There is Jess, a six year old girl from England, who lost her mother, father and twin sister in the crash there is Hiro, another six year old Japanese boy who lost his mother and Bobby, a similarly young boy from Brooklyn, who lost his single mother. For days, weeks, months, the three children – all of whom survived their respective crashes with minimal physical injury – come to be known as “The Three”. Although there is no record of a miracle child in the African plane’s downing, rumors abound. There are three known child survivors, one from each of three of the crashes.

Now, I say there was a child on each flight. It’s a very alarming scenario, and one that isn’t all that hard to envision. Panic and paranoia grip the populace and the resultant power struggle away from politics and into religion threatens to upset the balance of global economies. The four child survivors are declared to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Anomalies are exploited, other world events are interpolated, the last voicemail message of a dying passenger is deified and suddenly talk of the Rapture becomes strident. The radical fringe latches on immediately, followed quickly by religious fanatics. It doesn’t take long for conspiracy theories to spawn, as so many try to make some sense of what happened. Thousands die, unexpectedly, tragically, inexplicably. Some of the passengers are taken in a matter of moments, others are more aware of the danger before the end comes.

The final one slams into the heart of a densely populated township in Cape Town, wreaking as much carnage on the ground as in the air. One plane crashes into the swamps of the Florida Everglades, one is piloted straight into Mount Fuji rather than going down in a heavily populated area, another nosedives into the ocean. One child who miraculously survives.Įach crash occurs for different reasons: mechanical failure, bad weather, human error there are no signs of terrorist attack, no evidence of unexplained explosions, no indication of gunfire or foul play. Sarah Lotz creates such a scenario in The Three, a new novel that documents world reaction to what has come to be known in her alternate history as Black Thursday, when four commuter airplanes from four different airlines crash on four different continents, with the loss of all on board – except for one child on each flight. But what if something happened that seemed to defy coincidence? That couldn’t just be explained away, that had to have a deeper purpose? How far could you hold suspicion in check in the face of the unexplainable? New ones pop up every day, and old ones just don’t ever seem to go away, no matter how conclusively they are debunked.

The three lotz