She pushed full right rudder and felt the hydraulic system give her what it had left: the last reserves, reluctant and slow. And the aircraft responded, slowly. The yaw arrested. The nose came back toward centerline, the right-side cracking passing under the left main gear with a sound like scattered gravel.
They were still on the runway. The aircraft was slowing: 100 knots, 80, 60. The brakes were working, but not fully: she could feel the reduced authority, the slightly longer stopping distance. And the end of the runway was visible now, approaching, the rusted fence beyond it getting larger in the windscreen.
40 knots... 20...
The aircraft stopped, 40 feet from the end of the runway. The nose was slightly left of centerline. The left engine was winding down; the right engine was still.
Zariah took her hands off the controls.
The silence lasted about three seconds. Three seconds of absolute stillness in which the aircraft sat on the runway, and nobody moved, and nobody spoke, and the only sound was the whine of the engines spinning down and the distant, growing wail of emergency vehicle sirens from somewhere beyond the perimeter fence.
Then the cabin came apart.
Not in panic—in the opposite of panic: the release of something that had been held under tremendous pressure for the better part of an hour. Someone started crying and couldn't stop, and then someone else joined them, and then the sound spread through the cabin the way sound does when people stop trying to control themselves—when the thing they've been bracing against doesn't happen, and the bracing has nowhere left to go.
Danielle put her face in her hands. She sat that way for a moment. Then she took her hands down, unfastened her seatbelt, and walked to the cockpit door.
Zariah was still in the right seat. Her hands were in her lap. She was looking at the instrument panel: not reading it anymore, just looking at it. And her expression was the expression of someone who had held an enormous thing for a very long time and had just been allowed to put it down.
Danielle stepped over the threshold, crouched beside the seat, and put both arms around her knees without saying anything. Zariah leaned into it—just slightly, just enough.
"You landed it," Danielle said.
"We're 40 feet from the fence," Zariah said.
"Baby," Danielle pulled back just enough to look at her face, "you landed it."