"What did you do with them?"
"I still have them. They're in a box in my closet." Naomi smiled. "Some of those airplanes are in museums now. Some of them are razor blades."
Jasmine thought this over. "Is it hard?" she asked. "Being the captain?"
Naomi had a polished answer to that question, the one she gave recruiters and reporters. But it was nearly midnight and this child was looking at her as if the answer mattered more than anything, and so she gave the real one.
"The flying isn't the hard part," she said. "The flying you can learn. You practice, and you practice, and you learn to stay calm when things go wrong, and you learn to do the next right thing even when you're scared. The hard part is that some people are going to look at you and decide you can't do it before you ever open your mouth. And you have to fly anyway. And you have to fly so well that it doesn't matter what they decided."
Jasmine was quiet. The shuttle swung around the end of the parking garage and out toward the far lots, where the tall lamps stood on their poles over long rows of dew-wet cars. Then she said, "That sounds like school."
"It's a lot like school," Naomi agreed.
Lot E was the farthest of the employee lots, a long flat rectangle of asphalt bordered by a chain-link fence and a stand of scrubby cottonwoods that marked the airport's boundary. At midnight it was half full of cars and empty of people. Odette brought the shuttle to a stop at the third shelter and folded the doors open.
"Which one's yours?" Jasmine asked, pressing her face to the window.
Naomi pointed. Three rows over, under a lamp, sat a long, low, unmistakable shape: a 1972 Buick Skylark, two-door hardtop, painted the soft silvery green that the factory had called Willow Mist, with a white vinyl top and chrome bumpers that caught the lamplight like water.
"Whoa," Jasmine said.
"Whoa," Odette agreed. "Captain, I didn't know you drove that. I've seen that car out here and I always figured it was one of the mechanics."
"Usually I don't," Naomi said. "My regular car's in the shop. Transmission. So the old lady's been pulling double duty." She stood and shouldered her bag. "It was my father's. He bought it the year I was born and he spent the next forty years making sure it never forgot what it was supposed to look like."