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ABE STARED AT HIS CONTROLS AS he flew his jet over Africa. The controls didn’t indicate anything was wrong, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.
“Can you stop whistling for a second?” he asked.
Darius rolled his eyes. Instead of whistling, he switched to tapping the dashboard in front of him. “How much longer until we get there? All this plane travel makes me antsy.”
Abe had the strong desire to flick Darius, but instead chose to do a quick, in-flight diagnostic instead. “We’ve only been flying for twelve minutes. It used to take hours to go this distance.”
Darius tapped the dashboard harder. “Yeah, and I would have complained about it back then too.”
“Keiko,” Abe said suddenly.
He felt bad interrupting her while she was on a phone call with Husani, but he needed her hacking skills.
She popped her head into the cockpit. “I know you think it’s safer for me in Nairobi, but I’m still going to help you guys do stuff once we get there. You have to stop treating me like a child.”
Abe waved a hand through the air. “That’s not what I was going to say. Look at this diagnostic. Does anything look weird to you?”
“Oh,” Keiko said with a victorious grin. She glanced over to her hologram screen, which showed Husani grinning even harder than her. She swept up to the dashboard and said to Husani, “See, we’re not even in Kenya and they already need my help.”
Husani snickered. “That’s my girl, showing everybody up without even trying.”
Keiko tapped a few controls on the dashboard before she shrugged. “I don’t know what the readings for the air outside are supposed to be like, so I don’t know if I can help you there.”
“They’re all in the acceptable range,” Abe said. “They just seem too uniform, if you know what I mean.”
“Did you know this jet is not pure steel,” Darius said with a hand cupped over his ear. “It actually has a lot of impurities, and I’m guessing whoever sold it to you failed to disclose that.”
Keiko rolled her eyes, “And you’re basing that information on what exactly?”
Darius sat up in his chair with a look that suggested he’d been waiting for this moment. “I have elemental hearing.” He pointed his nose a little higher in the air. “I’ll be hila wasomi by the end of next summer.”
Keiko groaned. “Did we really have to take this guy? I’ve known him for less than an hour and I’m already about to lose my mind.”
Husani snickered from the hologram screen.
Abe ignored them all. “See, right here. Don’t these readings look too perfect to you? They’re all within range, but there’s usually more variance. You don’t think there’s a program or something messing with the readings, do you?”
Keiko started to shrug until the controls showed a little blip. Abe was ready to dismiss her and send her back to the cab, but when Keiko saw that blip, she lunged forward and put her hands on the controls.
“What is it?” he asked.
Rather than answer, Keiko’s fingers flew across the controls even faster than before. A harried look fell over her face.
“Keiko, what is it?” Abe asked again.
“Don’t bother her while she’s working,” Husani said. “She needs to concentrate.”
Abe narrowed his eyes at him. “When did you get so mouthy?”
Husani laughed through the hologram screen. “You aren’t my boss anymore. I can say whatever I want.”
Abe tried to look annoyed, but he had a laugh under his breath, and he knew they both heard it.
“You used to be his boss?” Darius said with one eyebrow cocked up. “How old are you?”
Before Abe could answer, the controls started beeping. The readings for the conditions outside were now off the charts, and not in a good way.
He gulped and turned on auto-pilot. “Everybody to the back,” he said. Keiko followed his order without question, but Darius had that look in his eye. He was about to ask a thousand questions, none of which they had time for.
Abe grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to his feet. “Now!” he said. He still had to push Darius through the cockpit door to get him to comply.
Once in the cab, Darius pouted. “What’s going on?”
“Shut up,” Keiko yelled at him. Then she turned to Abe. “I marked where we were in the sky before we left the cockpit and I got a copy of the autopilot route. If Husani knows exactly what time we get hit, we can use the exact time it takes to fall plus the autopilot map to figure out our location when we crash.”
“When we what?” Darius asked. “Crash? Did you say crash?”
Abe nodded. “Get ready to time us, Husani. There’s going to be a huge fire, but I don’t think there will be much of an explosion.”
“What is going on?” Darius shouted.
“Do you have anything to help with the heat? Do you think we’ll get burned?” Keiko asked.
Abe was already pulling the parachuting suits out of a cupboard. They wouldn’t use the parachutes, but the suits had several layers of protection that would help in the heat. Plus, they could use their temperature-controlled underclothes. Hopefully that would be enough.
Wait.
Parachutes.
Should they use the parachutes? Maybe it would be better to parachute out of the jet before the fire ball hit. They wouldn’t know exactly where they landed, but they might have a better chance of survival. That is, unless they fell into a fire ball on their way down.
“Will somebody please tell me what is going on?”
The jet shook and Darius fell to the ground.
“That was it, Husani,” Keiko said. “Start timing now.”
Husani nodded at her from the hologram screen. Every trace of playfulness had been wiped from his face. Now he wore a look that was purely concern. Abe had never seen Husani making a face that looked so ... noble? It suited him.
“Put this on,” Abe said, shoving the parachute suit at Darius. “And set your temperature-controlled underclothes as cold as they can go.”
The temperature-controlled underclothes wouldn’t allow temperatures that could cause hypothermia, which seemed smart. But right now, it would have been nice if they could lower the temperature even a few degrees more.
He felt a jolt in his stomach as the jet lost altitude. It took great effort to put the parachute suit on without falling over. And in the end, he did fall over once.
“Are we going to survive this, Abe?” Keiko asked. Her face was solemn, full of acceptance. He should have left her in Cairo. She was supposed to be safer this way and instead, he brought her into a jet that was about to crash to the ground. She looked at him expectantly.
He gulped and turned away. He couldn’t lie to her at a time like this. The best he could do was avoid the question.
