"Then get the captain's headset off its hook," she said, "and come and sit down. Carefully. The floor is not your friend tonight."
Outside the windows, lightning lit the storm, cloud beyond cloud, all the way down to the earth, and Micah reached for the headset with a hand that shook only a little.
Chapter 15: The Right Seat
The captain's seat was still warm.
Micah did not let himself think about that for more than a second, because a second was all he could spare. He climbed into the left seat carefully, the pilot's seat, the one Captain Mercer had warmed all the way from Jackson, and the whole aeroplane seemed to change around him. In row 23 the storm had been something happening to him. Here, in front of the wide glowing panels, the storm was information. Speed. Altitude. Heading. A horizon line on the attitude indicator that swung and swung and would not settle, begging somebody's hands to settle it.
His hands shook so badly he hid them in his lap.
"Headset on," Vasquez said. "Mic over your mouth. Good. Now look at me, Micah, not at the lights. Lights lie when you're scared. Look at me."
He looked. Her face was grey with pain, her right arm folded against her ribs, but her eyes were steady, and steadiness, he discovered, was something you could borrow.
"I am the pilot in command of this aeroplane," she said. "That does not change because you are sitting there. You are my hands. That is not a small thing. Hands are how a pilot talks to the sky. So we will go slowly, and we will go exactly, and we will bring this aeroplane down. Say it back."
"You're in command," Micah said. "I'm your hands. Slowly and exactly."
"Good boy. Now. Both your hands on the yoke. Lightly. Feel what it's doing first. Don't fight it. Fly the plane first, panic later. Did your Mr. Abernathy teach you that?"
"Yes, ma'am," Micah said, startled, as his palms met the cool, worn yoke of a real aeroplane for the first time in his life. "Those exact words."
"Then he was a real pilot. Take hold properly."
The yoke was alive. That was the thing the simulator had tried to tell him and never quite could. It pushed and pulled and trembled with the storm's moods, and through it Micah could feel the whole vast jet straining, the way he used to feel a horse must feel through reins in the films his grandfather loved. His hands still shook. But underneath their shaking, they remembered. Three years of evenings. Thousands of hours. His grip settled the way Joe had drilled into him: firm, not strangled.
"We're turning off heading," Vasquez said. "See it. The storm is pushing us. I need you to hold two-seven-zero while I keep the wings level with you. Small corrections. Half of what you think. A quarter. There. There. Talk to me while you do it. Pilots talk. It keeps the brain honest."
"Heading two-six-eight," Micah read, his voice thin in the headset. "Two-six-nine. Coming back. Two-seven-zero. Holding two-seven-zero, ma'am."
"Altitude?"
"Thirty-six thousand four hundred, dropping. Thirty-six thousand three."
"Then we help her. Ease back with me, on my count, gentle as church. Now."
Together, her left hand and both of his, they coaxed the nose up, and the great jet, shuddering, answered. The descent slowed. On the attitude indicator the little wings crept toward level and, for three whole seconds, held.
Micah let out a breath he had owned since row 23.
"That's flying," Vasquez said quietly. "Remember that you did that. Now the checklist. Left side, clipped to the yoke. Take it. Read it aloud, every line, and I will answer, and neither of us skips. That is how professionals stay alive, Micah. Not by being heroes. By reading the list."
His fingers fumbled the clip. Then the paper was in front of him, dense and ordinary and beautiful, and his voice, when he found it, was stronger than he expected.
"Autopilot," he read.
"Disconnected," Vasquez answered. "Continue."
"Flight directors."
"On. Continue."
"Thrust levers."
"Manual, set." Her left hand moved as she said it, quick and sure. "Continue, Micah. Louder. The storm doesn't get a vote, but I need to hear you."
He read louder. Line by line, answer by answer, they walked the checklist down like two people crossing a river on stones, and with every stone the cockpit grew a fraction calmer, and the alarm that had screamed since Micah entered fell silent at a touch from Vasquez's hand, and in the new quiet he could hear the rain, and the engines, and his own heart slowing to meet the work.
"Last line," he said at last. "Cockpit secure."