity-Fuck.

I gave him a calm smile. I was an actress after all.

“Hey.” I got my good hand on his cheek and turned his face to mine, away from his own leg. “Look at me. Don’t look down there. Look at me.”

“It’s bad.” His breath came out, fast and shallow. “Angelica, it’s really bad, I can see the⁠—”

“I know. I’ve got you. You don’t need to look at it. You just need to look at me.” I kept my voice easy, the same voice I used with nervous newbie costars on a first take, low and sure and a little bit bored, like this happened all the time and we were both going to be fine. “What’s my dog’s name?”

“You don’t have a dog.”

“Exactly. Keep answering easy questions and don’t look down.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the cockpit door hung open on one hinge, at a wrong angle. Hank climbed back toward us over what used to be the galley, one hand pressed to his own temple, blood seeping between his fingers. His eyes went straight to Grant’s leg and his jaw tightened.

“Compound fracture.” He said it plainly to keep from alarming anyone, knowing him. “I’ve got a SAM splint in my kit.”

He was already moving back to the cockpit, and came back with the kit in seconds, digging out a strip of foam-padded aluminum from the side pocket. “Marty, give me your belt.”

Hank worked fast, splinting Grant’s leg above and below the break, with the foam-padded aluminum splint and packing gauze against the wound with more pressure than gentleness, because gentle wasn’t going to help anybody right now.

Grant made a sound through his teeth that I felt down to my bones, but I kept talking to him, kept his face focused on mine. I fed him question after stupid question, watching tears leak out of his eyes. It was hell.

“He needs something for the pain and he needs it soon, or he’s going to go into shock on us.” Hank looked up at Milo. “Please tell me somebody on this plane has something.”

“I have hydrocodone.” Milo was already digging through the zippered pocket at the bottom of his fanny pack.

Milo shook a pill into his palm, then thought better of it and shook out a second. Grant swallowed them dry, grimacing, his hand finding mine and holding on hard enough to bruise.

“Did you get a call out?” I asked Hank. “Before?”

“Mayday’s in. Position, everything, before we lost altitude. Who has a phone that made it through the crash?”

“Mine’s toast,” Marty called out.

“Don’t know,” Grant gasped.

I looked at the floor and saw his phone was a cracked mess. “Grant’s won’t work, and I don’t have mine.”

Milo pulled his out and held it up. “No bars,” he said.

“Once you’re in Santa Barbara proper you’ll have five bars and a thousand missed calls, but out here, nothing. They know approximately where we are, though, and they know we’re down, not overdue. That’s the difference between hours and days,” Hank assured us.

“How many hours?” Marty asked.

“Depends how fast they get a bird in the air, and how fast it finds us in all this.” He nodded at the scrub and chaparral pressing against the broken fuselage on every side. “We need to make ourselves easy to find.” Hank looked at me, Milo and Marty. He pulled the silver emergency blanket out of his kit. “I need one of you to go out there, find a clearing, and spread this out. It’ll be easy to spot for the rescue copter.”

“Won’t this plane be easy to spot?” Marty asked.

“I don’t know,” Hank answered. “When we crashed, it was into a lot of trees, I think it’s covered.”