check.” Becca’s voice bounces off the metal-lined walls of the chute. “You normally check!”
Six feet below, I watch the drug take hold, and I send up a silent prayer as Sophia’s body rejects the poison almost as swiftly as she ingested it. Light from the front of the house spills down the chute to puddle on the floor by my outstretched feet.
“It was practically pitch-black!” I yelled back. “We were starving. These are not normal circumstances!” My own voice bounces back at me. Sophia takes a sudden, huge breath, letting it out in a sob that tears my heart in two. I could have lost her. I might still lose her.
“I’m going to make sure you know what it’s like to be locked up.” My face is upturned toward the beam of light, and it’s as though I’m shouting to the gods; gods who strike indiscriminately, who punish a child who’s done nothing to deserve their wrath. “I’ll pull every string I can to get you the maximum possible sentence.”
“The planet is dying because of people like Mina.”
“You’re insane. Mina has nothing to do with climate—”
“She has everything to do with it! If all the pilots and cabin crew stopped work—”
“There would be others to take their place!”
“—the planes couldn’t fly, and if the planes couldn’t fly, the ice caps wouldn’t melt. Don’t you see? It isn’t too late to redress the balance. That’s what’s so awful: we know the damage aviation is doing, yet we keep doing it. It’s like being diagnosed with lung cancer but continuing to smoke!”
There’s a quality to Becca’s voice that scares me. It’s the sort of tremor I’ve heard in street preachers or door-to-door fanatics. It’s a fervor that tells me she really believes what she’s saying. And if she really believes it, what else is she capable of?
“Don’t you see that you’re being manipulated? Whoever’s pulling the strings isn’t the one facing prison. They don’t care about you; they’ve set you up to take the rap. You’re cannon fodder, Becca, nothing more—a pawn in someone else’s game. You’ve been brainwashed.”
“You’re wrong. You don’t know what they’re like.”
“What who is like?”
For a second, I think she’s going to give me a name, but she swallows the word. “Our leader.”
Our leader, as if it’s some kind of cult.
“Do you know what they do to people like you in prison? People who hurt children?”
I wait, long enough for the thought to take root. I think of the times I’ve sat across an interview table from muggers, murderers, rapists, and how—no matter how awful their crimes, how much I’ve been sickened by their actions—I have never before felt the way I feel now. Never before felt my muscles tense with the urge to fight, never before wanted to pin someone down and make them pay. Never before wanted to kill someone.
But then, never before has anyone threatened my daughter’s life. My wife’s. I try to imagine what’s happening on board Flight 79, but all that fills my head is the image of a plane crashing into a building. It plays on a loop: fire and screaming and twisted metal.
“How can I go to prison,” Becca says, “when no one even knows I exist?” There’s a mocking tone to her voice that serves only to enrage me more, and I feel fresh blood trickle to my fingers as I wrench my wrists against metal.
“We’ll find you. I’ll find you.”
“You don’t even know my real name.”
Sophia’s breathing is more even now, and as she slips into sleep—exhausted by the anaphylaxis—I find a clarity previously clouded by fear that she might die. I switch off the hijack disaster movie playing in my head, and I remember who I am, what I’m good at.
“Your mother drives a red Mini Cooper with a pom-pom hanging from the rearview mirror.”
The silence that follows turns my speculation into fact, the win giving me courage. I’d just clocked off when I saw Becca at Tesco. I’d promised Mina—promised myself—I’d go straight home, but the urge to gamble was too strong, and I found myself driving in the opposite direction, toward the hypermarket on the outskirts of the next town, where I was less likely to bump into someone I knew. I had a pocketful of loose change, and somehow that made it okay. What was a scratch card, really? Thousands of people bought scratch cards. I wouldn’t log on to my online account, I wouldn’t spend more than a tenner, wouldn’t buy again if I