He did it without being asked in that moment, which Sanaa thought might have cost him more than being asked would have. He gathered his leather briefcase, straightened his jacket, and stepped into the aisle to let her in to the window — to 2A, her seat, chosen and confirmed months earlier when the championship draw had come out and her father had sat with her at the kitchen table and said, pick the seat you want and we will book it properly, like anybody else, no special treatment, like any other passenger. She had picked a window because over the mountains, early, the light did something she wanted to see before a tournament. She had picked it for a reason so ordinary it had embarrassed her to explain.
Now she slid into it and buckled her belt and put her battered word book in the seat pocket and her scorebook, still zipped in her backpack, under the seat in front of her, and the ordinariness of all of it nearly undid her. Her hands were shaking. She folded them in her lap, under the edge of her terracotta-orange hoodie where nobody could grade her on it, and breathed.
Devereux lowered himself into 2B.
Neither of them spoke. The aisle seat was his, had always been his, and he occupied it now with the contained stillness of a man sitting in a room where he has been told the proceedings will continue without his commentary. His fountain pen stayed clipped. His phone stayed dark. At one point the man in 1B twisted around to look at them both and thought better of it within the same second.
Time did the rest in its usual untidy way. There was a new departure slot to wait for, and then a queue, and then paperwork that had to be redone because an airplane that has been held at a gate for hours is, administratively, almost a different airplane. Passengers who had connections in Orlando were rebooked in low, urgent conversations. A baby two rows behind, who had been admirably patient, reached a limit and said so at volume. Captain Whitaker came on twice more to apologize without ever once sounding as if the apology were the airline's strategy rather than simply the truth.
"We are," she said the second time, "finally, cleared to push. Thank you. I mean that particularly this morning."
The pushback, when it came, felt like a held tile finally being set down. Sanaa pressed her forehead — not quite, almost — toward the cool window. Denver fell into its proper order below them as they taxied: service roads, other airplanes waiting their turn, the terminal shrinking into a diagram. Then the runway. Then the rising note she had listened for at the gate, completed at last, and the ground let go of them all at once.
Hours late, Flight 208 climbed.
Below Sanaa's window the land west of Denver gathered itself and rose. She had flown this route in her head from a map, but maps do not prepare you for the Rockies as a presence — ridge behind ridge, snow holding in the high creases even where the lower slopes had gone brown and green, the whole range falling away beneath the wing in a long, patient recession, as if the continent were exhaling. She watched it without taking a photograph. Some things she liked to keep unrecorded until she had decided what they meant, and besides, her scorebook mind had already stored it where it counted.
Beside her, Edmund Devereux looked straight ahead at the seat back in front of him, at nothing, for the entire climb. When the seatbelt sign chimed off, he unbuckled, buckled again, and finally said, to the space between their seats and not to her, "I owe you an apology. I am not — prepared — to do it justice yet."
Sanaa considered that. At the board, an apology was a kind of move too. People deployed it to close a subject. People also, sometimes, meant it, and the difference was usually in whether they tried to make you hurry.
"Okay," she said.
It was all she gave him, and it was honest, and she turned back to the window before he could decide whether it was forgiveness. It was not. It was a scoresheet entry. Apology offered, incomplete. Noted. Play continues.
Renee brought her a drink she had not asked for and a packet of biscuits, and set them down with the faintest extra care. The cabin settled into the ordinary miracle of level flight — laptops, murmurs, a cart in the aisle. Sanaa opened her word book to the two-letter list, the foundation stones, and let AA and AB and AD run through her mind like scales before a performance, while Orlando came closer at five hundred miles an hour and the tournament, which had felt impossibly far away at Gate B27, began to feel close enough to frighten her properly.
She was still looking at the list when Renee stopped on her way back up the aisle, touched the headrest of 2A, and lowered her voice, not in warning this time, but in something close to disbelief.
"Sanaa," she said, "whatever you're bracing for on the ground — it's already started. A passenger filmed the whole thing at the gate, and that video is already spreading."
Chapter 10 — The Video
Orlando received Flight 208 with wet heat and a sky so white it hurt.
Sanaa felt the change the second the cabin door opened — Denver's thin, cool morning traded for air that sat on her skin. She gathered her backpack, checked for the word book twice out of habit, and walked up the jet bridge in the strange, stretched quiet of a passenger who has been the center of an incident and is now, abruptly, just a girl in an airport again, following the signs for baggage claim with everybody else.
Except she was not quite everybody else. A woman glanced at her, then at a phone, then again. She pulled her backpack strap higher, the brass S tile knocking softly, and kept walking.
The championship staff were waiting where her father had said they would be, by the welcome desk with the blue banner, and their relief at seeing her was so large it told her, before any words did, how late she truly was and how much of the delay had reached Orlando ahead of her plane.
"Sanaa Osei!" The woman in front had a clipboard and a lanyard. "Defending champion, top seed, most delayed arrival in our history — we are putting that on a plaque. Your practice room is held, your first round is protected, nobody is starting a clock without you. Are you all right?"
"I'm all right," Sanaa said, and discovered it was mostly true. "Is my — has anyone — "
"Your school liaison is here, your coach has called four times, and half the hall has apparently watched you not sit down for three hours, so you are, I should warn you, famous in a new way since breakfast."