“It’s not like I have a choice.” She’d flushed with anger, making a show of buttoning Sophia’s coat. I could see her taking deep, controlled breaths, and when she straightened, you’d never have known anything was wrong.
“I’ll miss you,” I said softly. I wondered if I’d overstepped the mark, but her eyes glistened. She turned away, perhaps hoping I hadn’t seen.
“It’s just like any other flight.”
Twenty hours, though.
The fevered expectation around this flight has gone on for two years. Perhaps I’ve noticed it more simply because Mina works for them, but World Airlines has been there at every turn. TV adverts, showing the smooth action of the flat beds in business class and the stretched-out legs of passengers in economy. Interviews with the pilots who worked the test flights, and nostalgic comparisons with the fifty-five-hour “Kangaroo route” they ran in the 1940s, which stopped in six countries en route.
“In 1903,” Yusuf Dindar had said a couple of days ago, on the BBC Breakfast sofa, “the Wright brothers defied gravity with the first sustained flight of an engine-powered aircraft. More than a hundred years later, we have the capability to keep one hundred and fifty tons of metal in the air for twenty continuous hours.” He leaned back, a confident arm across the back of the sofa, and smiled. “The Earth’s forces are strong, but we’ve proved we are stronger. We’ve beaten nature.”
A chill runs across the back of my neck now as I remember his look of supreme confidence. I don’t doubt he has the best team, the best planes. But nature can swallow a town, fell skyscrapers, slide entire coastlines into the ocean…
I snap myself out of the worst-case-scenario loop playing in my head. Mina’s right: I’m a doom merchant. They’ve tested this flight three times. They’ve got the whole world watching. Their reputation, not to mention the safety of hundreds of lives, is at stake.
Nothing will go wrong.
SIX
17 HOURS FROM SYDNEY | MINA
We’re somewhere over Eastern Europe, below us nothing but a swirl of cloud. I touch my fingers to the glass and tune my eyes into the shapes I would be finding with Sophia if she were here. An old lady, bent over in a shuffle on her way to the shops—look, there’s her handbag. A palm tree—look, there! You have to squint a bit…
I remember looking for cloud pictures with my own mother, lying on my back in the garden while Mum picked at weeds in the flower bed. She kept the garden beautifully, never knowing the names of any plant but instinctively knowing where each should go.
“Plants need five things to flourish,” she’d said. She was digging up a pretty shrub that had sported delicate white flowers last year but that this year had failed to thrive. I’d sat up, delighted by this chance to show off what I’d learned in biology.
“Water,” I said. “And food. Light, to photosynthesize.” I thought for a moment. “Heat?”
“Clever girl. What’s the fifth thing?”
I screwed up my face. I couldn’t remember there even being a fifth thing.
“Space.” Mum carefully lifted the shrub from the ground, filling the resulting hole with soil and patting in the surplus around the neighboring plants. “These three were fine together when they first went in, but now this one’s too squashed. It won’t die, but it won’t thrive. I’ll put it somewhere else, and you just see—it’ll be so grateful.”
I think about that conversation every time I step on a plane, swallowing the guilt I feel at leaving Sophia. We need space to thrive. All of us.
I blink hard and leave the clouds to make shapes alone. Inside, the plane is bright and filled with chatter. The meals we’re serving are carefully planned: the first to keep passengers awake, the second to encourage them to rest.
“They should give everyone a sleeping tablet,” Erik said when we were looking over the menu. “It would have been cheaper.”
I take a walk through the cabin, checking everyone has what they need. There are seven rows in total. A double row of seats runs along the two sides of the cabin, with a bank of four seats in the center. Screens enable each seat to be isolated from its neighbor, providing each passenger with a private cocoon. When they want to sleep, the bottom half of the seat slides forward, tucking itself beneath the TV screen and transforming the already-comfortable chair into a perfectly flat bed. Not a bad way to spend twenty hours, and very