He stepped back from the console and scanned the flight deck, turning in one complete circle.

Jim said, “What is it, Eph?”

Eph had spent enough time around corpses not to be jumpy. But there was something here…somewhere. Here or nearby.

The strange sensation passed, like a dizzy spell, leaving him blinking. He shook it off. “Nothing. Claustrophobia, probably.”

Eph turned to the third man inside the cockpit. His head hung low, his right shoulder propped up against the side wall. His jump seat harness straps hung down.

Eph said aloud, “Why isn’t he belted in?”

Nora said, “Eph, are you in the cockpit? I’m coming to you.”

Eph looked at the dead man’s silver tie pin with the Regis Air logo. The nameplate over his pocket read REDFERN. Eph dropped to one knee before him, pressing his thickly gloved fingers against the man’s temples to raise his face. His eyes were open and down turned. Eph checked his pupils, and thought he saw something. A glimmer. He looked again, and suddenly Captain Redfern shuddered and emitted a groan.

Eph jerked backward, falling between the two captains’ chairs and against the control console with a clatter. The first officer slumped against him, and Eph pushed back at him, trapped for a moment by the man’s limp, dead weight.

Jim’s voice called to him sharply, “Eph?”

Nora’s voice held a note of panic. “Eph, what is it?”

With a surge of energy, Eph propelled the first officer’s body back into its chair and got to his feet.

Nora said, “Eph, are you all right?”

Eph looked at Captain Redfern, spilled onto the floor now, eyes open and staring. His throat, though, was working, bucking, his open mouth seeming to gag on the air.

Eph said, wide-eyed, “We have a survivor here.”

Nora said, “What?”

“We have a man alive here. Jim, we need a Kurt isolation pod for this man. Brought directly to the wing. Nora?” Eph was talking fast, looking at the pilot twitching on the floor. “We have to go through this entire airplane, passenger by passenger.”

INTERLUDE I

ABRAHAM SETRAKIAN

THE OLD MAN STOOD ALONE ON THE CRAMPED SALES floor of his pawnshop on East 118th Street, in Spanish Harlem. An hour after closing and his stomach was rumbling, yet he was reluctant to go upstairs. The gates were all pulled down over the doors and windows, like steel eyelids, the night people having claimed the streets outside. At night, you don’t go out.

He went to the bank of dimmers behind the loan desk, and darkened the store lamp by lamp. He was in an elegiac mood. He looked at his shop, the display cases of chrome and streaked glass. The wristwatches showcased on felt instead of velvet, the polished silver he couldn’t get rid of, the bits of diamond and gold. The full tea sets under glass. The leather coats and now-controversial furs. The new music players that went fast, and the radios and televisions he didn’t bother taking in anymore. And there were, here and there, treasures: a pair of beautiful antique safes (lined with asbestos, but just don’t eat it); a suitcase-size wood-and-steel Quasar VCR from the 1970s; an antique 16mm film projector.