"Good," Vasquez said. "Now we are not hoping anymore. Now it is a plan. Fly the plan, Micah."
And he flew it, heading locked toward Memphis, while behind him a hundred and forty-two people folded their fears into napkins and held on.
Chapter 20: What His Mother Said
Grace Kim asked the question ten minutes later, almost as an afterthought, with one hand on the cockpit door frame.
"Micah, honey, is there anybody we should try to reach for you? The company can patch a call through the radio, sometimes, on a night like this. Your mama, maybe?"
His hands tightened on the yoke before he could stop them, and Vasquez felt the airplane answer.
"Eyes and hands, Micah," she said, not unkindly. "Correct it, then think."
He corrected it, small and smooth, and breathed out. "Sorry. I am back. Attitude holding."
"Good. Now answer Grace if you want to. It is your choice. A short call can steady a person. I have seen it."
For a moment he wanted it so badly that the wanting frightened him. He could hear her in his head already, Tanya Lawson, saying his name the way she said it when she found him asleep over his checklists at the kitchen table. Micah James Lawson, she would say, half scolding, half proud, you cannot fly the whole world from this kitchen.
But if she heard his voice shaking at eleven thousand feet, she would know. She always knew. And she was the one waiting for surgery, alone in a Chicago hospital, and she deserved one night of not being afraid for somebody else.
"No, ma'am," he told Grace. "Please do not call her. Not until we are on the ground. She is in the hospital herself. I want the next thing she hears about this flight to be that it landed."
Grace studied him, then nodded with a respect that made his eyes sting. "Then that is what she will hear. I will make sure of it myself."
When she had gone, the cockpit settled again into its working quiet: instruments, rain softening on the glass, Tom Reyes checking in at intervals as steady as a metronome. Micah's mind drifted in the small spaces between tasks, the way Joe had warned it would, and he let it drift where it needed to go.
He thought of his mother's hands the morning he left Jackson, straightening the collar of his thrift-store jacket at the gate. He thought of what she had said, fussing so she would not cry. You listen to me, Micah. Rich is what is in your head and in your hands. Do not let anybody in a better coat tell you what you are worth. You hear me? He had said yes without really hearing, the way fifteen-year-olds do. He heard her now, completely.
The little green notebook pressed against his chest in his pocket. On its first page, in his grandfather Walter's upright mechanic's handwriting, were the words: Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Underneath, in Micah's own smaller writing from three years ago: learn the whole checklist before you touch anything. He did not take the notebook out. He did not need to. It had done its work by riding there, close to his heart, the whole flight.
A sound came from behind them, through the door, that broke the quiet: a stretcher board shifting, Dr. Priya Nair's low, urgent voice, and then a different voice, rough and barely there.
Vasquez went still. "Grace?" she called.
The door opened a hand's width. Grace's face appeared, wet-eyed and smiling in a way that looked painful. "He is awake. Just for a moment. Dr. Nair says his color is better. He asked who is flying his airplane. She told him, and he said to tell you something. Both of you."
Micah could not turn around. He kept his eyes on the scan, because the scan was his promise. But every part of him listened.
"He said," Grace went on, "tell Elena her flap setting for the brief was right, two-seven is the correct runway after all this rain, and tell the boy in my seat to keep his hands light and his readbacks loud. Those were his words. Then he went back under, but his pulse held. Dr. Nair is pleased with his pulse."
Captain Daniel Mercer, alive, half-conscious on the cabin floor, had spent his one waking moment doing what captains do: confirming a setting and encouraging his crew, all three of them, counting Micah in without hesitation.
Something in Micah's chest loosened and tightened at the same time.
"Micah," Vasquez said, and her voice had changed. "You heard the captain. Hands light."
"Hands light," he repeated, easing his grip until the yoke rested in his fingers instead of being gripped by them. "Readbacks loud."
"Then give Tom a loud one. He is about to hand us to Memphis Approach, and I want them to hear exactly who is helping me bring this airplane home."