It popped back to life. He’d clearly have to control the fuel flow manually by flipping the pump on and off.

He turned it off.

The plane began to climb.

“That was scary!” Echo shouted at him.

He left out the part where, in a few moments, the engine would die again.

And then it did.

He had gained altitude, so he let the plane glide, then he turned on the fuel pump and restarted the engine.

Echo had her hands fisted around the seat handle. “Dodge?”

“I got this.”

The plane flew for another five minutes with no mishaps, and then the engine backfired. He turned off the fuel pump and flew another ten minutes until the engine died.

“What is going on?” she said in the vacuum of the silence. “Are we crashing?”

“Not if I can help it. The fuel pump isn’t working right and it’s clogging the engine, but if I can keep turning it on and off, we might be able to nurse the engine along . . .”

She stared at him, her eyes wide.

They’d dropped to two thousand feet.

The engine sputtered, and he waited a moment longer, then gave it another go. C’mon.

The engine coughed to life.

Echo gave him a wan smile.

They were thirty miles out of Anchorage—another fifteen minutes was all they needed. Already, however, he was veering toward Highway 3, just in case he had to put down. He pulled back on the throttle. They needed altitude if his guess was right. Four thousand, maybe five. He got the Beaver up to six thousand feet before the engine misfired again. He turned off the fuel pump, climbing until his rpms started dropping. Then he flipped the pump back on. C’mon, don’t die on me—

Nope. Silence filled the cabin as they leveled off, descending gradually.

“Dodge?”

He said nothing as he tried the pump again.

This time, the engine took three tries to restart.

“We’re going to die.”

Nope. But he didn’t want to tell her that this dance was going to continue all the way to Anchorage.

If the fuel pump lasted that long.

It didn’t.

The engine died fifteen miles from the Anchorage airport. He could see Merrill Field in the distance, past the Air Force Base, past the railroad tracks, parked right in front of the hospital.

The wind caught the plane, was bumping it as he worked the ailerons.

He pitched down, picking up speed, then pulled out of it, leveling out, slowing.

“What are you doing?”

“In order to keep us in the air, I need speed. But in order to maintain speed, I need to descend. But not too quickly, or we run out of air, and not too slowly, or we’ll stall.”

“Stall? As in drop out of the sky?”

“Breathe, Echo. I—”

“I know. You got this.” Her eyes were wide. “I’m just going to sit here and pray.”