She turned on the air nozzle above her head to full force, but there was no escaping the succulent odor of her fellow travelers, not packed into this tin can.

You certainly couldn’t feed on a jet. If you stuffed the remnant down the toilet, it would be found later in the plane’s holding tank. Remnants had to be completely destroyed—ground up and burned, usually. Humans had found just a very few of them over the generations, generally taken for mummies. In fact, she’d once wrapped a news hawker in tape and put him in a mummy case in the basement of the British Museum. That had been when—oh, a few hundred years ago. He was probably still there, her old hawker. It had been the St. James’s Gazette that he’d been selling. Pretty good paper in its day.

Look at the humans around her, she thought, all happy and fluttery and unconcerned about the thirty-thousand-foot maw of death beneath their feet. How could anybody be as careless of their lives as humans were? They flew all the time; they raced around in automobiles; they went on roller coasters and fought wars. Miriam’s theory was that humans did indeed have souls, and inwardly they knew it. That was why they came to her for sex, thrilled by the danger they sensed. They weren’t really afraid of death, the humans. For them, it was nothing more than another thrill ride.

For the Keepers, death meant leaving the cosmos forever.

The plane leveled off. Miriam knew by its motion and sound exactly what it was doing at every moment of the flight. Actually, she could have flown it herself. She’d trained herself on her PC with a flight simulator, just in case some pilot died from the airline food or something. If some fool were to attempt to hijack the thing, she’d hypnotize him immediately and simply sit him right back down. They’d have to try to figure it out later.

Two shy children peeked at her over the seat ahead. They gazed steadily at the European, but it wasn’t only curiosity in their eyes. She knew that the longer the flight, the more uneasy she would make her seat-mates. The presence of a Keeper evoked instincts that humans, being so near the top of the food chain, were as unfamiliar with as she was with fear. What a human felt in the presence of a Keeper was what a mouse felt in the presence of a snake—a sort of horrible question.

They would grow unaccountably suspicious of her, be strangely drawn to her, grow sick in her presence, and if they slept, they would have nightmares about her, every single soul in this airplane.