A beat. Then: "Moving emergency services to Harlow. Stand by for surface report."
Warren looked at her from the left seat. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
She began configuring for the approach.
The descent checklist ran in her head in her father's voice. He had a specific cadence when he ran checklists: unhurried, each item given its full weight, nothing skipped because it seemed obvious. She'd absorbed that cadence so completely that she couldn't run a checklist any other way:
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Fuel crossfeed open; imbalance present but stable.
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Engine two 63% N2, performance degraded, monitoring.
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Engine one showing early degradation flag, holding for now.
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Hydraulics 2,200 and declining.
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Flaps: she'd need them, but flap extension increased hydraulic demand. She'd deploy in stages, conserving pressure, timing the extension for when she needed it most.
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Landing gear: the biggest hydraulic demand of the approach. She'd extend it as late as she could justify.
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Speed: she'd need to come in slightly fast. 4,200 feet sounded like a lot until you were flying a regional jet with compromised braking and a surface you couldn't trust. Too fast meant overshooting; too slow with degraded hydraulics meant risking control loss before the threshold. There was a narrow band of acceptable; she was going to have to find it and stay in it.
"Flaps to 10," she said to herself and moved the lever.
The aircraft buffeted slightly as the surfaces deployed. The hydraulic pressure dipped: 2,100, and stabilized. She began the descent.
In the cabin, the change in the aircraft's attitude was immediately felt: the nose had come down to a shallower angle, the engines had pulled back, and the quality of the movement was different from anything in the preceding hour—purposeful, committed, going somewhere specific.
Danielle had returned to her seat. She had Zariah's empty seat beside her, and she was gripping the armrest of it the way you grip something when you can't hold the person you want to hold.
She thought about the morning she'd gotten the call about Marcus: the particular hollowness of that moment, the way the air in the room had seemed to change density. She thought about the two years since: about every conversation she'd tried to have with Zuri that had ended in quiet, about every evening she'd looked through the gap under Zuri's door and seen the blue glow of the simulator monitors and not known whether to knock.
She hadn't understood. She'd thought it was grief looping back on itself—a child who couldn't let go.
She understood now: Zuri hadn't been unable to let go; she'd been getting ready. Not consciously, maybe not with a plan, but something in her had known that her father's knowledge needed to live somewhere, and she had made herself into the place it lived.
Danielle pressed her fingers hard against the armrest, looked out the window at the gray afternoon sky, and said under her breath, with everything she had: "She's got it, Marcus. She's got it."
Mr. Callaway had not spoken in 40 minutes. He sat with his laptop closed, hands flat on the tray table, looking at the seatback in front of him. Somewhere in the last hour, the person he'd been when he boarded this flight—the man who'd been closing deals and performing certainty into his phone—had quietly vacated. What was left was just a man in a charcoal suit waiting to find out if he was going to live.