“What the fuck is happening?” Mason’s awake, eyes wide and confused, automatically reaching for me before catching himself. “Phoenix?”
“We’re crashing.” The words come out high and thin. “We’re actually crashing.”
“We’re not crashing,” Atticus says, but his knuckles are white on the armrests.
“You said turbulence never brought down a plane!”
“I know?—”
The plane lurches violently to the left. The flight attendant definitely screams this time, and something crashes in the galley.
I turn to glare at Atticus, fury mixing with terror in a cocktail that makes me feel insane. “If this plane goes down, I want you to know something.”
“Phoenix—”
“The last words you ever hear.” I bare my teeth at him in what definitely isn’t a smile. “The very last thing before the curtain goes down for the last fucking time.”
“We’re not going to?—“
“I. Told. You. So.”
The plane drops again and the lights go out.
FIVE
ATTICUS
I’m slowly comingto the realization that I missed my shot with Phoenix Riviera.
At this point, I’ve tried everything. Every trick and technique in the book that has served me so well in the past has landed with a thud. Where Phoenix is concerned, I have absolutely no game.
The emergency lights cast everything in a sickly greenish-yellow glow that makes Phoenix look like she’s about to vomit. Which, to be fair, she might be. We’ve been on the ground for twenty minutes now, and she still hasn’t unclenched her death grip on the armrests. Mason’s trying to coax her fingers loose, speaking in that low, soothing voice I’ve already identified as the one he uses when Phoenix is spiraling.
“Phoenix, we’re safe. We’re on the ground.” Mason’s thumb brushes over her white knuckles. “You can let go now.”
“No.”
“The plane isn’t moving anymore.”
“It might.”
“Physics doesn’t work that way.”
“Physics tried to kill us thirty minutes ago, so forgive me if I don’t trust it very much right now.”
She’s got a point. The landing was rough enough to send Stephanie’s laptop flying across the cabin, where it connected with her face hard enough to leave a gash that’s still bleeding through the tablecloth she balled up to use as a makeshift bandage. The flight attendant’s sporting what’s going to be a spectacular black eye, and I’m pretty sure I bit through part of my tongue when we hit the runway and bounced right back up like it was a trampoline.
Now, I’m just sitting here like an idiot, watching them and wondering how I became the villain in this particular story.
“This is your fault,” she says for the third time, finally releasing the armrests to point an accusing finger at me. “You and your statistics.Turbulence never brought down a plane, Phoenix. You’re perfectly safe, Phoenix. Stop being an anxious idiot, Phoenix.Well guess what? We almost fucking died!”
I’m pretty sure those aren’t exactly verbatim quotes, but it’s probably better not to argue. “We didn’t almost die.”
“We had to wear oxygen masks!”
“As a precaution?—”
“Oxygen. Masks. Atticus.” Each word comes out like a bullet. “That’s not precaution, that’s…holy shit we’re all about to become a cautionary tale for aviation safety.”
