As soon as Shen saw the stricken Freddie, he pointed to the lower part of the fuselage, where the cargo had been, and said, “Carry him into the shade.”

They heaved him up again, with Jess hanging on to the edge of the group, her tears replaced now by a shock that looked etched in stone. Tom took in Freddie’s oddly dumbfounded face, and noticed that he wasn’t sweating, that his skin looked waxy but dry.

Shen briefly stopped next to Tom and said, “I’m pretty sure it’s heat stroke, serious. The only way to keep him alive is using the water to sponge him down.”

Tom understood what he was saying, that their water had already been squandered and become perilously low, that they would need a lot more the next day. But if Shen wanted Tom’s permission, there was no question.

“There’s a river. We’ll find a way.”

Shen nodded and said, “Good, but as long as you understand.” Tom gave him a quizzical look and Shen added, “I think he’ll die anyway.” He didn’t wait for a response, but headed into the fray, giving instructions for Barney to get water, telling the others to remove Freddie’s clothes, to get something to fan the air around him.

Joel was in the thick of it too, sometimes repeating Shen’s instructions, telling people to make space or help with one thing or another. Once, he peered out from the shade of the broken fuselage, past Tom and up the hill.

Tom turned in the same direction. The bonfire was still producing the faintest trail of smoke from somewhere within, but it wouldn’t last much longer. Tom set off toward it, climbing the slope for the third and, he hoped, last time.

He could smell the bonfire before he reached it, a burnt chemical smell that seemed to cover the upper part of the slope. But he could also see from farther up the slope that the bonfire had been a more ambitious construction than it had seemed from down below.

There were suitcases to make up the structure of it, but layered on top were hundreds of items of clothing that had been found in the luggage. Much of it had burned, but some of the fibers had proved remarkably resilient, with even flashes of color still visible here and there.

Once he was on the ridge he poked at it with his foot, pulled a couple of suitcases about, creating enough disturbance that another billow of smoke rose up, but he saw it had done all the burning it would do. After that climb and in the late afternoon sun, he couldn’t even feel any additional heat rising from it.