She had spent eighteen months certain that the difference between them had been something she did or failed to do, some margin of skill or speed or attention that she had come up short on and he had paid for.

She knew better now, with the transcript still in her future but the truth already closing in: the difference had been the metal.

His had been sabotaged past saving and hers had not.

There was no lesson in it, no justice, nothing she could have done.

But she did not know that yet, in the right seat over Spain, and so she flew this approach for both of them, the one she had survived and the one she had not, and she brought all of it, the skill and the grief and the terrible luck, to bear on the single task of backing up a good man as he landed.

Chapter 12 — On Whatever Wheels It Has