“There are a dozen other mini-crises unfolding, but the team has it in hand. There is one other thing, I suppose. Would either of you like a glass of beer or wine in violation of all regulations?”

They glance back at him. Bronson grins.

“I want to have your baby, Vorstenbosch,” she says. “We would make a lovely child.”

Waters says, “Ditto.”

“That’s a yes?”

Waters and Bronson look at each other.

“Better not,” Bronson decides, and Waters nods.

Then the captain adds, “But I’ll have the coldest Dos Equis you can find as soon as we’re parked.”

“You know what my favorite thing about flying is?” Bronson asks. “It’s always a sunny day up this high. It seems impossible anything so awful could be happening on such a sunny day.”

They are all admiring the cloudscape when the white and fluffy floor beneath them is lanced through a hundred times. A hundred pillars of white smoke thrust themselves into the sky, rising from all around. It’s like a magic trick, as if the clouds had hidden quills that have suddenly erupted up and out. A moment later the thunderclap hits them and with it turbulence, and the plane is kicked, knocked up and to one side. A dozen red lights stammer on the dash. Alarms shriek. Vorstenbosch sees it all in an instant as he is lifted off his feet. For a moment Vorstenbosch floats, suspended like a parachute, a man made of silk, filled with air. His head clubs the wall. He drops so hard and fast it’s as if a trapdoor has opened in the floor of the cockpit and plunged him into the bright fathoms of the sky beneath.

JANICE MUMFORD IN BUSINESS

“Mom!” Janice shouts. “Mom, lookat! What’s that?”

What’s happening in the sky is less alarming than what’s happening in the cabin. Someone is screaming: a bright silver thread of sound that stitches itself right through Janice’s head. Adults groan in a way that makes Janice think of ghosts.

The 777 tilts to the left and then rocks suddenly hard to the right. The plane sails through a labyrinth of gargantuan pillars, the cloisters of some impossibly huge cathedral. Janice had to spell “cloisters” (an easy one) in the Englewood Regional.

Her mother, Millie, doesn’t reply. She’s breathing steadily into a white paper bag. Millie has never flown before, has never been out of California. Neither has Janice, but unlike her mother she was looking forward to both. Janice has always wanted to go up in a big airplane; she’d also like to dive in a submarine someday, although she’d settle for a ride in a glass-bottomed kayak.