Behind them, in the galley, the lead flight attendant, Sarah, was doing the same. A passenger in 4B was hysterical, screaming about a mechanical sound he thought he’d heard. Sarah didn't comfort him with a hug or a soft word. She stood over him, her expression unreadable, and gave him the only thing that would save him: a set of precise, icy instructions.
In the cockpit, the alarms were a choir of chaos. Elias didn't flinch. He didn't think about his wife waiting at the gate in Santiago or the fact that this was his last flight before retirement. He was simply a machine of muscle and memory. He adjusted the trim, felt the engines roar in protest, and forced the nose down to regain speed.
“Airspeed’s decaying,” his co-pilot, Miller, whispered. Her knuckles were white on the yoke. This was her first trans-continental flight since her father’s funeral, and Elias could see the tremor in her hands.
The plane hit a pocket of dead air, dropping five hundred feet in a second. Screams erupted from the cabin. Oxygen masks tumbled from the ceiling like yellow plastic ghosts.
When the wheels finally chirped against the tarmac in Santiago, the silence didn't break immediately. It lingered until the engines began their low, mournful whine down to a halt.
