He spent a while aimlessly clicking through Maeve’s various social media activities. On Lyke and other social media platforms, she had registered using variant spellings of her first name (Mab, Mabh, Madbh) and her last (Bradan, O Bradain). Apparently both names were Gaelic and so the spelling was all over the place. This was a common subterfuge used by people who didn’t want to sign up for social media accounts under their real names, but who understood that the fake name had to be convincing enough to pass an elementary screen by an algorithm somewhere; “Mickey Mouse” or “X Y” would be rejected, but “Mabh O Bradain” was fine. “Mab” was only one letter different from “Moab” and he wondered if Maeve had used it for that reason, as a sort of pun on her adopted home.

She was Australian, living in the States because of some family complications only murkily hinted at on social media. She was a double amputee—one of those people who suffered from a congenital malformation of the lower legs that made it necessary to remove them, below the knee, during childhood. She had been pursuing rowing and paddling sports for much of her twenty-nine years. Verna, her older sister in Adelaide, had stage 3 melanoma; Maeve had a lot to say about the importance of sun protection for outdoorsy people.

He had been clicking on links for a while without reading them. He had gone down a rat hole and found himself reading a page on modern high-tech prosthetic legs. He knew a couple of other people who used them, and had once invested in a startup that was trying to make better ones. So as random as it might have seemed, it felt like a point of connection between him and Maeve.

The jet was over the Bitterroots, aimed south-southwest. Corvallis pulled up a map and zoomed it to the point where he could see San Jose in the bottom left, Moab in the bottom right, and Missoula up top.

He unbuckled his seat belt and walked forward past the little galley, where Bonnie was making coffee. She had kicked off her high-heeled pumps and switched to her sensible in-flight footwear. She looked up at him, moderately startled; the toilet was in the back, he had no particular reason for being up at this end of the plane.