"She might not want to."
"Then I'll leave her alone."
She nodded, and went past him into the flight deck, because that was the rule since 2001, since the rules had all changed: never one pilot alone. When one of them stepped out, somebody else stepped in, so that there were always two people behind the door, and one of them could open it, and one of them could keep it closed.
Dariela Montes had the airplane. She was sitting in the right seat with her hand resting near the glareshield panel and her eyes on the instruments, and the sky in front of her was the deep violet that comes up behind you when you fly east into the night, with a band of hot orange low in the mirrors on either side where the sun was going down over the Rockies. There were cells far off to the south, over Oklahoma, building their own weather in the dark, lit up from inside every few seconds, silent. Billie pulled the door closed behind her and heard it lock and folded down the observer's seat behind the center console and sat on the edge of it.
"Hi," Dariela said.
"Hi."
They watched the lightning in Oklahoma for a while.
"He gave me the leg," Dariela said finally. "I mean, he gave it to me before we pushed. He said, you fly, I'll monitor. Your landing. He's been working the radios like a robot. Checklists like a robot. He's fine for that. He's fine." She made a small adjustment to something on the glareshield that might not have needed to be adjusted. "He sent a message to scheduling about ten minutes ago. He's coming off the trip in Baltimore. Fatigue call. He wrote it himself. I didn't say anything."
"Good."