The wing man came skimming in, sliding through the air until he was in fingertip formation, within five feet or so of Garry’s wing tip, every detail of his bird visible sharp and clear. They ran an eyeball leak and panel check of each other’s planes, and then they slid apart to a standard formation, tactical line abreast, a mile and a half apart.

Garry was sitting at the front of his plane, cushioned by ear plugs and ear cuff pads, surrounded by a crystal clear bubble of plastic. He was in a cocoon of sunlight and sound, everything at his fingertips and under his control, at home.

Garry turned the formation to the north-east, towards Arizona.

They flew over Las Vegas. The city was a splash of glass and concrete in the middle of a crumpled, arid landscape. He could see the pyramid of Luxor shining in the washed-out sun, utterly unreal. And then over Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam, and across the Shivwits Plateau… And now, here was his first, thrilling glimpse of the Grand Canyon.

Here at its western end the Canyon was a knife-gouge in the Colorado plateau. He was flying east now, into the low sun, and he could see how the light picked out sedimentary strata. In the deepest section of the Canyon he could see the Colorado River itself, a stripe of silver-blue painted over the land. There was a greenish stubble over the plateau and the upper slopes of the Canyon, the asparagus green a strong contrast to the crisp red of the old rocks exposed beneath. The stubble was a covering of trees, he knew, junipers in a sea of sage, diminished to specks by the scale of the Canyon.

He dipped low, and imagined the sound of his passing washing over the empty land. But a soft warning from Jake made him lift his nose, and gain a little more altitude. A smudge of volcanic shit, ash and dust, covered the ground here, emanating from the cracks that had opened up in million-year-old vents. Best to keep his engine intakes clear of that.

He looked into the Inner Gorge, the oldest rocks. He could see where the Moonseed was eating into them, silvery patches like scars amid the volcanism.

They headed further east. He passed Lava Falls, where rapids turned the river white, and he was flying over the Havasupai Reservation, the home of the People of Blue Green Water, who had lived here for a thousand years. But today, of course, the People had been evacuated. Despite the peril they had stuck to their traditions; they had insisted on walking out, all the way to Tusayan.