An enormous crow burst from the wreckage with a scream as Ava approached. It flapped away angrily, circling once, before flying towards a nearby grove of trees and disappearing in the shadowy twilight. Ava didn't believe in ghosts, but she also hadn't believed her grandfather when he'd told her about that clock so long ago. And now here she was.

She reached forward to touch the cold metal hull, below where the front of the cockpit had been ripped away. The opening was too high for her to climb into, so she began to walk slowly along the length of hardened earth towards where the wing would have been. She could hear nothing but her own breath as she went; that, and the soft hiss of her hand sliding across the frozen skin of the great machine. The air had that same unnerving stillness as the attic from before, and yet the destruction here was anything sterile.