After breakfast and a bath, Irene drove her father to Burbank in his car, a green Model A, not because he’d been drinking (though she was pretty sure he had) but because she knew he liked her to drive. He had taught her himself, once she was thirteen and could reach the pedals. He dozed most of the way to Burbank, even though Irene put the top down in the heat and allowed the scorching California wind to blow right through him. His eyes opened just as Irene swung the car into the row of vehicles already lined up in the airfield parking lot.

“This is it?” he said.

“It’s not much, but it’s home.”

He raised his eyebrows at that. Irene expected him to ask a dozen questions, how long had she been flying, how had she found the place to begin with, who had taught her to fly, why she’d kept the whole business from him all these months. But he only nodded, as if he understood perfectly, and reached for the door handle.

The airfield was already filling with people. They had billed this afternoon as the first public demonstration of the new Rofrano Centauri, but in fact Sam and Irene had already made several test flights. Without fanfare, they had flown it together down to San Diego and back, Sam in the cockpit and Irene in the navigator’s seat just behind him, while the earth lay flat and fascinating as a map beneath them.

But nobody else knew anything about that. The fanfare, the crowds now gathering at the airfield, they had nothing to do with the inside of the Centauri’s revolutionary aluminum fuselage, which contained only Sam and Irene.

Irene spotted Sam right away. He stood next to the hangar, hands on hips, grinning his wide-mouthed grin before a semicircle of newspapermen and airplane fanatics. The California sun blazed away on his hair. His face had tanned bronze to match. As he spoke, he caught sight of Irene, hurrying past with her father, and his eyebrows went up. Irene shrugged and continued on to the cafeteria, where she sat her father down with a cup of coffee.

“I thought I was going to see an airplane,” he said.

“You’ll see it, all right. I can’t let you in the hangar, that’s all.”

“Your own father?”

“Rules are rules. A hangar’s a dangerous place if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Now, pumpkin—”

“Drink your coffee, all right? I’ll let you know when the excitement starts.”

When she returned to the hangar, Sam still held court outside. She nodded to the security guard and slipped in by the side door. There were no windows on this building, nothing to allow passersby any glimpse of the machine that lay inside. Irene flipped on the lights, and out of the blackness appeared this beautiful silver bird.