Chris shook his head. “Olivia—what a bitch. I can’t help it if I had a dream.”

Chloe, sitting in the row behind them, said, “Not the dream again! Chris, just shut up about it.”

He didn’t turn in his seat but raised his voice slightly for Chloe to hear, sounding too loud as he said, “You won’t be saying that if I’m right and the plane crashes.”

Barney said, “What?”

“I dreamed it. And it was exactly this plane.”

Joel Aspinall was sitting across the aisle from Tom—student rep on the school council, son of some local politician—and he leaned forward now and said, “Chris, bro, you need to keep it down or we’ll get thrown off the plane.”

“Maybe we should get thrown off. Then you’d all be thanking me when it crashes.”

There was a murmur of voices in response, the talk clearly getting to some of them, but then from somewhere behind, possibly the back row, a very clear voice sounded, not raised, but deadly serious.

“Christian!” It was Alice Dysart, who’d known Chris since kindergarten and whose family was close to his. They were nothing alike, but the connection, whatever sort of connection it was, obviously carried some weight, because Chris yielded instantly and slumped down into his seat.

He still couldn’t resist turning to Tom and whispering, “This plane will crash. We’re all gonna die.”

He was such an attention seeker that it was hard to tell whether he’d really had a dream and was genuinely nervous, or whether it was some poor attempt at causing a stir.

Either way, Tom looked at him and said, “I don’t care.”

Chris kept eye contact for a few seconds, then seemed to give up and faced forward again. Tom did too, staring at the seat in front of him, struck by a strange realization.

He didn’t believe for one minute that Chris Davies had been having prophetic dreams, but he also realized he’d been telling the truth, that he actually didn’t care. Whatever was going to happen would happen anyway, and one day or another they would all die. The way Tom saw it, there wasn’t any point worrying about whether that day might be today.

CHAPTER 3

The first time Tom flew in a plane he’d been really excited beforehand, but also bored and impatient in equal measure. He’d been excited boarding, and really excited and a little scared for the first ten minutes. After that, it had been really boring and he’d fallen asleep.