fuels could mean?”
“Oh, I guess not, because I’m obviously too stupid to have read up about global warming and air pollution! You’re the only one who knows anything about that!”
“I wasn’t implying that! Or that you were stupid! But if I did I think I’d be justified, based on what you just almost did!”
“What I almost did? Aren’t they tracking you every time you use your stupid powers, which you are obviously not doing now?”
“Are you suggesting I’m being stupid about this? Me? Are you sure it’s me and not you?”
I took a deep breath and started coughing on a lungful of dust, which was lucky, because I could feel veins throbbing in the side of my neck and wondered, dimly, how close I was to simply having an aneurysm or some damn thing. And Hamid was approaching, it must have been—short, fiftyish, a bright ring around his eyes where the olive skin had been protected by his mirrored shades, potbelly straining at a black Ziggy Stardust t-shirt tucked into severely drop-crotch jeans.
“You coming?” he said, cheerfully. “You can keep fighting aboard, no problem.”
“Come on,” I muttered. I stomped ahead of her to the tiny plane and climbed inside to discover that there were no seats inside, just a jumble of boxes and bags. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke; the inner walls, painted pale grey, were turning yellow in an uneven gradient from the middle up. Johnny pushed past me and settled against a big bag of something or other—I couldn’t read the writing on the sack, but it must have been comfortable. I picked a similar one and settled back. It felt like nuts, something light, round, and hard. They’d be smoked nuts by the time they were delivered, I thought. Gross.
“Ey, you kids, no touch in the back,” Hamid called from the front. “That valuable stuff. Big money!”
“We won’t,” Johnny called back.
“Nah, I know what you are. Rich babies travel on your ‘gap year,’ hey? You think I don’t know that word? No, I learned it from other kids. I know them all, English, French, Spain, everywhere. I fly them all. Always good times to fly on your gap year, see new places. Then go to school. Hey?”
“Yeah. Gap year.”
Her voice was strangled, as if she were holding back tears. I found that I didn’t care. She’d dragged me halfway across the world, taken me from the people I loved, didn’t even care that I didn’t have a house or a job to go back to. After all, she had always been surrounded by people who could just buy a new house if they needed one, and who had never even heard of jobs. She’d taken everything from me, and I’d taken nothing, and I had tried to make a gesture to show her that the world didn’t have to be as unfair as her money let her pretend it wasn’t, and she’d yelled at me. Asshole. Let her cry, if her feelings were so hurt.
The plane jolted forwards, then back, so sharply that we were thrown onto the diamond-plate floor, and then we were bumping, at a sedate walking pace, away from the asphalt pad and towards what I assumed was the runway. As I regained my feet I glanced out the window to see three men racing across the tarmac towards us, not in official uniforms, just shirt and ties, one of them waving a piece of paper with two dark squares on it. I felt my blood run cold for a second—were those our photos? had we been caught?—but the angle was wrong and they fell behind us as we taxied, picking up speed, and finally lurched heavily into the sky at an angle that threw me back amongst the boxes and bags.
“Ey! I said no touching!” shouted Hamid. “My deliveries!”
We rolled and pitched as we rose to whatever minimal altitude the little engine could manage. As the cabin filled with diesel fumes, my stomach announced that it was going to empty itself at the earliest opportunity and that I should find an available corner. I gritted my teeth and imagined being a statue, Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Don’t move anything. Not a finger, not a knee, not your tongue, nothing. Maybe the message will get passed down.
Trying to reorient my eyes and brain, I stared out the small, greasy window at my shoulder, the size of a paperback book. Yellow sand, smoke-grey mountains. Maybe just hills, back home; it was hard to tell