A pilot does not leave people behind.

You can quit the service, quit the sky, quit the version of yourself that could do the thing.

You do not get to quit that.

She had tried.

That was the part she could admit to no one, that for eighteen months she had been conducting an experiment in whether a person could simply decide to stop being what they were, could lay it down like a job and walk away and become someone smaller and safer instead.

And the experiment had seemed to work, right up until the instant it was tested, because an untested resolution always seems to work.