He’d seen that one person fly out of their seat and hit the roof, but he had to assume the split in the fuselage had been pretty clean and the bodies had remained strapped inside. It was even possible some of them had survived, but that seemed one miracle too many.

He glanced behind, surprised by how far he’d already climbed. And seeing the rump of the plane from this vantage point, and the cluster of people standing in front of it, he knew for sure that none of them should have survived. It would go down in the books as a freak occurrence, like that flight attendant who’d survived a plane being blown up at thirty thousand feet and had landed safely in deep snow.

He pushed on, increasingly conscious of the wall of noise around him, the birds and other animals, but mainly insects, that filled the jungle they’d crashed into. For all those creatures, nothing had changed, and sooner or later—starting with the bodies first and then the wreckage—all evidence of this crash would slowly be absorbed back into the landscape.

Finally he reached the top, but it didn’t provide him with much satisfaction. The other side of the ridge descended into a deep, forested ravine before rising up to even steeper hills beyond. He took a quick look behind at the landscape beyond the tail of the plane, undulating and densely jungled, more low hills in the distance, a vast expanse of green stretching as far as he could see.

Then he turned back to the valley and it took him a short while to see the rest of the plane, far below and far enough away from the ridge to suggest it hadn’t simply slid down the slope but had catapulted away from it and belly-flopped onto the valley floor. It looked flattened and crumpled, the paint charred as if a swift fire had engulfed it before burning out.

He wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get to the wreckage from there, but he knew without moving from the ridge that there was no one still alive in it. Miss Graham with her fear of turbulence, Jack Shaw with his long legs, Maisie McMahon with her undisclosed health problems—they were all dead. So was Olivia, who’d complained of Chris annoying her, and in so doing, had saved his life and cost Miss Graham hers.

In a way there was something wondrous about it, the random movements that had determined who would live or die, including the movements of the plane—if it had traveled just one yard more before hitting that ridge, Tom would have been down there in that blackened wreckage with them.