Start from the moment it first went wrong.

Chapter 6 — Don’t Fight It

He gave it to her in the clipped shorthand of the trade.

The autopilot had dropped offline without warning.

The flight computer had begun throwing error codes that contradicted one another, a machine insisting on two incompatible truths at once.

And his first officer had complained of a sudden numbness in one arm, and then of a wrongness he could not describe, and had lost consciousness between one sentence and the next.

Maya listened and did not interrupt, and she looked once, hard, at the unconscious man, and asked whether he had eaten the crew meal.