Maya felt the lean begin and met it, hands and feet moving with Davis’s in the same instant, the two of them holding the airplane’s balance between them against the storm and the drift and the doubt, keeping the weight off the leg that might not hold for one more second, and one more, until with a heavy structural clunk that she felt in her teeth the gear found its lock and took the load and held.

The nose came down.

The engines threw themselves into reverse with a roar that shook the cabin, and the airplane slowed, and slowed, and rolled out straight and true down the wet black runway, and stopped.

For a moment the only sound on the flight deck was the rain and two people breathing.

Then, behind the locked door, muffled by it and enormous anyway, three hundred human beings made the sound that people make when they have just been handed back their lives, a ragged roar of weeping and cheering and disbelief.

Davis put his face briefly in his hands.