Dapkey’s warning echoed in her head.
“Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” she asked.
“That’s not for us to say,” Kora said kindly. “It’s your life. We all must make our own decisions.”
Nayli was looking up and frowning at a panoramic TV screen in the cafeteria high on the wall.
“Is that the creep Brad or are my eyes deceiving me?”
Aelanna and Kora followed her gaze and landed on a well-known sports reporter on a news channel, in front of a clip from a famous New York baseball team in their home stadium. The video cut to a still of a new player.
Oh no...it was Brad the rat Silverman. He had made it on another rung to international stardom. Was he to plague her life forever?
Nayli muttered on. “If I ever get my hands on him, he’s gonna regret it... ”
“Guys please, let’s not do this again. I’m trying to move on,” Aelanna cried.
Kora was giving one of the waiters a death stare. He came over.
“Could you change the channel?” she asked.
“What to?”
“Anything but that.” She jerked her head at the screen, but Aelanna said, “Scrub that” because the sports report was over.
The waiter rearranged his face into a bland, customer-facing expression. He took his order tablet out of his pocket.
“Can I get you ladies anything?”
Aelanna didn’t know anything about planes, but this one was small and exclusive, and the journey seemed to take hours, until at last she felt it descending just as the day was fading. The young male cabin assistant didn't speak to them, apart from running through the emergency routine and making sure they were strapped in. They touched down in the middle of nowhere and sped along a tarmac runway in the middle of gently undulating grassland for longer than she felt comfortable, but the vastness felt like a blank page. She could remake her life here; start over.
The three women stepped off the plane, down a few steps into a warm breeze. The sun was setting, and it was the golden hour, washing the grass plain that they’d landed in with a lurid orange glow.
The landscape was empty and isolated. Apart from a few runway lights flickering in the dying sun, and a fence of posts and two wires stretched between them, nothing and nobody was there.Deserted. As in an actual desert. All Aelanna could see was a horizon of endless prairie, of rippling grass, the low sun and rapidly darkening sky around it. A strange feeling for a city girl who had never seen anything but buildings and streets and people. They had arrived in an alien world here on Earth.
They stood in a small huddle, clutching the handles of their cabin bags and looking lost. The stairs were already up and the plane was taxiing off in the opposite direction. They were on their own.
“What do we do now? Where do we go?” asked Aelanna.
“It's not Kansas, for sure,” said Nayli.
“I’ll bet it’s Oklahoma—” snapped Kora.
Aelanna twisted round to face them, cutting off Kora with her mouth open. “Guys, we must figure out what to do.”
A dusty off-road vehicle with a large cab and an open pick-up truck back drew up alongside them. A young, gangly guy with messy red hair and matching stubble hopped out ofthe driver's door. He wore blue overalls, like a mechanic.
“Get in,” he said in an unfamiliar accent, jerking his head toward the cab. “Leave yer bags. I’ll load ‘em.”
“Wait a minute,” Kora said, confronting him. “We two are travelling... onwards.” She jiggled her hand between her and Nayli. “My friend,” she pointed to Aelanna, “needs to go to the terminal. Can you take her there, and us... wherever we’ve got to go?” She glare-frowned at him. “Where’s the terminal, or is there one at all?”
“Over there,” he said, jerking his head to a long low shed with a corrugated metal roof. “Only I’m the last one here. The manager’s knocked off early and there ain’t nobody else.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Aelanna fixing Kora then Nayli with a determined look. “I’ve changed my mind.”
Nayli gasped. “Sweetheart! What brought this on?”
“Are you sure? It’s not that you feel like a fish out of water because you’re out of New York?” asked Kora.
