At the front of the cabin, Grace Kim's head came up. Her eyes found the raised hand in row 23, travelled down to the boy beneath it, and Micah watched her understand, all at once, that help had come in the last shape she had expected.
"You," she said into the handset, so the whole plane heard it. "Row twenty-three. What's your name?"
"Micah," he said. "Micah Lawson."
"Micah Lawson," Grace repeated, "how old are you?"
"Fifteen," he said, and the cabin erupted.
Chapter 13: Not Him
The noise that went through the cabin was not quite shouting. It was worse than shouting. It was fear looking for somewhere to stand, and finding Micah.
"Fifteen?" a man said, two rows ahead. "He's a child."
"She can't be serious," said someone else. "Tell me she's not serious."
And then, from first class, parting the curtain with one ringed hand, came Richard Vane.
Micah recognised him from the terminal in Jackson, where Vane had looked at his jacket the way a man looks at a stain. He recognised him from the complaints that had floated back through the curtain all evening, about the wine, about the seat, about the storm, as if the storm were a service the airline had failed to cancel on his account. Now Vane stood in the aisle with his tie loosened and his face flushed, and he pointed at Micah as if Micah were a mistake that needed correcting before it spread.
"No," Vane said. "Absolutely not. Not him."
"Mr. Vane, sit down, please," Grace said.
"I will not sit down. Do you see him? He's a kid. Look at him, look at the jacket, he's some charity case they let on this plane, and you want to put him in the cockpit? I have a company. I have grandchildren. I am not dying because this airline ran out of pilots and picked a mascot."
The word mascot landed on Micah's chest and stayed there. His raised hand had come down at some point. He could feel his ears burning. Part of him, a shameful, honest part, wanted the floor to open, wanted Grace to shake her head and say there had been a misunderstanding, wanted to go back to being nobody in row 23.
Sofia stood up.
She had to hold the seat back to do it, because the plane was still rolling under them, but she stood, sixteen years old and furious, and turned to face first class and everyone.
"His name is Micah," she said, loud enough for the whole cabin. "He goes to an aviation centre three times a week. He has flown that simulator for three years. Emergencies. Storms. He told me all about it before any of this happened, when there was nothing to brag about. Who else here has done that? You, sir? Have you? Anybody?"
Nobody answered her.
"He raised his hand when the rest of you were studying the floor," Sofia said. "That's the bravest thing I've ever seen anybody do, and you're booing it because of his jacket?"
"It isn't the jacket," Vane began, and then stopped, because perhaps, for the first time, he heard himself. "It's— he's fifteen years old."
"He's fifteen years old," Grace Kim said, "and he is the only offer of help on this aircraft."
She came down the aisle then, half walking, half bracing herself from seat back to seat back against the roll of the plane, and stopped at row 23, and crouched so her face was level with Micah's. Up close he could see she was frightened too, and that she had decided, the way Joe decided things, to be frightened and useful at the same time.
"Micah," she said quietly. "Tell me the truth, all of it, right now. Not the good version. The truth."
"I'm not a pilot," he said. "I've never flown a real plane. Not once. I go to Sky Lab, in Jackson. It's a community centre. Mr. Abernathy, he flew for the airlines, he taught me. I've got thousands of hours on the simulator there. I know checklists. I know the emergency ones by heart. I know how to read instruments out loud and keep my hands steady and do what I'm told." His voice shook and he let it. "That's all of it. That's everything I am."
Grace held his gaze a moment longer. Then she lifted the handset.
"Elena," she said. "I have a passenger. Fifteen. Three years of simulator training under a retired airline captain, checklists and emergency procedures, by his own account, and he told me the truth before he told me anything else." She listened, and Micah listened to the silence with her, and the plane rolled, and the alarm up front went on insisting. "Yes," Grace said. "Yes, he's calm. He is calm."
She lowered the handset slowly.
"First Officer Vasquez says bring him," she said. "Now. Before the next cell hits."
Vane stepped into the aisle as Micah stood, whether to block it or by accident Micah never knew. They were face to face, the tall man and the boy, and the plane tilted, and Vane put out a hand, not to Micah, but to the seat, to keep from falling.