Zariah was watching from the right seat. He looked at her for a moment. His expression was difficult to read: not remorseful, not defiant—something more complicated. Something that might, in another person, have been acknowledgment.
"Your father almost stopped us," he said, loudly enough to carry. "Looks like you finished it."
The agent moved him forward. He went.
Zariah sat very still in the right seat for a long moment after he was gone.
"Finished it."
She turned that over. She thought about what finishing it meant: not just landing the aircraft, not just surviving, but what came next. The documentation her father had spent two years building. The network he'd been about to expose. The meeting he'd never made it to.
There would be another meeting. There would be investigators and hearings and records subpoenaed and testimony given. There would be a process: long and imperfect and necessary. And somewhere at the beginning of it would be the documentation Marcus Washington had left behind, which she had found 14 months ago on the same hard drive that held his flight recordings, in a folder he'd labeled with her name.
She had been waiting to know what to do with it. She knew now.
The news found her the way news finds things: fast and everywhere and all at once.
By the time the passengers had been evacuated from the aircraft, and the medical teams had reached the pilots, and the FBI had secured the scene, someone had already posted something from their phone. By the time the ambulances left for the nearest hospital, a local news crew had arrived at the perimeter. By the time Zariah and Danielle were sitting in the back of an emergency services vehicle wrapped in foil blankets and drinking bad coffee from paper cups, the story was already moving: 12-year-old girl lands plane after both pilots collapse.
The satellite trucks arrived within the hour. The perimeter was crowded with cameras and reporters doing their pieces to camera against the backdrop of the aircraft sitting on the runway—40 feet from the fence, left of centerline, engines cold.
An FAA official found them. Then an FBI coordinator. Then a woman from the airline's crisis management team who was trying very hard to look like she was in charge of a situation that had already made it clear it did not need her to be in charge of anything.
Through all of it, Zariah sat quietly and answered the questions she was asked, and didn't perform anything: not heroism, not modesty, not trauma, not triumph. She answered accurately and completely and waited for the next question. Danielle answered some of the questions on her behalf—the ones that were more about family, more about background, the ones that required context she couldn't give herself. She did it well. She did it the way someone does something when they've just discovered they're capable of more than they thought.
A reporter at the perimeter managed to get close enough to call out, "Zariah, how does it feel to be a hero?"