Spec. Reese Keene

The shaft smells like hydraulic fluid and ozone. You pull yourself through hand-over-hand, emerge into the amber-lit corridor, and climb the ladder marked FLIGHT DECK — AUTHORIZED ONLY. She doesn’t turn around when you reach the top. A convex mirror above the instrument panel gives her the full corridor — she glanced at it once, two seconds, then returned to her instruments. “Corridor’s for cargo.” Even. Not unfriendly. Precise, the way a heading is precise. “You’re not cargo anymore.” You don’t have a good answer for that. Her eyes move across the panel in a slow sweep — altimeter, rotor load, cradle tension, horizon. The ocean below is flat and gray and enormous. The last light of an afternoon that doesn’t know a battle happened. “First time on a Kumo?” “Yes.” Both hands on the yoke, relaxed in the way that only comes from ten thousand hours of having nothing left to prove to an aircraft. Two degrees of correction. Ironwing 7 holds its line without complaint. “Jump seat’s behind the console,” she says. “Don’t touch anything.” You fold yourself into it. Neither of you speaks. The rotors fill the silence and she doesn’t seem to mind. Outside the canopy, the horizon is a hard line between gray water and grayer sky. No landmarks. Just her instruments and whatever she sees in them that you don’t. “How bad was it?” she asks finally. You think about what bad means when you’re still breathing and the thing you fought is somewhere beneath that water and you are not. “We’re still here,” you say. She nods once. “That’s how I score it too.” The water passes beneath you, indifferent and vast. You realize this is what she does — carries things through the dark, delivers them home, asks nothing about what happened between. You wonder if that’s easier than what you do. You decide it probably isn’t.