Chapter 8: Weather Ahead
The first sign was not a sound. It was the ice in Micah's cup beginning to tremble in tiny, perfect circles, though the plane itself still felt smooth. He watched the ripples widen and thought, absurdly, of the glass of water in a movie he had seen at Sky Lab, the one Joe had paused to make a point.
"Air talks before it shouts," Joe had said. "You learn to hear the whisper, you will not be surprised by the scream."
Micah sat up straighter.
Ahead of the left wing, where the moonlit cloud sea had rolled unbroken from Mississippi, the horizon had changed. Towers of cloud now rose over Tennessee, stacked and swollen, lit from inside every few seconds by silent flares of lightning that made their edges glow white, then violet, then nothing. The storm did not look like weather. It looked like a city built for giants, and Flight 417 was flying straight toward its gates.
Sofia saw it too. She had been dozing against her window, but now she turned, wide awake. "Micah. Is that where we are going?"
"That is Tennessee," he said. "Captain Mercer said there was weather to watch. I think that is the weather."
"It looks alive."
"It kind of is." He tried to keep his voice easy. "Storm cells. Pilots go around the worst of them. They can see them on radar long before we can."
As if the captain had heard him, the cabin speakers clicked.
"Folks, Captain Mercer again." The warmth was still there, but underneath it was a new, clipped focus Micah recognized from every serious simulator session Joe had ever run. "We are watching a line of thunderstorms building over Tennessee, right along our route to Chicago. First Officer Vasquez and I are working with air traffic control on the smoothest way around. I am going to turn the seatbelt sign back on, and I need everyone seated with belts fastened low and tight. Flight attendants, please secure the cabin and take your seats. We may feel some bumps. Nothing we have not handled before, but I would rather you were strapped in for them."
The sign chimed on. Around Micah, the peaceful cruise dissolved into rustling, clicking, low murmurs. Grace Kim and the other attendants moved swiftly down the aisles, checking belts, collecting cups, closing overhead bins with firm thumps. Grace's calm had not changed, but her speed had, and Micah noticed that more than anything.
When she reached him, she gave the strap across his lap a short tug herself. "Tight, just like that. Notebook safe?"
"In my pocket, ma'am."
"Good. Keep it there. And Micah — " She glanced toward the front, where the cockpit door stood closed and suddenly very important. "Whatever you hear, remember the captain and Ms. Vasquez do this for a living. Trust the voices."
"I do," he said, and meant it, and was still afraid.
From first class came Vane's voice, loud enough to be heard through the curtain. "Secure the cabin? I did not pay first-class money to be bounced around Tennessee like cargo. Tell the captain to climb over it or go around it properly."
Micah could not hear Grace's reply, only its tone — courteous steel — and then a silence that suggested even Richard Vane understood he would get nothing more.
The jet began to turn, and then to climb a little, the engine note deepening. Micah pressed his palm flat against the wall panel beside his window, the way his grandfather had laid a hand on a running engine in an old photograph, feeling for the truth of a machine through vibration. Under his hand, Flight 417 felt purposeful, pushed, a living thing being asked for more.
"There," he murmured. "She is working harder."
"Is that bad?" the woman in 23B asked, her belt pulled so tight the strap wrinkled her blouse.
"Not bad. It is the captain asking for altitude. Higher can mean smoother, if the tops are not too tall." He repeated Joe's lessons like prayers he was not sure he had the right to say out loud. "They will be talking to Memphis Center, looking for a hole in the line."
Lightning bloomed inside the nearest tower, close enough that several passengers gasped, and for an instant the whole cloud was lit like paper from behind — beautiful and terrible at once. Thunder did not reach them at this height, and the silence where thunder should have been made it stranger.
Sofia reached back between the seats and found Micah's hand without looking, gripping hard. "You are not scared," she said. It was not quite a question.
"I am," he said honestly. "I just know what the sounds mean, mostly. Scared and knowing can be true at the same time. Joe says that is basically the whole job."