All reason is lost to Gertrud then. She throws the boy at her husband and Leonhard catches him by his collar. Like a cat. Like some sort of feral animal. With one arm he holds the small boy over the open window and simply drops him. Walter Doehner vanishes from sight, his screams fading as he falls.
It is much harder to get little Werner through the window. He’s frightened and fighting hard to stay with his mother. When Leonhard picks him up like an invalid and throws him at the window, the child bounces off, splayed across the casement like a starfish.
There is sadness and gentleness in Leonhard’s deep voice when he looks at the boy and says, “I’m sorry.”
Gertrud’s husband sets a huge, strong hand on each side of the boy’s waist and pushes. Like a peg in a hole he pops through. And then he too is gone.
“Irene!” Matilde shouts, but her daughter is nowhere to be seen. The three of them are the only people left in the lounge, and they can barely speak or breathe or cry with the smoke billowing and churning around them. The hem of Gertrud’s dress is on fire and she is slapping at it madly. A part of her registers that the skin on the palm of her right hand begins to hum in pain.
“Irene!”
Gertrud wonders how Matilde does it, how she goes out the window without Irene. How she chooses her sons over her daughter. But she does. Gertrud blinks and Matilde is scrambling over the windowsill, her feet dangling, and then with a wounded cry that has nothing to do with fire or pain or burning, she drops to the ground below.
Leonhard reaches for Gertrud. He will not wait any longer. But the ship hits the ground and they are knocked apart, thrown to their hands and knees. Chairs slide and topple and join together in a giant knot between them. Leonhard reaches for her. Calls her name with such a note of fear that her heart stumbles in response
He is closer to the window than she is. He could jump. He should jump.
Gertrud reaches for him. “Please don’t leave me.”
THE STEWARDESS
Emilie opens her eyes. She blinks. She sees nothing but red and smells nothing but smoke. Something wet and warm drips down her forehead and into her eyes, and she realizes that her scalp is bleeding. She wipes the back of her hand across her face. Wipes the blood out of her eyes.
Emilie hears a deep groan and realizes it’s coming from her. She rolls to her side. Coughs. There is so much smoke in the room and it is so hot and she can’t order the frantic bursts of thought that ricochet inside her skull. Emilie tries to remember where she is and what’s happening. Matilde Doehner’s cabin. Something is very wrong. Something happened and she is hurt and she needs to get out of this room, but she can’t remember why or how. And then…
Oh.
An explosion.
Emilie raises herself onto her hands and knees. She crawls forward.
THE JOURNALIST
“I could never leave you,” Leonhard says.
He flings chairs out of the way. She hears this, barely, over the roar of the fire, and then his arm is around her waist like a steel cable and they are loping toward the window. He does not release his grip as they scramble over the edge or even as they hover there for a moment, their legs dangling into space. It is only when they drop into smoke and emptiness that she feels his grip on her waist relax, and only then because he does not want to fall on top of her.
The drop is no more than ten feet, but she has no way of preparing for the impact with so much smoke obscuring her vision. She hits the ground leaning forward with her legs slightly bent and she’s pitched forward, unable to break her fall. The impact knocks the air from her lungs. Gertrud lies there, stunned, the side of her face mashed into earth that is strangely damp and cool. Leonhard’s feet come into view, and then his hand is at her waistband, yanking her up. But she still can’t breathe. Her lips tingle and her eyes burn. There is a scratch on her cheek, and it feels as though she’s holding a hot coal in the palm of her right hand. She looks at it, confused, and sees angry red blisters where she beat out the fire on her hemline.
Gertrud feels a bright, clean thread of air entering her lungs and she gasps for it more greedily. Leonhard pulls her forward without an ounce of gentleness. He is almost brutal in his desperation to get out from beneath the burning airship. They run through the obstacle course of debris, fallen girders, flaming furniture, a charred body—she looks away from this—hunks of wreckage and objects so twisted by fire and the impact of the wreck that she cannot even identify them.
They run.
But not fast enough.
Gertrud feels the sparks on her shoulders and in her scalp. She looks up to see an inferno settling down on top of them.
THE NAVIGATOR