Page 157 of The Sins of Noelle

My eyes snap wide open as panic overtakes me.

Immediately, more pain explodes in my body as I attempt to move.

I’m in between two seats, my head right next to the metal body of a chair.

Lifting my hand up and touching my forehead, I’m not surprised to find blood oozing from an open cut.

Fuck! Something happened to the plane.

The last thing I remember was a loud noise before we started losing altitude. But something else flashes in my mind—a fire bursting from one of the wings. And as I look around, I note a gaping hole where the right wing of the plane should have been.

As I slowly come around, I forget all about the situation I find myself in and my own injuries as fear that something might have happened to Noelle.

“Noelle!” The noise is wrenched from my throat, ragged and filled with anguish, as I force myself to move. “Noelle! Where are you?”

Please answer me and tell me you’re alright.

On my elbows, I use what little strength I still have to push myself in a sitting position.

The area around my chest hurts like hell, but I push against the pain. My only purpose is to make suresheis fine.

All previous anger fades away, replaced with a sense of desolation unlike I’ve ever experienced as I realize how pointless everything is if she’s gone.

No! She can’t be gone. She’s fine. She has to be fine.

I take a deep breath as I wince at every little move, but I’ve suffered worse in my life. If there’s something I’ve learned after everything I’ve been through it’s the fact that the human body is capable of extraordinary things even when pushed to the limit. Because in the end, the desire to survive is more powerful than any transient pain.

All my life, I’ve done the best I could to survive, enduring unspeakable acts because I knew there was hope at the end of the tunnel.

But now… Now that hope has a name, a physical incarnation. That hope might be deceiving, and she might be a wicked liar, but she ismyhope.

Beyond the desire to survive is the realization that I cannot survivewithouther.

My voice echoes back, but with no answer.

True dread overtakes me as I feel my heart sinking.

“Noelle, answer me,” I grit out, managing to get to my knees. Holding on to the armrest of one of the chairs, I push myself up, barely able to rise to my feet.

“Fuck,” I squeeze my eyes shut as my vision almost blacks out from the sudden bout of movement combined with the splitting headache from my injury.

I blink a few times, zeroing in on the destruction around us.

God…

Half of the right wall had collapsed with the wing. The seats on the other side are ripped apart, some hanging from their wires, some cut in half. And as I look into the horizon, I can’t help but shiver as it dawns on me what had cushioned our free fall.

We’re not on ground. We’re caught in a tree—a very tall tree by the looks of it.

“Raf?” That small sound is a heavenly melody to my ears.

“Noelle, where are you?” I call out as I take a step forward.

“Here,” she coughs. “I’m…fine, I think,” she says before she pauses.

“I don’t see you,” I bark out, still terrified that she might be injured.

A flutter of fabric grabs my attention at the other end of the plane.

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