Years earlier he had been a defense contractor, a supplier, a man whose firm sold components into military programs, and whose business ran on the same rot that would later nearly take an airliner into the sea: parts that were not what the paperwork swore they were, certifications bought rather than earned, safety sold off a dollar at a time to people who would never know until the moment the metal failed.

Maya sat with that for a long time in the quiet room.

Because she knew, before the detective finished, which program and which failure he was going to name.

Eighteen months earlier, in a sky far from this one, a flight control system had locked up on a pilot through no fault of the pilot’s, and a man had not come home, and the woman who had been flying his wing had carried the certainty ever since that she had failed him, that she had been right there and had not been enough.

Gabriel Torres.