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“Taking you to LPPD on São Miguel,” said one of the voices in my ear. “Runway is five miles out. Can you get a visual?”
“No. Bad cloud cover.”
“If you miss it, we’ll try Lajes Airfield or Horta.”
“Lots of choices,” Ayal muttered beside me. We worked in tandem to orient the plane according to the directions that air control fed us, staying aloft, flying by instrument only and manipulating the controls with sweating palms. Somehow, we managed to maintain the altitude we needed. The winds were on our side at the moment, but they’d become a problem when we landed, when we needed to stop the multi-ton aircraft without functioning systems.
“Are you ready to brake?” she asked.
“As soon as we touch down.” Without hydraulic control, I’d have to slam on the brakes, and they’d definitely lock up. The landing gear would gouge holes in the tarmac if we were lucky, or snap off completely if we weren’t. “There shouldn’t be fire,” I pointed out, the one bright spot. “No fuel left to ignite.”
The danger would be in the impact, or the ocean landing if we overshot the runway. I turned to the open cockpit door, yelling loudly enough to be heard in the back. “Put your heads down. Brace for a hard landing. Hardest fucking landing of your lives.”
Silence greeted my barked orders. I finally had visual contact with the islands and we started to descend. “Okay, we’re here,” I said to the people on the ground. “We’re right near the airport. Do we have a place to lay this baby down?”
“All cleared for you,” a sharp voice replied.
“Do some S-turns,” said Ayal, as if in a trance. “We’re too high.”
“I got it.”
I’d never flown a jetliner without power before, but flying was flying, and I’d tried just about every variety of it over the years. Big planes, small planes, old planes, military jets, state of the art hovercrafts, planes with mechanical anomalies, and lightweight planes designed to glide.
I tried to think like a glider pilot rather than a jet pilot, making measured S-turns in the air, balancing distance and speed, altitude and angle to reach the airport in the correct position to land. They’d cleared all the air traffic from São Miguel, so I picked an east-west runway and lined up the plane, letting it drop to the earth. It fell fast, but we had to land fast, or we’d shoot into the ocean.
“We’re almost there.” Ayal yanked off her headset. Ground control couldn’t help us now. “Oh, please. Oh God. Please land us.”
“I’m trying. No chance at a redo.”
The runway widened beneath us as we dropped the last few feet. Ayal sucked in a breath and held it.
“Brace! Brace!” I yelled the words a second before we touched down, and the cockpit door slammed shut from the impact. The plane bounced and shimmied, but held together, the typical noise of reversing engines and air flaps replaced by the squealing and thudding of the tires.Thup, thup, thup, thup, thup,flat tires, shuddering fuselage, high-pitched screams from the back.
I would have screamed too, if I wasn’t so busy nursing the brakes and working the controls. The safety belt bit into my shoulders and hips as we rapidly decelerated. Ayal braced her hands on the control panel, silent and pale at my side. We passed waiting fire trucks and ambulances, zipping by them on the runway that was both too long and too short.
Pumping the brakes did nothing. All I could do was try to hold the nose down so we didn’t lift into the air again. I gritted my teeth as the tires’ thumping died to a scrape. The plane pitched forward, then slowed to the point I could let out a breath. It hadn’t flipped or broken apart. We finally rolled to a stop about two hundred meters from the end of the runway.
“Bless you,” said Ayal, touching her forehead, then mine. “You did it. Thank you.”
I looked at the piles of manuals in her lap. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
While Ayal signed off with ground control, I took off my oxygen mask, feeling keyed up, angry, euphoric, overwhelmed, devastated. Fire engines pulled alongside our crippled jet, filling the air with sirens, but I barely heard them. Outside the cockpit window, the earth looked green and beautiful. I could have died, we all could have died, but we were alive.
“Devin,” said Ayal. “Are you all right?”
I’d think about that question later. For now, I had to look after the passengers, and get all of us the hell off this plane.
Chapter Five: Ella
All around theuniverse, things were happening all the time. I knew this from my work. Galaxies were colliding, stars were dying in supernova explosions. But right now, on this tiny island, on this tiny planet, every step I took seemed like a miracle.
I don’t remember how we got from the airport to the hotel, only that Devin guided me into an elevator with floral wallpaper. All those flowers. Fort and Juliet were with us, clinging to each other. I felt unhinged, lost in a whirl.
I knew Devin had somehow guided the plane to earth without engine power, had saved us from a horrific crash, because I’d lived through the rough, bouncing landing. Somehow, he and the female co-pilot had wrangled the plane to a stop, ignoring the shrieking controls. As we stumbled off the crippled plane, she’d cried. I’d cried. We’d all cried, but not Devin.
I didn’t trust him anymore, because he hadn’t cried. There was something unnatural about his self-control.
Another reason not to trust him: he’d lied. He’d told me before the flight that everything would be okay. I felt a sob rise in my throat, choking out like a grunt. Was the crash landing I’d experienced more or less shattering than a black hole exploding? I studied gravitational waves to make sense of the universe. Now, nothing made sense.
