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“How does she know where every single piece goes?”
Miranda happened to be nearby when she asked her question. She pointed over Susan’s shoulder, then Mike’s.
Susan turned and was face-to-face with a pair of F-35C Lightning IIs parked close by in the crowded Hangar Deck. One had suffered only minor damage from the incident on deck, the other had been severely damaged by falling debris and much of its inner workings were visible.
Susan laughed.Notmagical, scary-level memory.
By the time she turned back, Miranda was once more reassembling the plane. However, even though Susan now watched for it, she didn’t see Miranda look at either plane behind them. The plane map truly was in her head.
And it was working.
Some sections were blanks. The right wing was believed to have been blown overboard when his ordnance had exploded in the fire after his final landing in PriFly. The tail had been spotted, dangling precariously by the mount for the perilously damaged ten-story-tall radar mast atop the Island.
Miranda had blithely ignored the captain’sNo Trespassingcaution signs. Holly had cursed and followed as Mike had explained,She does that. Nothing is more important than the crash, not even her own safety.
Susan had noted that Mike had also been on the move to follow Miranda into the hazard before Holly had waved him back.
She looked again at the three people doing the sorting.
“Why aren’t you helping them reassemble the plane?”
“I’m not allowed.” That’s when she picked up on Mike’s stance, arms tightly crossed and incredibly intent on each piece they lifted and place—even though they’d been at it for hours. “There’s no question that I slow down their process during a reassembly. Like you, my specialty is human factors.”
Susan had never seen herself as lesser for those skills, yet Mike clearly did.
“You do understand that they value you for the exact skills you have.”
“Sure. They piss off someone enough to want our team dead.Send in Mike. He’ll fix it.”
“There,” Miranda pointed into the middle of the mess. “That’s what we were looking for.”
A glance at Mike showed that he had no clue.
“What—” Susan was startled.
But Mike cut her off with a sharp gesture. She’d thought they were reassembling the plane as some sort of an exercise. She hadn’t understood that they were looking for something specific.
Miranda stared down at where she’d just indicated, suddenly as frozen as a statue. As if the least motion might make the whole thing explode all over again.
“What?” Susan whispered to Mike, but he simply shook his head tightly. Everyone was watching Miranda standing completely still in the middle of a hundred-million-dollar scrap heap, not counting the cost of the damage to the aircraft carrier.
Three minutes by her watch, no one so much as wiggled their toes except Sadie, who yawned, stretched, rolled onto her back, and fell asleep again with all four paws up in the air.
