Dana had not been wrong about the first ten minutes. The jet dropped and caught itself and dropped again. Celeste's coffee, which she had carried aboard from the lounge in a ceramic cup because she refused to drink from paper, slopped onto the walnut table. Jonah handed her a napkin without being asked. Across from her, Theo had begun to hum.
It was the same note as before, the low, steady compressor note, but louder now, competing with the engines and the creak of the cabin. He was rocking slightly in his seat, forward and back, a small, tight motion, and his hands were pressed down on the folder so hard his fingertips had gone white.
"It's okay, bud," Marcus said, low. "It's the clouds. Dana said. Ten minutes and it's smooth." He reached over and touched the boy's headphones and then said, under his breath, "Oh, no. No, no."
He eased them off Theo's head and turned them over in his hands and pressed a button on the side of one ear cup, and pressed it again. Nothing lit up. He dug in the backpack at his feet and came up with a charging cable and looked around the cabin for an outlet and found one beside his seat, and plugged it in, and the little light on the headphones blinked red, once, and stayed dark.
"Battery's dead," he told Theo. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, bud. I charged them last night. I don't know what happened." He set the headphones back over Theo's ears anyway, dead, as if their weight alone might help. "Give it twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and they'll have enough juice."
Theo hummed louder.
The jet broke out of the clouds. Sunlight poured through the windows all at once, so bright that Celeste had to turn her face away. Below them the overcast spread out flat and white in every direction, like a field after snowfall, and the ride went smooth as glass.
Theo did not stop humming.
Celeste opened her laptop. Slide nine. Slide ten. Wren in a wheat field, Wren in a subway car, Wren with her chin lifted, unafraid. The humming went on underneath everything, the same note, never wavering, a sound that didn't so much fill the cabin as become the cabin, and Celeste found that she had read the same headline on slide eleven four times without taking in a word of it.
There was a place at the back of her skull where the sound was settling. She knew that place. She had paved it over a long time ago and built something expensive on top of it, and she did not like the feeling of something pressing up from underneath.
She looked across the table. Marcus was turning the pages of the laminated safety card for Theo, pointing to the pictures, talking softly. Theo wasn't looking at the card. His eyes were fixed on a point somewhere over Celeste's left shoulder, and his thumb had found the Velcro tab of his folder again, and he was opening it and closing it.
Rrrip. Press. Rrrip. Press.