Irene regained consciousness inside an airplane. For a moment, this didn’t seem strange to her. She was aware of pain, but it was a foggy, unspecific kind of pain, as diffuse as it was terrible, and she realized she was drugged. Morphine?

Baby, she thought.

She tried to move her arms, but she was strapped to something, a stretcher. She screamed out, My baby, where is my baby? She couldn’t feel if it was still there. She couldn’t feel her stomach at all. The grasshopper stirrings had gone quiet, but then this human insect of hers went to sleep all the time, went still for hours, so maybe it was drugged, too, on the morphine they had given her.

A bomb. That was it; that was what had happened. A bomb in the hangar. She was badly hurt. She was on an airplane, somewhere above the Spanish countryside, and though she couldn’t see anything, she knew it was one of the Republican airplanes, a Potez bomber by the sound of it. Sam’s airplane.

She felt her mind slip away again. Sam was alive. Everything would be all right, because Sam was still alive.

They were landing. Irene felt the sharp angle of descent. She thought hazily that it was too sharp, they were descending too fast, something had happened. She heard somebody’s voice, Sam’s voice yelling to her, but she couldn’t make out a word of it.

We’re cracking up, she thought.

Something was wrong with the engines. One of them had gone out. There was a cough, a sputter, and the other engine died.

No fuel, she thought.

How had they run out of fuel? The mechanics should have filled the tank last night, after they arrived back from Valencia. Maybe the mechanics had forgotten. Maybe they had forgotten to tell the mechanics? Sam was shouting at her from the cockpit. Telling her, probably, to brace herself. As if she could. She heard him better now that the engines were dead, but the thing about coasting, it was still noisy. There was the rattle of the airplane, the roar of the wind around you.

Down, down, down.

When would they hit? Surely it couldn’t hurt her as much as she hurt now. She thought she was boiling in oil. She just wanted to die, she wanted to crash already, except the baby would die and so would Sam.

The airplane slammed into the ground. Her last thought, as they skidded along whatever surface Sam had found to crash on, was that this was probably how it was supposed to end, after all. In a crash somewhere, just the two of them.

By now, more than a week had passed since the disappearance of Irene Foster on the final leg of the Round the World Air Derby, and dozens of aircraft had crisscrossed that stretch of the Sahara Desert where she was presumed to have crashed.