The jet shuddered, climbed a little, shuddered again. The rain drummed. The engines held their note, brave and even, and Micah held his notebook through his jacket and listened to a plane asking, with every sound it made, for somebody to fly it.
Up front, the cockpit door banged once in its frame, and Grace Kim came out backwards into the galley, one hand gripping the wall, her face the colour of paper, looking back at something Micah could not see.
Chapter 12: Is There Anyone?
Grace Kim did not look like that in any of Micah's imaginings of flying.
She had been kind at the gate in Jackson, and kind again at row 23, with a smile that made the whole cabin feel safe. Now she stood at the front of the economy cabin holding a handset in a white-knuckled grip, her hair coming loose, and her voice, when it came through the speakers, had a crack running straight down the middle of it.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said. "I need you to listen to me very carefully."
The cabin quieted in layers. The baby kept crying. Somebody's phone played a cheerful tune into a seat pocket until its owner fumbled it silent.
"Our captain has been taken ill," Grace said. "He is being cared for by a doctor among our passengers, and he is in good hands. Our first officer is at the controls, but she has been injured. She is flying this aircraft with one hand, and she cannot do everything that needs doing alone."
Micah's heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
"I am going to ask a question," Grace said, "and I need every person on this aircraft to hear it. Is there anyone on board with flight experience? Any experience at all. Military, private, training, simulators. Anyone who has ever sat at aircraft controls and understands a checklist. If that is you, please, raise your hand and ring your call button. Please."
The word please hung in the air.
Nobody moved.
One hundred and forty-two passengers, and the cabin went so still that Micah could hear the rain. He could hear the engines. He could hear, far ahead, a thin electronic alarm insisting on something, over and over.
He looked at the rows in front of him. A businessman in a grey suit studied his tray table like it might save him. Two college boys shook their heads at each other. An old man near the wing closed his eyes and moved his lips in prayer. Nobody's hand went up. Nobody's call button chimed.
In his head, Joe Abernathy's voice, dry as kindling: The sky doesn't care about your feelings, Micah. Answer the question that's in front of you.
The question in front of him was simple and it was enormous. Had he ever sat at aircraft controls? Yes. For three years. Three evenings a week at Sky Lab, and every Saturday Joe could spare, in a simulator built from a retired cockpit and stubbornness. Thousands of hours. Checklists until he dreamed them. Engine failures, crosswinds, storms exactly like this one, flown again and again until his hands knew things before his mind did.
And never once in a real aeroplane.
He was not a pilot. He knew that the way he knew his own name. Raising his hand would not make him one, and if he raised it and they misunderstood, if they thought the fifteen-year-old in the thrift-store jacket was something he was not, people could die of that misunderstanding.
But his hand knew something too. It knew the weight of a yoke. It knew how to read a checklist aloud so another person could work. It knew, Joe said, how to stay calm and do the next right thing.
Sofia was watching him. She had turned around in her seat, her face pale, her dark hair wild from sleep and fear.
"Micah," she whispered. "You told me. At the gate. The simulator place. You told me you basically live there."
"Simulators," he whispered back. "Sofia, it's not real flying. I've never—"
"You said the man who teaches you flew airliners for thirty years. You said you practise emergencies. This is an emergency, Micah." Her eyes filled, but her voice did not shake. "There's nobody else. Look around. There's nobody else."
Grace's voice came again, thinner now. "Please. Anyone. Even training experience. Please check with the people beside you."
Micah swallowed. His mouth tasted of metal. He thought of his mother in a hospital bed in Chicago, waiting for surgery, who had cleaned hospital rooms on double shifts to buy the ticket folded in his notebook. Page one of that notebook, in Grandpa Walter's square handwriting: Listen first. Then act.
He had listened to every sound this plane had made since Jackson.
His hand rose.
It rose slowly, shaking worse than the aircraft, into the rough air of the cabin, and Sofia let out a breath like a sob and reached across and squeezed his other hand once, hard.