Then we go. Tear along at some godawful speed while the scream climbs up my lungs. No. No. NO! It’s too late, I’m strapped in this goddamn chair like an execution, I can’t get out, I can’t make her hear me through all that racket, my God, I can’t make her understand that I’ve changed my mind, I want to stop, I want to stay safe on the ground, now faster and faster, until I close my eyes again and give it all up. I say to myself, never mind, what does it matter, if I die I die, this is how Velázquez died, I will die as he died, I will know what he knew, I will feel as he felt, I will maybe see him somewhere—not in heaven, sinners as we are and unashamed, but somewhere warmer—and I’ll tell him maybe I might have married him, if he had lived, because it seems I had become a little attached to him after all, it seems I still keep the memory of him tucked deep beneath the glassy surface of that organ most people call a heart. And while I’m thinking all these thoughts, one after the other, experiencing this strange revelation, something happens.

We rise in the air.

All that rattling melts into something like peace.

And I think, Lord Almighty. I’m flying.

I lean forward and tap Lindquist on the shoulder. “Where are we going, anyhow?”

“Just a little island out to the west,” she says, “where we can be alone.”

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

August 1928: Howland Island

The island was shaped like a pickle instead of a potato chip not because of some cartographer’s error, but because it was not Baker Island. It was Howland Island, thirty-two miles to the north, and they had only just caught sight of it at the extreme southern edge of the horizon. So Sam and Irene had narrowly made landfall at all.

The Centauri wasn’t in bad shape, all things considered. There was no apparent structural damage. The engines and the wheels had come through the hard landing fine, except for a blown tire. The only destruction came to the longwave radio antenna, which had broken off, leaving them unable to communicate.

“But they know we’re here,” said Sam. “That was my last transmission, that we had sighted land and were headed down.”

“To Baker Island. And they’ll sail on over to Baker Island and find no trace of us, and they’ll think we ditched at sea and drowned.”

“Baker’s not so far away. We’ll see a ship and signal. Anyway, they’ll look for us here, if they don’t find us on Baker.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Positive.”