The lightning came first as a number on a screen, and only later as anything you could see.
At 3:12 in the afternoon on the second Thursday in August, the ramp tower at Denver International put the whole of Concourse A into a lightning hold, which meant that the strikes on the detection network had come within five miles of the field and every ramp worker, every fueler, every bag runner and tug driver and lav-truck operator had to stop what they were doing and go inside. Billie Faraday watched it happen through the windows of the jet bridge at gate A41.
A belt loader stopped with a green duffel bag halfway up its rubber spine. Out past the end of the concourse, over the brown flats toward Watkins, the clouds had built themselves into a gray-white wall with a flat dark floor, and under the floor there were long soft curtains of rain that did not reach the ground.
"There it goes," said Tomasz, behind her, in the galley. "There goes my dinner in Baltimore."
"Your dinner in Baltimore was a protein bar in the hotel elevator."
"It was going to be a good protein bar."
Bridgeline Airways Flight 1418, Denver to Baltimore-Washington, was scheduled to push at 3:55 p.m. Mountain and land at 9:22 Eastern. The airplane was a Boeing 737-800, ship number 3427, tail N827BX, which Billie knew by its bad coffee maker. It had sixteen seats in first class, four rows of two-by-two in navy leather that the company called Summit Class in the advertisements and that everybody who worked on the airplane called first, and a hundred and forty-four in the back, and it was going to be full, because it was August, and because the earlier Baltimore flight had canceled for a maintenance problem at noon and dumped its passengers onto this one like water from a bucket.
She had been flying for thirty-one years. She was fifty-eight years old. She had started at a regional carrier in Salt Lake City in 1995, flying turboprops into Elko and Rock Springs, and come over to Bridgeline in the merger of 2004. Now she was number two hundred and eight out of four thousand nine hundred at the company and number nineteen in the Denver base, and she could hold almost anything she wanted, and what she wanted, mostly, was to work the front of the airplane as the A, the lead, on three- and four-day trips to the East Coast and back.
She was the A today. Tomasz Wrona, twenty-nine, who had a laugh you could hear in the cockpit, was the B, working the aft galley. Amberly Dunnigan, who had been on the line for eleven months and still said "Oh my gosh" when a passenger was rude to her, was the C, working the midcabin and the back door. It was the second day of a three-day trip. They had started that morning in Kansas City and were supposed to sleep in Baltimore and come home tomorrow through Charlotte.