Nora first saw the plane where the glacier had split open after a warm summer. She was checking rock movement for the regional survey office when a dull silver curve appeared under the ice, too smooth to be stone and too large to be debris. At first, she thought it was part of an old shelter. Then the helicopter circled once more, and she saw the wing.
By the time she reached the site on foot, half the fuselage had emerged from the thawing slope. The nose was buried in packed ice, but the tail and cargo door were visible, tilted at an angle as if the aircraft had slid there and simply stopped. The paint was faded, the logo almost gone, yet the shape was unmistakable. It was a freight plane.
Nora stood in the thin mountain wind and stared at it. A few calls and scrolling the web told her that twenty-eight years earlier, a cargo flight called Northline 816 had vanished on a winter route across the north. It carried no passengers, only two crew members, and a full hold of commercial freight. Search teams had looked for weeks, then months. Nothing had ever been found. The case had become one of those cold stories people mentioned only when talking about storms and bad luck. Now the plane was here, lying in the open at last. Nora raised her camera, took a picture, and felt the strange pull of a mystery that had been waiting far longer than she had been on the job.