Stop. It.
Raven fell into step beside her, dragging her crew bag with the resigned energy of a woman who had given up on the wheels three airports ago. "Did you see the notice?"
"What notice?"
“Company email. Just came through.” Raven held up her phone, but they were walking too fast for Ciana to read it. “Côte d’Azur Atlantic has been acquired. New ownership, effective immediately. Some holding company out of—” She squinted at her screen. “—Monaco.”
Ciana felt something shift. Not alarm, not yet. A vibration, like a wine glass struck at the wrong frequency. “Acquired by whom?”
"Doesn’t say. Very private, apparently. The email’s all corporate-speak. ‘Exciting new chapter,’ ‘commitment to excellence,’ the usual nothing-words." Raven shoved her phone into her jacket pocket. "Could be worse. Could be a budget carrier. Imagine us in polo shirts."
Ciana didn’t laugh. She was looking at the departures board, but she wasn’t reading it. Acquired. The only stable thing in her constructed life—the airline, the routes, the rhythm that kept her days from collapsing into the shapelessness she remembered from before—had just been picked up and placed in someone else’s hands.
Raven glanced at her. Something in Ciana’s face must have shown, because her voice shifted: still Raven, still dry, but with the structural reinforcement underneath that she deployed when she could tell Ciana’s foundations were swaying. “Hey. It’s probably nothing. Airlines change hands all the time. Our contracts are solid.”
"I know."
"And if anything changes, we deal with it. You’re the best crew on this fleet, and I’m saying that only partly because I’m biased."
Ciana nodded. Managed a small smile that felt like it fit correctly on her face.
They turned the corner toward the crew exit, and Ciana’s gaze swept the row of security monitors mounted above the corridor junction. Most of the screens showed empty gates, motionless jetways, the hollow architecture of an airport between shifts.
One screen showed the first-class cabin. Her cabin. The image was frozen, a still frame, not a live feed. It showed the aisle, the seats, the low amber lighting. And in the centre of the frame, caught mid-motion, pouring champagne with her face turned slightly toward 1A: Ciana.
Her own face looked back at her from the monitor. Eyes soft in a way she didn’t recognise. Mouth slightly parted. She looked like a woman noticing something she wasn’t supposed to notice.
Then the screen flickered. Cycled to another feed, an empty gate, grey carpet, nobody there.
Ciana stood very still.
"Ci?" Raven was ahead of her, halfway to the exit. "You coming?"
“Yeah.” She didn’t look at the monitor again. She walked. Her heels clicked against the terminal floor and she counted them the way she always did when the ground stopped feeling solid. One, two, three, four.
Her flat was a third-floor walk-up in the Libération quarter, four hundred square metres of careful independence: white walls she had painted herself, a shelf of paperbacks organised by colour because it soothed something in her that she had never bothered to name, a kitchen window that framed a rectangle of Nice skythat changed colour seventeen times between dawn and noon. She had counted.
She made tea. Sat at the table. Opened her laptop and deleted the airline acquisition email without reading it because Raven had already summarised the only parts that mattered and because the rest would be noise designed to make upheaval sound like opportunity, and Ciana had no patience for that particular fiction.
She thought about the security monitor. The frozen image. Her own face, softened toward 1A, caught on camera and displayed on a screen that should have been showing live feeds from the terminal.
It was a glitch. Screens cycled. Feeds lagged. It meant nothing.
She washed her cup. Set it on the rack. Stood at the kitchen window and watched the streetlight throw its orange circle on the pavement below, and inside that circle a cat moved, slow and deliberate, as though the light were warm.
Her phone buzzed.
A company memo, different from the acquisition email. This one was addressed to her directly. She read it standing up, because some things were easier to absorb when your body was already braced.
INTERNAL MEMO — CONFIDENTIAL
TO: C. Reyes, Senior Cabin Attendant
RE: Reassignment — Private Charter Division
Effective immediately, you’ve been reassigned to the newly formed Private Charter Division of Côte d’Azur Atlantic. You’llserve as sole cabin attendant on an exclusive client account. Details of the client and flight schedule will be provided upon your first briefing.
Please confirm receipt and availability within 24 hours. Refusal to accept this reassignment may result in termination of your current contract.
