“What’s the difference?”

“You want me to tell you the difference between riding a bike and falling off one?”

“I just meant that once you’ve flown one plane you can pretty much fly them all. Oh look. Wonder what this button does?”

“Don’t touch it.”

“What does it do?”

“I don’t know, but don’t touch it.”

“It must do something, though.”

“Of course it does something. It wouldn’t be there if it didn’t do something. But since we don’t know what it does, don’t touch it.”

Vex raised an eyebrow at Saracen as they picked up speed. Saracen laughed, opened his mouth to talk...

“I’m going to press it,” said Gracious over the speakers.

“Do not do that,” said Donegan.

“It might be important. It might be the fly button.”

“There is no fly button.”

“On these new jets, how do you know? It might be a button that stops us from blowing up, or crashing.”

“Don’t say crash,” said Donegan, “not when we have passengers.”

“They can’t hear me,” said Gracious. “They can only hear me if I keep this mic button here pressed. I could be calling them all the names under the sun and they wouldn’t have any idea.”

“Still,” said Donegan.

Outside, the runway blurred past the windows and Vex’s head was pressed back into his seat.

“Hey,” said Gracious over the tannoy, “you think Aurora has a boyfriend?”

“Probably,” said Donegan.

“I don’t think she does,” said Gracious. “I think she’d have mentioned it. You think she’d go out with me?”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“You’re short.”

“I’m the same height as she is.”

“Yeah, but you look like a hobbit.”

“She might like that.”

“She might like hairy feet?”

“My feet aren’t hairy. They’re masculine. So you think she’d go out with me?”

“Still no.”

The jet lifted off the ground, but over the roar of the engines Gracious kept talking. “Do you think she’d go out with Saracen?”

“Probably.”

“Yeah.” The plane climbed higher. “I would.”

“You’d go out with Saracen?”

“If I was going to date a guy, yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t know. I don’t think he’d be my type. You know who I would date? Frightening.”

“Why Frightening?”

“I just think he’d be gentle, you know?”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t date Dexter?”

“I’d be afraid I might cut myself on his abs,” Donegan said, and they laughed until Gracious said, “Oh, wait, this is the mic button,” and then the speakers cut off.

Once the plane had levelled off, Vex stood up. “OK then,” he said, “as you may have guessed, the time has finally come to stop talking about collecting the four God-Killers, and just go do it. I appreciate that it’s pretty short notice, but the opportunity has arisen and we might not get a better one.”