“There must be somewhere north we can land, away from—from what’s coming down behind us. There must be somewhere that isn’t a threat to anyone. Nunavut maybe? They landed a 777 at Iqaluit last year. Short little runway at the end of the world, but it’s technically possible, and we might have enough fuel to make it.”

“Silly me,” Kate says. “I didn’t think to pack a winter coat.”

He says, “You must be new to long-haul flying. You never know where they’re going to send you, so you always make sure to have a swimsuit and mittens in your bag.”

She is new to long-haul flying—she attained her 777 rating just six months ago—but she doesn’t think Waters’s tip is worth taking to heart. Kate doesn’t think she’ll ever fly another commercial aircraft. Neither will Waters. There won’t be anywhere to fly to.

Kate isn’t going to see her mother, who lives in Pennsyltucky, ever again, but that’s no loss. Her mother will bake, along with the stepfather who tried to put a hand down the front of Kate’s Wranglers when she was fourteen. When Kate told her mom what he’d tried to do, her mother said it was her own fault for dressing like a slut.

Kate will also never see her twelve-year-old half brother again, and that does make her sad. Liam is sweet, peaceful, and autistic. Kate got him a drone for Christmas, and his favorite thing in the world is to send it aloft to take aerial photographs. She understands the appeal. It has always been her favorite part of getting airborne, too, that moment when the houses shrink to the size of models on a train set. Trucks the size of ladybugs gleam and flash as they slide, frictionless, along the highways. Altitude reduces lakes to the size of flashing silver hand mirrors. From a mile up, a whole town is small enough to fit in the cup of your palm. Her half brother Liam says he wants to be little, like the people in the pictures he takes with his drone. He says if he were as small as they are, Kate could put him in her pocket and take him with her.

They soar over the northernmost edge of North Dakota, gliding in the way she once sliced through the bathwater-warm water off Fai Fai Beach, through the glassy bright green of the Pacific. How good that felt, to sail as if weightless above the oceanworld beneath. To be free of gravity is, she thinks, to feel what it must be like to be pure spirit, to escape the flesh itself.

Minneapolis calls out to them. “Delta 236, you are off course. You are about to vacate our airspace. What’s your heading?”

“Minneapolis,” Waters says, “our heading is zero-six-zero, permission to redirect to Yankee Foxtrot Bravo, Iqaluit Airport.”

“Delta 236, why can’t you land at Fargo?”