Sanaa looked back at the word list. Five-letter words ending in -ING that took a front hook. She knew them cold. Knowing them cold was not the point. The point was to have something true and fixed to look at while other people handled a thing that kept changing shape.
Her own scorebook was in the front pocket of her backpack, zipped shut. Every game she had ever played was in it — her score and her opponent's, signed by both players, because that was the rule and also, her father said, the whole point. At Larkspur, he had told her once, when she asked why he could never just fix a late flight for someone important, there had to be something in every system that could not be argued with afterward. A scoresheet worked because nobody could go back with an eraser and make the semifinal kinder. It said what had happened, whether you liked the result or not.
Sanaa thought about that while the tablet man came back from the galley with his expression rearranged.
He did not sit. He stood at row two with the tablet held against his chest, and this time he spoke to both of them — to Devereux, because Devereux demanded to be spoken to, and to Sanaa, because she was, after all, the other name in the discrepancy.
"We've pulled the full reservation record," he said. "Miss Osei, your booking was made months ago. Seat 2A, confirmed, First Class, Denver to Orlando on Flight 208. That confirmation has never been cancelled by you. It has never been changed by you."
Devereux made a small sound, impatient. "Then give her — "
The official kept his eyes on the tablet, and Sanaa understood, with a coldness that started in her hands, that he was reading exactly what was there because reading exactly what was there was the only safe place left to stand.
"This morning," he said, "that record was altered. 2A was released and reassigned in the system, and Miss Osei was moved to a later status that — well. That wouldn't have boarded her in this cabin at all."
"Altered by whom?" Renee asked from the aisle. She asked it too quickly, and then seemed to regret the asking.
"That's the irregularity," the official said. "There's no ordinary agent code attached to the change. When one of our agents at a desk or on a phone line touches a confirmed reservation, their code stamps it. Their location stamps it. The reason field has to be filled. None of that is here."
The cabin had gone quiet enough that Sanaa could hear the air vents.
"Errors happen," Devereux said at once. "Systems glitch. I will not be moved for a glitch."
"No one is saying you caused — " the older official began from the flight deck door.
"I should hope not."
But the tablet man was still looking at the empty place where a code should have been, and Sanaa could see he was no longer really talking to the cabin. He was talking uphill, to people on the other end of a phone, people whose names arrived in the galley by radio and by message and changed the way the crew held their shoulders. She caught only fragments when he turned back to the galley for a second call.
" — no, not gate-issued — "
" — not a name she would know, no — "
" — yes, Corporate Integrity. Yes, I'll hold the aircraft until — "
Corporate Integrity. Sanaa knew that phrase the way she knew a difficult seven-letter word: she recognized it, and she knew it weighed more than it looked. Her father almost never talked about that part of Larkspur at home. When he did, he called it the department you called when you hoped you were wrong.
Renee found Sanaa's eye. Renee's face had changed too. Whatever private sympathy she had offered before was still there, but something official had joined it now, something that made her stand straighter.
Captain Whitaker came out of the flight deck herself then, and the whole First Class cabin attended to her without being asked. She was not tall, but she had the occupying quality of a tournament director entering a playing room — the games did not stop, exactly, but everyone suddenly remembered there were rules with a name behind them.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said, "we're going to be at the gate a while longer. I know that's not what you want to hear. There is a record that needs to be verified before I will take this airplane anywhere, and we're going to verify it here, on the ground, where verifying it is still easy. Thank you for your patience."
She looked at Sanaa when she said patience. Or Sanaa thought she did. It might only have been that captains, like directors, learned to look at the person in the room who was being asked to bear the most waiting.
Then Captain Whitaker turned to the tablet man and asked a question Sanaa heard perfectly, because the captain intended questions on her aircraft to be heard perfectly.
"If that change didn't come through an agent," she said, "then show me where it did come through. Get me the audit ledger."
Chapter 8 — What Was Done in His Name
The officials let Devereux make a phone call because, Sanaa supposed, there are some requests an airline does not refuse a man until it is certain it has to.
He made it from seat 2A, which he still had not left. He turned his body a fraction toward the window, as if a fraction were privacy, and held his phone low. Sanaa, still standing in the aisle with her word book closed now against her chest, could hear him the way you hear the player at the next table in a tournament hall — not because you are listening, but because the room is built out of people trying not to be overheard and failing by degrees.
"Pick up," he said first. Then, warmer, covered in relief. "It's me. I'm still on the ground. No — listen to me. There is some nonsense with the seat. They are talking about records. I need you to tell whoever you spoke to at Larkspur that — "
He stopped.
Sanaa watched his free hand, which had been resting flat on the leather briefcase in his lap. The fingers curled, slowly.
"When did I ask for that?" he said.
The person on the other end kept talking. Sanaa could hear the shape of it even if she could not hear the words — the bright, rapid cadence of someone in an office explaining that everything had been taken care of, that it had all been very routine, that someone senior had been very obliging. She knew that cadence from tournaments.