No, Maya said, looking straight ahead into the streaming dark where the runway lights were finally, faintly beginning to resolve.

But I have a boy asleep in seat 8A, and I am going to bring him home, and I am going to help you put this airplane on the ground on whatever wheels it has.

Then back me up, Davis said.

All the way down.

Maya set her hands on the controls beside his, feather-light, matched to his, and the approach lights came up out of the storm to meet them.

She thought, in the last seconds before the runway, of the thing she would never say aloud to this captain she had known for less than an hour: that she had done this before, almost exactly this, ridden a wounded aircraft and a failing system down toward a ground that might or might not receive it, and that the last time she had been doing it alongside Gabriel, their two aircraft in the same bad sky, and that she had walked away from that day and he had not.