She had hated how much she had missed it.

It is a strange thing to grieve a state of mind, but that was what she had been doing without naming it, mourning the clean empty readiness that the work had given her and that nothing in her quiet new life had ever replaced.

People imagined that the hardest part of flying was the fear, and it was not.

The hardest part, and the most addictive, was the opposite of fear: the way the whole noisy clamoring self went silent under pressure and left behind only a calm instrument that saw and decided and acted, with no room in it for dread or hope or anything but the next correct thing.

She had been so sure that walking away from the danger meant walking away from that clarity too, that the two came as a single package and she had to refuse both.