I can’t quite see the mirror. But as I lean in closer, hoping Julie’s face will offer some clue to the puzzle inside her . . . I see something else. Something more dangerous than her temper, than her dreams, than her secrets or mine.
A flash on the border wall. A bright spot rising.
“Uhh?” I blurt; I can’t find any words; I thrust my arm between Abram and Julie and point out the window.
They look.
“Abram?” Julie shouts.
“No,” he says in a tone of indignant disbelief, like there must be some mistake.
The object streaks up from the wall and a ball of fire blooms in the distance. A few seconds later, the sound hits: a low boom that I can feel in the floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Nora says, joining the bottleneck at the front of the plane. Two more glowing specks rise from the wall and explode, closer now. The three clouds of smoke float in the air like a bouquet of black roses, their white stems reaching down toward earth. The first is vertical, the second slightly curved; the third is pointing straight toward us.
“Daddy what’s happening?” Sprout cries.
“Stay in your seat, Murasaki!”
Something screams past the windows and I catch a split-second glimpse of the anti-aircraft defenses the wall supposedly doesn’t have: a blue cylinder with pointy fins and a red nose cone, like a child’s toy rocket. It explodes somewhere overhead, shoving the plane downward.
“Gray River,” M says dreamily. His face is pressed against the window, staring up at the lingering cloud of fire. “Magnum XLs.”
“What?” Abram shouts, craning his neck toward M.
“Old-fashioned heat seekers.”
“Why are they missing us?” Nora asks with a cringe, as if asking will break the spell.
“Tuned for fighter engines. We’re too cold.”
“So we’ll get through,” Abram declares with desperate confidence. “They’ll miss us and we’ll get through.”
M’s eyes widen. “Maybe, but—”
“Are you out of your mind?” Nora shrieks. “Turn around!”
Abram stares grimly ahead, his knuckles white on the controls.
“Turn around,” Julie says. “We can find somewhere else.”
“Like Iceland?” Abram snaps. “Like fucking Atlantis?” His voice trembles with a strange blend of rage and fear. “There’s nowhere else. There’s no more time. We’re in the mouth and it’s closing.”
Another flash from the wall.
“Abram, for Christ’s sake!” Julie says, grabbing the back of his seat. “Turn around!”
“Daddy?” Sprout says. She’s standing in the middle of the aisle, eyes wide with terror. Abram ignores her. He shoves the throttle forward.
This missile’s aim looks true. It will pierce through the center of the cockpit and burn everything to ash, all our rebellious hopes and prideful visions of a world better than the one God gave us, a world where we make our own rules, worthless creatures that we are—the missile explodes in front of us and knocks the plane upward like a punch to the chin. I topple back into the aisle and my head strikes a chair and as I sprawl out on the floor, the plane plunges into the fireball. The cabin is a cavern in Hell, red-orange light in every window and the roar of the angry damned demanding justice, real justice, not this kangaroo court of cosmic entrapment, the screams of children who never asked to be born, punished for the flaws in the world that greeted them—
“Help me!” Sprout is screaming over the howl of wind through two broken windows. She clings to a seat as the suction pulls at her hair and sucks drops of blood from a cut on her forehead.
Julie jumps off the floor and runs to her side. Sprout reaches out and Julie picks her up, though the girl isn’t much smaller than Julie herself. She carries her into the cockpit and sets her in the copilot seat and grabs Abram by the collar of his jacket.
“Turn the fuck around!” she roars into his face.
Abram looks from Julie to his daughter to the cyclone of dust and garbage swirling out the windows. “God damn it,” he hisses under his breath. He cranks the controls left.
I tumble back into my seat as the plane banks hard, rivets creaking under the strain. We tip until the window is looking straight at the ground, the dirt sky of an inverted world. I feel the air getting thin. An oxygen mask dangles in front of me and I remember the old instructions, their startlingly blatant reversal of ethics: Secure your own before helping others.
But before I can debate this moral puzzle, the air thickens again. My ears pop. We are descending so rapidly I wonder if we’re crashing, but then I see our runway lining up in front of us: a five-lane section of freeway stretching off toward Detroit.
“Landing . . . on that?” M says through clenched teeth. “The fucking road?”
Abram says nothing. No warnings, no instructions. He’s either consumed with the task of landing or he’s simply done dealing with us. But we don’t need him to tell us we’re in for a rough touchdown. Julie slips into her seat next to me. Her face is tight, but not with fear. Something else. I take her hand and she allows it to be taken, but her fingers remain clenched.
“Fuck,” M says. “Fuck.”
“Marcus,” Nora says. “Take a breath. You remember breathing, right?”