"Boy," Vane said, and his voice had lost its certainty somewhere on the way out. "If you go up there—"
"Excuse me, sir," Micah said politely, the way his mother had raised him. "She's waiting on me."
And he stepped past Richard Vane, toward the front of the plane.
Chapter 14: The Cockpit Door
The aisle was only twenty-three rows long, and it was the longest walk of Micah's life.
The plane would not hold still beneath him. It climbed and sank in long, queasy swells, and twice it dropped out from under his feet so suddenly that he caught himself on strangers' seat backs and strangers' hands caught him, held him up, passed him forward. An old woman seized his sleeve and said, "Go on, baby, go on," in a voice thick with tears. The businessman in the grey suit, who had studied his tray table when Grace asked for help, stood halfway out of his seat to let Micah pass and said, "Sorry. Sorry," to no one in particular. A little girl held up a stuffed rabbit as he went by, as if it might help.
He did not feel brave. His legs were water. But Joe Abernathy had a rule Micah had heard a hundred times, and he walked to it like a rope in the dark: You don't have to feel calm. You only have to do the next thing calmly. The next thing was one more step. Then one more.
At row 8 he saw Dr. Priya Nair.
She was on her knees in the aisle beside the forward galley, where the crew had laid Captain Daniel Mercer flat on a board, and the sight of the captain stopped Micah's breath in his chest. The tall, warm-voiced man who had welcomed them aboard in Jackson, who had joked about Chicago weather over the speakers, lay grey-faced and still, his shirt open, Dr. Nair's hands moving over him with terrible steadiness, a flight attendant holding a light, another counting aloud under her breath.
"Clear of him, love," Dr. Nair said to Micah without looking up, calm as Sunday. "Give us room. He's alive, and I intend to keep him that way. Your job is up there."
He's alive. Micah carried those two words the last few steps like a lamp.
Then he was at the cockpit door.
It stood half open, banging softly in its frame, and through it came a smell he knew from Sky Lab and had never expected to smell in the real sky: hot electronics, coffee, and fear. Alarms were sounding, two of them, layered. Red and amber lights moved on the panels as the plane pitched, throwing colour across the small dark space. Rain lashed the cockpit windows and the world beyond them was black, then white with lightning, then black again.
And in the right-hand seat, First Officer Elena Vasquez was flying the aeroplane with her left hand.
Her right arm was cradled against her body, and even in the bad light Micah could see her wrist was wrong, bent at an angle wrists do not bend, her face shining with sweat above it. Her left hand gripped the yoke and her whole body was braced with the effort, because the yoke was fighting her, the storm was fighting her, and she was one-handed against all of it.
"Close the door behind you," she said, without turning around. "Wind gets in. It matters."
Micah pulled the door shut. The cabin noise fell away, and the alarms got louder, and the rain got louder, and Vasquez's breathing got louder.
"You're Grace's boy," she said. "The simulator boy."
"Yes, ma'am. Micah Lawson."
"Micah Lawson, listen to me, because I will only explain this once." The plane rolled and she hauled it back with a sound in her throat she did not bother to hide. "My captain is dying in my aisle. My right wrist is broken. The autopilot is gone. I am a very good pilot, and I cannot fly this aeroplane and run its checklists and work its radios alone, in this weather, with one hand. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
"Yes, ma'am," Micah said. "You need a second pair of hands."
"I need a second pair of hands that does exactly what it is told, exactly when it is told, and nothing else. Nothing else, Micah. If I say do not touch, you could be looking at a button that would save our lives and you do not touch it until I say the word. Is that clear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Are you going to panic?"
He thought about it honestly, the way Grace had asked him to. "I don't think so, ma'am. I might be sick later. Not now."
For the first time she turned her head, just enough, and looked at him properly, the boy in the thrift-store jacket standing in her ruined cockpit with his grandfather's notebook swelling his pocket. Something in her face changed, not softening, exactly, but settling, like a checklist item checked.