On the other side of the doorway, the world is dark. I fish the flashlight from my coat pocket and switch it on, but there isn’t much to see. Every surface is coated in dust. A pile of sand spreads from the entrance and across the floor—deck, I suppose—according to the direction of the wind that carried it. Because of the slanting platform beneath me, I feel unbalanced, not quite sound. I sweep the beam around the cabin. The space is cramped and narrow and bare, as if someone cleared all the trappings to make room for things that are no longer there. I step toward the cockpit. My pulse thuds in my throat. But the seat is empty, the dials and switches blanketed by dirt and nothing else. I touch the wheel, which is not like the steering wheel of a car but open at the top, incomplete, a pie missing a wedge. When I examine my finger, the dirt is the same dun color as the landscape around me, as the dirt that covers the windows like a curtain, blocking the light.

On the deck next to the pilot’s seat, a large, heavy book catches the flashlight’s beam, face down, spine broken, pages splayed. Like everything else, it’s covered in dirt, but I lift it anyway and brush away what dust I can.

I flip through the pages. A logbook.

I am not a pilot—this is the first time in my adult life that I’ve boarded any kind of airplane, intact or otherwise—and the entries, written in faded purple-black letters, might as well be Latin. Still I pass my fingers over them. Because whose hands touched this last? Whose pen wrote those letters and numbers? In one column, the farthest left, I recognize dates. The last one is 13 MAY 1937. To the right, in the next column, reads 0522. Five twenty-two a.m.?

I set the logbook on the seat and sweep the flashlight once more around the cabin, and as I do, an object catches my eye at the rear, near the tail, tucked in the seam between deck and wall.

It is a pile of something. A pile of clothes, attached to a boot.