Chapter 8 — The Storm Ahead

With the airframe flying clean again, Maya made herself do the cold arithmetic that a cockpit demands and a frightened mind resists.

She read the fuel state over Davis’s shoulder and did not like the margin.

She looked at the weather radar and liked it less, a broad Atlantic storm system squatting across the track ahead in angry blooms of color, exactly where they did not want it.

And in the right seat the first officer had not stirred, his breathing shallow under the mask, a man who needed a hospital and was instead strapped into a chair five miles above the sea.