Underneath, in Micah's own writing from age twelve, it said: People too, Grandpa. People too.
Chapter 30: Wings
Seven months later, on a bright Saturday morning in Jackson, Mississippi, Micah Lawson put on a jacket that fit him, because his mother had insisted on hemming this one new, and walked out across the little airfield at Sky Lab with his logbook under his arm.
The airfield was not really Sky Lab's — it belonged to the county, a single strip of cracked runway beyond the centre's fence — but this morning it felt like theirs. The new simulators were already humming inside the building behind him, and a fresh-painted sign stood by the gate, modest and blue: THE WALTER LAWSON SCHOLARSHIP — FIRST RECIPIENT, it did not say. Joe Abernathy had refused to put Micah's name on anything. "Signs are for the next kids," Joe had said. "You just be the proof it works."
The proof, this morning, stood waiting on the tarmac: a small white training plane with a blue stripe, two seats, one engine, and a propeller turning lazily in the warm-up. A real aircraft. Not a simulator. Micah had dreamed about this exact aeroplane shape for three years, and now his mouth was dry and his palms were sweating inside his gloves, exactly like a boy who had never flown anything real in his life — because he hadn't. That was the whole point of today. Today it would be lawful, and taught, and logged, and his.
"Checklist," said Joe Abernathy, climbing in on the right side with the care of a seventy-one-year-old whose knees had opinions. His instructor's licence had been renewed specially, after what the county paper called "some community encouragement." "Out loud, Micah. The way we do it."
"Yes, sir," Micah said, and took the left seat — the pilot's seat — and settled into it slowly, the way you sit down in a church pew. His hands found their places and, for one breath, they shook. He thought of rain on a windshield at night, of a cast propped on a cushion, of a steady voice from Memphis saying, Flight 417, you're cleared, we're all down here pulling for you.
Then the shaking stopped, because the checklist had begun, and checklists were home.
"Fuel, checked. Controls, free and correct. Instruments — "
Behind the fence, where families were allowed to stand, Tanya Lawson watched with her hands folded over the place where her heart, repaired and strong, beat under her best blouse. She had flown — flown, in an aeroplane, as a passenger who laughed at takeoff — from Chicago two weeks earlier, because she had promised her son she would come home to Jackson with him, and Tanya Lawson kept promises. Beside her stood Aunt Denise, and Sofia Delgado, who had driven four hours with a thermos and a banner she was forbidden from unrolling until after the flight. And at the end of the fence, leaning on it with his hat in his hand, stood Daniel Mercer, thinner, silver-haired, walking with a cane he used mostly for pointing at aeroplanes, exactly as he had sworn in a hospital room that he one day would.
Micah saw them all through the little window as he taxied, and lifted one hand — a small wave, quickly back to work, because Joe was watching and Joe missed nothing.
"All right," Joe said, at the end of the runway, over the intercom, as the little plane trembled with eagerness under them. "Wind's friendly. Sky's empty. This one's not an emergency, son. This one's yours. Nice and easy."
Micah lined the nose up on the centre line. The strip ran ahead of him into a sky so wide and blue it looked invented. He thought of his grandfather's hands, blackened at the knuckles with honest grease, guiding a wrench and a boy with the same patience. He thought of a hospital-cleaner's double shifts, and a thrift-store jacket, and a green notebook worn soft as cloth. He thought of a captain's whisper and a co-pilot's splinted wrist and row twenty-three, where a frightened boy had once raised his hand because nobody else could.
For Walter, he thought. For Captain Mercer, who kept his promise and came to the fence. For Mama, who is standing right there, alive, watching me do this properly.
"Sky Lab One," said the tower, in a voice nothing like Tom Reyes's, and yet somehow exactly like it, "you are cleared for takeoff."
Micah wrapped his hands around the controls. They were steady. They had done their homework ten thousand times, and today, for the first time, the sky was simply asking him a question he was finally old enough, and trained enough, and permitted to answer.
"Joe?" he said.
"Right here beside you," Joe said. "Always was."
Micah smiled, and pushed the throttle forward, and gave the only answer there had ever been, the one his whole life had been practising in the dark so it would be ready in the light:
"Taking the controls."