“Why?” Jed asked, not thrilled. They’d descended to seven thousand feet and it had been simple—just dial 7000 into the altitude box on the autopilot and hit Accept. The plane had descended smoothly to the desired altitude, leveled off, and adjusted power to keep the speed at the preset two hundred and twenty knots. He’d begun to believe they might survive this insane plan.

“There’s no auto-land feature on this plane,” the pilot said calmly. “So we’re going to line you up, walk you through power settings to manage the descent and speed, and give you little corrections, but at the bottom, you’ll have to hand fly the plane to land. I want you to get a little bit of a feel for it now, okay?”

“Uh . . . okay,” he said, shooting a glance at Eli, who tried to give him an encouraging smile but failed.

“One, put your left hand on the yoke—the steering wheel–looking thing—and your right hand on the throttles.”

Jed did as instructed. “Check. Now what?”

“Two, I want you to turn off the autopilot,” the pilot said, “and, One, you just hold her steady.”

Eli mumbled a short prayer, then disengaged the autopilot.

To Jed’s surprise, nothing happened at all.

The plane continued in straight and level flight, on heading, the speed constant.

“Okay, One, smoothly pull the throttles back. You’ll feel the nose drop—which is fine, it’s supposed to. You’ll begin to descend. Once the vertical speed indicator—it’s beside or beneath the airspeed indicator and probably labeled VSI—gets to about the five hundred feet  per minute down hash mark, just ease the tiniest little pressure back in on the throttles.”

Jed did it, his chest tightening when the nose dropped with the throttles coming back; then—when they didn’t fall out of the sky in a gigantic fireball—he relaxed a little bit.

“Just keep the wings level with gentle pressure left and right if you need to. Look outside to do this—don’t stare at the instruments and chase things around too much.”

Jed concentrated on doing just that and again found it easier than expected.

“Okay, we’re going to level now at two thousand five hundred feet, okay?” the faceless voice instructed a few minutes later. “Ease the throttles forward for me, slow and smooth, to somewhere about where they were when you were level.”

Jed complied, and the plane bobbled a bit. He instinctively pulled on the yoke, but he found the less he did, the better the plane responded, and after a few tweaks on the throttles, they were level at two thousand two hundred feet.

“Sorry,” he grumbled.

“Close enough,” the pilot replied, but that felt wrong to Jed since being off by three hundred feet at landing would be a disaster.