In her old life she had known pilots who needed to be right, who collected their correct calls like trophies and flew worse for the collecting, because a person busy being right is a person who has stopped watching for the ways they might be wrong.

The work did not reward that.

The work rewarded the opposite, the humility to keep checking your own reading against the airplane’s, to hold your correct diagnosis loosely enough that you would drop it the instant the evidence changed.

She had been right about the flight controls.

She filed it, flatly, as one true thing among the many things she did not yet know, and went looking for the next of them, because the storm did not care that she had been right once, and neither did the ocean.

Chapter 7 — Not an Accident