Chapter 61 730 EST
When Allie emerged from the lavatory, she found she had the waist of the plane to herself. The first thing she did was find
an adorably small bottle of Jack Daniels in the drinks cart, screw off the top, and throw it back. It hit hard, and she swayed
on her heels, and for a moment she felt like an inflatable girl, a plastic woman full of sweet emptiness and air, so weightless
she might’ve lifted right out of her shoes.
When her eyes stopped watering, she twitched the curtain two inches to one side, to inspect economy, what BA called “World
Traveller.” There had to be almost three hundred people back there—they called them souls when you were aloft, three hundred
souls—and flight attendants moving among them. Allie couldn’t possibly take in all of them, could hardly see to the back of
the cabin. Her eyes stung at the hopelessness of finding Horation Matthews among all the rest. It couldn’t be done. For all
she knew he was in disguise, wearing a wig, a fake mustache. She hardly knew what he looked like undisguised, and a figure came back to her, that people only recognize a familiar face out of context 8 percent of the time.
But then she looked, really looked. Her gaze began to flick from face to face, registering each for a moment, no more. She saw: a young Black man, dressed in
office casual; his children; his wife, leaning over the kids to help them with a Mad Libs; an old man with a Ken Follett novel, his wife pressed to his side, her hand resting gently, unconsciously, on his thigh; a bald woman with her head in a pastel silk wrap.
Allie studied her for an extra moment, wondering if she could be a Christian nationalist with a shaved skull and lipstick, but there was no psychopathy in this woman, only cancer.
Allie’s gaze drifted on, sorting passengers as she sorted numbers on a spreadsheet, pushing aside the thought that in a few hours they’d all be dead.
That child there would die with half her face burned off her skull.
That laughing teenage girl would hit the ocean hard enough to be liquefied herself.
She looked and looked, but it was going too slowly, it was taking too long, and desperation chased all the patience out of
her. She let the curtain fall back into place. In the next moment, the desperation ebbed, and a wild certainty took its place.
She couldn’t spot him in the back of the plane because he wasn’t in the back of the plane. She had only ever seen the one photo, and yet she was sure if he was there to be found, she would
recognize him in an instant . . . and perhaps he would recognize her too, in some fashion. He was being hunted, driven from his home, and running for his life. He would be on high alert and
possibly dazed with panicked exhaustion. She would know him by the way he sat, ready to spring from his chair, ready to scream.
And he would know her simply because she was looking for him. It was an absurd notion, but also felt like it could be true.
She stepped across the dim galley to the other curtain, the one across the entrance to business, tugged it a little to one side for a look.
The bald flight attendant was in the aisle, leaning over a passenger, possibly taking a dinner order, and no sooner had she touched the curtain than he lifted his head and caught her eye, as alert to her as if she had jangled a bell.
She dropped the curtain. Frig. She sensed he was already moving toward her.
In another moment he’d gently but firmly drive her back to her seat.
She wondered about diving into the bathroom once more—a childish notion—and her gaze fell on the staircase.
For the first time she noticed that the red carpet on those steps was stitched with copper dragons, unicorns, and lions.
No doubt the entire British Airways fleet was subtly decorated with the impossible bestiary of the empire, the Welsh dragon, the Scottish unicorn, and the English lion .
. . and yet in a glance Allie knew this was a tongue-in-cheek joke from King Sorrow to her and understood with a sudden surreal confidence that she would find Horation above.
Allie grasped the banister and ascended, the plane pitching her from side to side. She heard moans, back in economy, a sick
lowing of unhappiness, and she felt like a wraith slipping loose from some region of the damned. She paused at the top step.
Here was another little room for the flight crew, a sort of pantry with space for a coffee machine, a small fridge, a lavatory
to port, an emergency door to starboard. The second-floor cabin was not large and only about half-full: a dozen rows, with
a single aisle up the middle, two seats on either side. No one at all sat in the aftmost row. In the next row forward, a couple
in their late fifties sat to port. A single man occupied the aisle seat to starboard, the window seat empty. This man, traveling
alone, seemed to sense someone standing in the aisle behind him, and turned his head to stare blankly back at her.
Horation’s eyes were puffy slits, the eyes of a former boxer, and his cheeks showed the corrosion of youthful acne. For all
that, he was not unattractive. He projected a sleepy, surly masculinity, had the look of a man who didn’t rattle as a point
of principle. His gaze took her in, flicking down the length of her body, then up to her face, and he smiled, as if he had
been waiting for her to turn up.
The cabin went dark. The screen, at the far end of the compartment, lit up with the Paramount Pictures opening credit, a whirl
of stylized stars around snowcapped mountains. Time for the in-flight movie; time for a little fun in the dark.