Zariah looked at her aunt. Her eyes were steady and dry, but something in them had shifted: a quality that had been held back for a very long time—not grief exactly, but the thing that lives right next to grief, the thing that has to wait until the work is done before it can surface.
"They killed him," she said. Her voice was quiet and even and utterly certain. "It wasn't an accident."
"I know," Danielle said. "We're going to make sure people know."
Outside the windscreen, the first emergency vehicles were coming through the perimeter gate.
The radio crackled: "7702." Reeves' voice—not controller-professional anymore, just a man who'd been holding his breath for 14 minutes and had remembered how to breathe. "You just saved 200 lives. I want you to know that. Over."
Zariah reached for the mic. "Copy that, Mr. Reeves." A pause. "Thank you for staying with me."
"Anytime," he said, and she could hear that he meant it in a way that had nothing to do with his job.
Warren had his head back against the seat. He'd been running on adrenaline and engineering instinct for an hour, and now that the aircraft was stopped, all of it was catching up to him at once. He looked at Zariah with an expression that was tired and genuine and a little undone.
"I've been in aviation maintenance for 22 years," he said. "I've never seen anything like what you just did."
She looked at him. "You helped."
"I handed you wrenches," he said. "You built the house."
She almost smiled at that. Almost.
They brought Hollins off the aircraft in handcuffs. He walked down the portable stairs they'd rolled to the door with the same composed, unhurried quality he'd maintained throughout the flight. FBI agents in dark jackets were waiting at the bottom, and he went with them without resistance, without drama.
At the base of the stairs, he paused. One of the agents had his arm, but he turned his head and looked back up at the aircraft, at the door where Gerald was standing. And then, as if he'd sensed it, his eyes moved to the cockpit window.