answerphone playing in the empty kitchen. And then I hang up, and I take a deep breath. I’m coming home.
“Are you okay?”
I nod mutely at Rowan. How can I be okay? How can any of us be okay?
“What happens when the fuel runs out?” Derek says quietly. We’re sitting in a tight circle—me, Cesca, Rowan, Derek, and Alice—squashed into the aisle between the seated passengers. Alice is still typing on her phone. Around us, snatches of farewell calls fill the air with fear and grief. I think of the six hijackers I’ve counted and wonder how many have yet to make themselves known. Derek is, if it’s possible, even more disheveled than earlier, his shirt rumpled and his glasses at a slight angle, as though they’ve been knocked.
Cesca hesitates. “We’ll crash,” she says eventually.
“But what happens?” Derek persists. “How will it feel?”
I shiver.
“Don’t.” Alice screws her eyes shut.
“The engines will stop. One, then the other, within minutes—maybe seconds—of each other. The plane will become a glider.”
“We won’t just drop out of the sky, then?” Derek says.
Alice winces again. Her eyes are still fixed on her screen, fingers moving faster than I can follow. A memory surfaces, and my pulse quickens, the buzzing in my ears taking me back to training school, back in the hot, cramped cockpit of a Cessna 150. I let out a breath, counting to ten and digging my nails into the flesh of my palms until I’m back in control. Cesca’s still talking.
“A Boeing 777 has a glide ratio of, I don’t know…maybe seventeen to one? So for every seventeen thousand feet we travel, we’ll lose around a thousand in altitude.”
“How high are we?”
“Around thirty-five thousand,” I say quietly. There’s silence as we all try to do the math.
“It’s not an exact science. The glide ratio’s dependent on weather conditions, altitude, weight…” Cesca trails off.
“But eventually,” Derek says. “Eventually, we’ll crash.”
He speaks matter-of-factly. As if he doesn’t care. As if, I realize, he wants it to happen.
“At the moment,” Cesca says, “the plane’s still on autopilot. Anyone could be in that flight deck, and you wouldn’t know the difference. But landings are different. The plane needs to be configured for landing or ditching—”
“Ditching?”
“Landing in the water,” I say.
“—and the nose needs to be kept up for as long as possible. If we go into a death dive—” Cesca stops abruptly, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Well, that’s going to be hard to come back from.”
There’s a long silence.
“People do survive plane crashes, though, don’t they?” Alice looks at me, her fingers still poised above her keypad. “Those safety briefings you do, that we all ignore—that’s what we’ll have to do, right?” Her head nods furiously as though she’s answering her own question.
“The ones in seats maybe,” Derek says. Alice looks around the cabin, where the economy passengers all have their seat belts on. Several of them are leaning into one another, twisting as far as their restraints will allow, hands clasped above their heads. “The rest of us will be thrown around like rag dolls. We’ll be dead before we hit the ground.”
I glance up at the pregnant woman. Silent tears spill over her lower lashes.
Cesca glares at Derek. “Do you want to start a mass panic?”
“Alice has a point,” I say. “Depending on how and where we land, we stand a chance of surviving this, but if we’re not in seats, the injury potential is significantly higher.”
“So we need seats.” Alice’s voice has gone up a notch. She kneels up, head swiveling like a meerkat on lookout. “I read somewhere the back of the plane is the safest place to be, so that’s something.”
“The plane’s full,” I say.
“But we paid more!” She looks at us all in turn, seemingly oblivious to our incredulous faces. “We paid more for our seats. So if they won’t let us back into business class, it stands to reason that—”
“No.” Rowan holds up a hand, palm raised toward Alice as though he can physically stop her from saying anything else. “Just stop.” She glares at him, then resumes typing. I’m just wondering who she’s saying goodbye to when she stops, stares at her screen for a moment, then presses a final key.
“There,” she says with a long exhalation. “Filed.”
Derek stares at her. “You have got to be kidding me.” He looks at the rest of us, who aren’t following. “She’s written it up for the paper.”
“Let’s face it,” Alice says. “You’d have done the same if you’d thought