The air is clean in paradise. The words play on a loop in my mind until the syllables erode into guttural sounds, leaving only the hardened core of a mission. The air is clean in paradise. But the air is rancid in the cockpit. I breathe in a thick choke of vomit and spilled food, imagining the fragrant flowery scent of paradise filling my lungs. The air is clean in paradise. It fades with the exhale. So I repeat. Through the windshield, I fix my eyes on the horizon. I have to be strong for Sara. If I show fear, then fear is all she’ll know.
On the ground, the air gathers clouds of exhaust from munitions factories and bombing site and any other kind of weapon we thought to kill each other with over the past decade. And every year that passes, the sky churns its hazy swirl, leaving the brightest days to feel like the sun is just some sickly orange orb shining through muddy water. The only place to see that heavenly blue now is at 30000 feet, even though it's just as dangerous up here.
Sara was born into this war. The war we call the endless war because it feels like it’ll go on until there’s no one left to fight it. My sister protected Sara from the worst of it. She’d shield ears from gunfire and explosions, cover eyes from carnage, tell bedtime stories, so Sara could be our bright blue sky when this was all over. A vessel for the memories of who humanity was before technology wired its way into our biology. Vanessa insisted on helping with Sara. She knew it was important for me to join the Resistance so I could do my part fighting all those lazy tech-dependent governments reliant on AI to tell them who got employment, education, medication. Ignorant masses bottle-fed by robots until they regressed into child-like soldiers, desperate to defend a master who continues to treat them with such cold, exacting cruelty that all they can do is accept their place in a lifeless world. Starved for human interaction, for food and shelter, for breathable air.
But there were a lot of us who couldn’t stomach that life. Seven years I spent smuggling supplies on commercial airlines. I flew the long hauls. The sixteen hour flights. There were times I didn’t know where I was or when I was or if I was alive or trapped in some perpetual nightmare, sleeping in crew quarters hidden above first class, showering in airports before turning around and flying to the other side of the globe with medicine or comms equipment stashed in the hold. I was gone for months at a time. But when I made it home, I’d always bring medicine for Sara’s breathing.
By the time they took me into custody, I was so tired it felt like I was dreaming. All those dimwitted tech lovers cussing me out as I was marched through the Frankfurt airport. All of them dressed in the same government-approved coveralls, all modified with their tech implants gyrating and snapping pictures of my capture. The children of a loveless upbringing.
The police brought me to some Haxon detention center for questioning. They even put a human across the table from me to try and break me, but it was useless. I knew from Resistance intelligence reports that the other side was lacking for pilots. That even with all the automation in other fields, flight was one the AI just couldn’t dominate. So, they required a trained pilot, in case a system failed mid-flight. They needed me more than I needed them. That’s what I figured anyway, until they showed me the picture. Vanessa’s beaten face, locked away in some nameless detention center. Her life wiped from the AI-controlled history books.
Luckily Sara escaped, tucked safely away with the neighbors, just like we rehearsed. There’s always a plan, as long as you stick with it. Otherwise you’re in free fall.
This Airbus A380 has 545 seats, but its half full. Lucky Haxon fighters swell the seats, fat with a reward of paradise for their heroism on the battlefield. Each one of them could’ve killed someone I know. Or been the one to capture Vanessa. Sara won’t have that life. She needs to see a blue sky. She needs to know the air is clean in paradise.
Daddy said to stay quiet. That’s the game, he said. Stay quiet as long as I can, and then when I can’t anymore, stay quiet a little longer. I was sleeping when his friend came to get me. I was having a really nice dream about me and my friend from school. Jessica. We were having a princess party in the backyard and there was a parrot in the tree above us. It was a big pretty red parrot, like the one from the tv commercials. We were asking it questions and it answered back yes or no. But then I woke up to Daddy’s friend saying my name. He was out of breath like he ran over here from across town or something. He pulled me out of bed and packed my clothes in a really big hockey bag he had with him. And then he told me to get in the bag. But I said I couldn’t get in there because it was dark in there, and where were we going anyway. He said he was bringing me to see Daddy, and the two of us were going on a trip to a far away place with clean air and all the parrots I could ever want to talk to. I asked him how long the trip was and he said fourteen hours. I said, how long do I have to stay in that bag for. And he said the whole time. The whole time. I said, what if I have to pee or I get hungry and he said Daddy hadn’t told him to plan for that, and he got kinda mad. Not at me, I don’t think. Aunt Vanessa always said Daddy didn’t think everything through but he meant well because he wanted to protect me. That was his real mission, she always said. So I went into the kitchen and I got a flashlight and some food, and a big Tupperware container I could pee in if I had to, and then I told the man if I was gonna be stuck in a bag for all that time, I wanted Aunt Vanessa’s bathrobe to keep me warm. The white one with the hotel name on it. He grabbed it from the closet, wrapped me in it, and laid me in the bag. He was whispering the whole time, and I remember the last thing he said before he zipped me in was This is your cocoon, and when the plane lands and you come out, you’re gonna be a beautiful butterfly in paradise.
That was yesterday.
I ate all my snacks and my sandwich already, and I only have a couple sips of water left. My mouth is dry and I feel like I’m gonna cough. But I was told to stay quiet. Really really quiet. At least there’s a tiny hole where the zipper ends meet that I can see out into the baggage hold so I don’t get bored. I wish I could change the channel, but this is all there is to watch. A bunch of bags in the dark and the sound of the plane engines outside so loud it feels like static in my ears.
A light comes on all the way toward the front. Like a little tiny strip of light and I see there’s a door up there. Someone’s coming down. A young man, I think. He reminds me of Aunt Vanessa’s boyfriend. The way his face looks kind of hairy. He waves his flashlight around, looking at all the bags. He aims it at some red bag up front and opens it. He pulls out some clothes, some computer stuff, then puts it all back and moves on to another bag. He opens an army duffle bag, dumps the whole thing on the ground and pushes it around on the floor, and he smiles. He reaches down and picks up an apple. He looks so excited. He takes a big bite out of it and laughs as he chews it up. Spitting little bits of it all over the darkness. Daddy warned me about these people. He said that even though they looked older than me, they were as smart as a five year old kid. He said that’s what happens when you count on AI too much. You rewire your brain little by little until it stops growing.
They told me not to put a monitor down there, that it’d be found, but how the hell could I leave this to chance. If I’m putting her in danger, I gotta have eyes on her the entire time.
My co-pilot, Quinto, is reading some book he’d smuggled aboard. I tell him I need to hit the head and he shrugs, apathetically. He’s caught, like me, but unlike me he’s got nothing to live for and he’s got no problem scaring the hell out of me with that reality.
‘We should crash the plane somewhere good,” he says, before I step to the cockpit door and knock. Morgan opens it from the other side. She’s the AI deputy aboard, responsible for making sure we don’t do exactly what Quinto wants to do. She’s dumb like the rest of them, thirty years of not thinking for yourself will do that to anyone, but she’s got a genetic trait that cuts past her ignorance. She’s clever. Can’t be helped.
“We’re listing,” I tell her. “I think some of the baggage in the hold got loose.”
Morgan looks at me suspiciously, but not with enough sense to add it up to anything. She grins so I can see her crooked, unbrushed teeth jutting out at me. They forget to do the most basic human things, opting to swap out parts when decay sets in. She says “You better go fix it.”
I squeeze past her and make my way down the first class aisle. Past Amber serving drinks to the bigwigs, slapping her ass and calling her a traitor, her eyes teary but strong, knowing she can’t do anything but take it. This flight will end soon. All flights do. She holds onto that mantra for herself the way I hold onto mine. The air is clean in paradise.
As I move through business class, a passenger grabs me by the arm, stopping me. Some greasy haired moron with wires sticking out of his cheekbones for God knows what reason.
“Are you the Captain?” he asks. And I nod, and point to the uniform I’m wearing. And he lets out a dopey guffaw like some cartoon character. “Oh right. I know that. Are we almost there?”
I take my time answering him. It’s the only form of defiance I have when we’re flying. I slowly shake my head, “Another five hours, I’m afraid. Just about to pass over Australia.” He lets me go so he can reach over his seat mate to look out the window.
I hurry through the rest of the cabin, my eyes on the rear hold. The air is clean in paradise. I nod to Jake, another flight attendant and POW, and head down the stairs to the baggage hold. There’s a flashlight shining down there already.
He’s halfway down the rows of bags, thumbing through a box of raisins when he spots me standing there. He stuffs a second box in his government-issued coveralls.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“I’m the Captain.”
“What do you want?”
“You can’t be down here,” I tell him with whatever authority I have left in me.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” he says defiantly and with glee. “You’re a prisoner.”
“What’s your name?” I ask him. A lighter touch.
“Parsons,” he says. No first name. None of them have first names anymore. Went out of fashion a while back when some app came out that used their fingerprint and retinal scans to introduce them to each other. The names are just formalities now. Relics.
“I'm Reed,” I say.
“Okay,” he says, and he stuff a few more raisins in his mouth.
“I don’t care what you’re looking for down here, Parsons, but I do care that you’re moving the bags around.” He looks at me like I’ve completely stumped him with some imaginary question. I continue, “You see, when the bags shift, it throws off the fuel calculations for the flight.”
‘So…”
“So, if we don’t have any fuel, what happens?” I can’t help speaking to him like a child. Like a child younger than my Sara, knowing that even at three times her age, he’ll never have the wit and intelligence Vanessa and I cultivated in her. But I can feel her eyes on me. I know she’s watching this exchange, so I show him kindness. I show him the world I want Sara to live in. He shrugs, and I take mercy.
“Well, Parsons, if the plane doesn’t have enough fuel, we’ll crash into the ocean.”
“Can’t you land on the water?”
I smile, more for Sara, than for him. “Even if I could, we’d be a thousand miles from land. We’d die out here. All for those raisins you have there.”
He stuffs the rest of the packet in his pocket and looks around at the other bags, and the mess he’s created with the ones he’s already pilfered.
“If you go back to your seat now, I’ll make sure the flight attendant brings you whatever food we have. Don’t you want to enjoy your vacation?”
Parsons takes a step backward toward the hockey bag, considering my offer but I can tell he’s testing my authority, too. I see it in his face. He’s trying to calculate the risk, but he doesn’t know the math. His stubbly face is defiant. Same as it is toward any other human.
Daddy! I see him through the zipper hole! I wish I could say something to him. I want to tell him how good I’m being down here. And how I’m doing everything he told me to do. But I know I have to save it until we get there. I can tell him all about my trip when we’re in paradise, where I can show him the things I learned about parrots in my dreams, and we can breathe the clean air he always tells me about. But I’m hungry too and my throat is dry and all that food Parsons is finding makes my stomach grumble. I put my hands on my belly to keep the noise down. I have to stay quiet for Daddy. I move a little bit to cover the noise, and Daddy and Parsons look over at me. I freeze like I’m invisible. If I believe it, they’ll have to, too. But they keep looking at me, until Daddy says, “Turbulence. You should find your seat now.”
And then some lady sticks her head down the stairwell and looks right at Daddy and says, “Get back to the cockpit.” They must really need him to fly.
Daddy and Parsons go up the stairwell and the door closes and I’m in the dark again.
I hurry back to the cockpit as fast as I can. I know he saw the hockey bag rustle. We both saw it move. I gotta see it on the monitor. I have to know she’s okay down there.
The plane rumbles a bit as I take my seat. Quinto is already at the controls, eying the gathering storm in front of us like some challenge or some promise of a glorious death.
“I have control,” I say, and he sits back, and we both watch the clouds thundering all around us.
“You think they’re gonna win this war?” he asks.
“If they do, then we all lose, don’t we?” I say back. And I glance over at him staring back at me like some scared kid for the first time. Then he looks back out at the storm. And I take the moment to switch on my monitor wedged beside my seat. The feed is dark, which is good. If the bag was visible then that’d mean the stairwell was open and someone was down there again.
“We’re already dead, you and me,” Quinto says. The plane jostles suddenly, but I even us out. “We should just nose down into the water, take these fucker to Hell along with us.”
I shake my head, “the Resistance was formed to preserve human life. Not destroy it.”
“Those people back there, they’re barely human anymore, man. So many wires running through ‘em, they’re basically AI. We’d be doing the Resistance a favor.”
“Where’d they pick you up?” I ask him, trying to change the subject.
“Peneng. You been?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Not a lot of tech there, but it’s where one of the major Haxon | Lo circuit boards are manufactured. I was taking a load of dummy chips to swap out with a friend over at one of their factories. Nabbed me as soon as I touched down. Turns out my friend wasn’t a friend after all.”
“They take you to a Haxon detention center?”
“Three weeks… or a month. You know how it goes. They try to break you, but they need guys like us. It’s a delicate little dance they do. How long you been flying for them?”
“Almost six weeks,” I say. And that length of time feels like the silence that follows.
“So you don’t got much time left then,” he finally says. “Resistance will’ve moved their anti-aircraft positions by now.”
“Then it’ll be on you,” I say, and I dread that reality. But Quinto’s already looking back out the window. All that lightning bouncing between dark clouds. His stare isn’t holding some fear of death or a desire to persevere. It’s almost like God is whispering some secret in this moment that he’s gotta hold onto for safe keeping. His eyes tear as the plane shudders again.
“Hit the seatbelt light,” I say. And I glance down at the monitor, and I see the hockey bag clearly.
The turbulence makes me scared. Bags keep crashing onto the ground all around me and it’s louder than the thunder outside. But I’m safe if I stay in my cocoon. I know that. And when it’s time to come out, I’ll be a different girl and Daddy and I will be together in paradise. I can’t show tears right now. I have to be a big girl. I have to show Daddy I listened to what he said, and I followed directions, and I won the game.
A light shines in through the zipper hole again. I hope it’s Daddy coming back to make me feel better, but it’s not. It’s that man from before. The one looking through everyones’ bags for snacks. I lay still, like I’m playing freeze tag, but he keeps on walking toward me. Watching me. He gives my bag a little kick, but I don’t scream or anything. I just bite the inside of my lip, like Aunt Vanessa taught me whenever we were being quiet in the attic crawlspace. But it doesn’t work this time. This Parsons man who Daddy got to go away reaches toward my zipper hole and I pull back. He unzips the bag and I can’t hide anymore, so I just stare up at him and he looks at me like I scared him or something. But I’m the one who’s scared. And I say the first thing that pops into my head.
“Hello, I am Sara.” I reach out my hand to shake his, pretending I’m a robot. But he backs away from me like I’m sick or something, and he just stares at me for a really long time.
“Are you a… are you an AI?” he asks me.
“I am.” I say, even though I’m lying. But it’s okay because Daddy said that if someone finds me, I have to pretend to be a robot, or we can’t go to paradise. He said it’s part of the game and I really want to win. I’ve already been thinking of things I want to teach my parrot to say. Things like, what a nice day it is today and welcome to Sara’s princess castle. And maybe if I get good at teaching it, I’ll have it say the air is clean in paradise for Daddy, because he says that all the time.
“What kind of model are you? I’ve never seen a child AI before,” he asks me.
I squint real hard, trying to remember the answer that Daddy taught me, and then I remember. “I am a Haxon | Lo version 6.5 child model, confidential prototype.”
“Oh wow, a prototype,” he says, and I don’t know what he means. “What can you do?”
“I am a child companion. Are you in need of companionship?” I ask. I know I wasn’t supposed to but I made the second part up because I haven’t talked to anyone in a while and I guess I just want a friend to play with.
Parsons smiles at me and sits on the floor cross-legged like we used to in school for story time. He puts his hand out and we shake, and we’re friends now. Even though his hands are clammy and metal and very different from Daddy’s or Aunt Vanessa’s boyfriend’s.
“Why did you come down here?” I ask him.
“Well, I was down here earlier because I was hungry and then I saw your bag move and I wanted to come back and check it out. I’m glad I did. You’re amazing.”
He makes me smile when he talks. He sounds like the kids from school when I used to go, before Aunt Vanessa pulled me out and taught me at home instead because it was safer in the castle. She painted my bedroom walls pink and grey like a princess castle and she told me that the whole house was enchanted and we couldn’t get hurt as long as I stayed inside. We lived like that for a long time. Daddy came to visit every once in a while and he’d bring a magnet or a keychain from whatever city he was coming back from. And he and Aunt Vanessa and Aunt Vanessa’s boyfriend would sit in the kitchen whispering to each other all night about Daddy’s adventures. And I would stay up, pretending he was a knight out there slaying dragons and monsters and one day he’d climb up to my castle window and take me far away so I could go outside again and I wouldn’t need medicine anymore. And maybe I could make new friends.
“Did you find anything to eat?” I ask.
Parsons pulls a pack of raisins out of his pocket and my stomach grumbles, even though I hate raisins. He looks at my stomach, then says “Wow, that’s so lifelike. Lucky you don’t actually have to eat food. Food on a plane is hard to come by.”
I wish I could snatch the box out of his hand and eat the whole thing. Those gross little dried up grapes I’d always hide in the couch cushions when I was home. But he stuffs them back in his pocket and I force myself to smile like a robot would.
Every time I level off, we hit an air pocket and the rollercoaster starts all over again. My heart races. My eyes toggle between the storm in front of me, and Sara on my tiny monitor, talking with that man. That fucking scavenger. And all I can think about is the storm that’s been running through me since Sara was born. How for nine years I’ve had to juggle her safety with the preservation of humankind. How I promised her mother I’d carry on the mission, so the progress she’d made wouldn’t be for nothing. How I missed birthdays and holidays and all I could offer in exchange were a few lifeless trinkets I’d pick up at this airport or that. I’d remind myself that at the end of the day, it’s all for her. That if the air wasn’t so dirty, Sara’s breathing wouldn’t be so bad. And if Haxon didn’t have such a hold on the pharmaceutical industry, maybe I’d be able to buy her medicine instead of resorting to smuggling to get my hands on it. I have to remind myself that preserving humanity and preserving Sara’s innocence, sometimes means doing horrible things.
She’s gonna run out of water soon, if she hasn’t already. And there’s a chance Parsons could find the empty bottle or her pee pot or empty food wrappers and figure out she’s not actually a robot. As dumb as they are, he’d have to be braindead for that to slip past him. And Sara’s gonna need to take her medicine soon anyway, which means she could have a coughing fit if she doesn’t. And robots don’t breathe.
He asks me, “what can you do?” And I have to think kinda hard about it because Daddy never told me much about what a robot can do. He didn’t talk about them much at all, except when he was talking with Aunt Vanessa and her boyfriend at night when they all thought I was asleep. I used to hear them say mean things about the robots. How they were bad for people because they didn’t let anyone think for themselves. How they made my medicine hard to get. But I don’t want to pretend to be a bad guy because Parsons is nice to me and I want to be nice to him, too. Maybe I can be a good robot who tells stories that’ll cheer him up. The way Daddy used to tell stories to me.
“Do you want to hear a story?” I ask.
“What kind of story?” he says. But I only know a couple by heart, and even those ones are kinda hard to remember. I put my hands over my eyes so I can remember all the characters better. I have to do this sometimes to see the story in my head.
“It’s a princess story,” I say. But he doesn’t seem very interested. “It has a knight in it, too. And a dragon, okay?” and he nods all of a sudden like I nod when Aunt Vanessa used to give me ice cream when I missed Daddy.
“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a castle. It wasn’t a really big castle, and she wasn’t allowed to look around it much or go outside at all. She had to stay in there. All day and all night. Just her and the lady who took care of her.”
“Was she in trouble?” he asks me.
“No. She’s not in trouble. The world is in trouble outside. That’s what the knight says. The knight is sworn to protect her from all the bad stuff outside the castle. So she has to stay inside.”
“What kind of bad stuff?” he asks me.
“Well…at nighttime, when she looks out the windows, there’s always a lot of shadows out there. It’s really dark. And sometimes she sees people out there walking by, or she hears a scary sound out there, or some stinky smell like batteries, but she knows the knight hears it, too. And he goes and checks and defeats whatever bad things are out there. Okay?
“Doesn’t sound so scary to me,” he says. And I don’t know, maybe it isn’t as scary as I remember it when Daddy tells me that story. But we’re not really at the scary part yet anyway.
“Okay, so, one day the knight hears something way out there in the distance, and he tells the princess that he has to go and check it out, because protecting her sometimes means leaving her for a while. So, the knight, he goes out into the world dressed in his armor and his sword and he gallops off to the place where he heard the sound. He travels for days and days and when he finally gets there, he sees this old lady. She’s crying and he tries to get her to tell him what happened, but she can’t stop crying. She just points to the ground and she tells him that she can’t make food grow anymore. The dirt is bad. Nothing grows anymore. And she’s so hungry. The knight tells her, ‘I would bring you food but I have a princess back at my castle that needs medicine and I need to take care of her.’ And the old lady says, ‘I can get you medicine if you can get me food.’ And they agreed to help each other because they both say that helping others is the most important thing any of us could do.
“So, the knight went home with the medicine and he gave it to the princess, and after she was feeling a little better he told her that he needed to go back out there to bring food to the old lady. The princess was sad, but there was nothing she could do about it. The knight was brave and so he had to do brave things. That went on for a long time. Every time he came back, he brought more medicine, but he’d have a new promise he had to keep for some other old lady somewhere out there. And he’d be gone for longer and longer, until every time the princess forgot what the knight looked like for a day or two, he’d come riding back into the castle and up to her room and give her a hug and everything would be perfect again for a little while.”
“Where’s the dragon, though?” Parsons asks me.
“It’s a different kind of dragon,” I say, trying to remember the story the way Daddy used to tell it to me. “This dragon lives inside the knight, so it’s hard to get at. And it breathes fire in his belly whenever he leaves the princess and it only stops when he’s home at the castle again. But he has to leave to help people all the time, so it keeps coming back. He doesn’t have a choice.”
My throat is dry from talking so much, so I cough. And Parsons stares at me, but he’s not smiling anymore.
“You coughed,” he says. I scrunch my face up, because all I can think about is the burning feeling in my chest and how hard it’s getting to breathe right now. And I cough again. I can’t help it. My insides are dry and burning.
“Do you have water?” I ask him.
“Why would AI need water?” he asks back.
I try to stop my coughing but I can’t. “My insides are hot.” I say. And he stares at me again for a long time, looking over my face and body like I was some kind of doll in a toy shop.
“Must be your heat regulators. Some new kind of cooling system based on empathy,” he says, finally. And I have no idea what he means, but he’s smiling so I smile back and nod. He pulls a bottle of water from his pocket and hands it to me and I drink the whole thing and I feel a little better now. And he watches me the whole time and I have to look away because I wish he wouldn’t stare so much.
“So, what happens to the knight and the princess? How’s it end?” he asks.
“You okay?” Quinto asks me from his co-pilot seat. And I nod, realizing I’ve been staring at the monitor beside me for a long time instead of the storm outside the windows.
“I’m fine. Just distracted,” I tell him.
He cranes his neck to get a better view, “Distracted by what? What are you looking at?”
I hide my monitor with my body and shake my head to reassure him. “Nothing.” But he’s suspicious now. I can tell by the way he’s studying my expression, hunting for clues. And I try to hide my worry for Sara, but there’s no way of burying that fear deep enough to trick Quinto. He’s naturally suspicious. Same as me.
“Bullshit. What are you hiding?” He unbuckles his belt and crawls over to my side, leaning over me to see — the monitor. I stare at his face, inches from mine. And slowly the edges of his lip curl into a mischievous smile.
“What’re you watching?” he asks.
And I try to play it off. “Some passenger is down in the hold.”
“So what? Got nothing to do with us. We’re not smuggling anything on this flight.” And he looks into my eyes for the lie. A lie that he finds easily, because my worry is so plain for anyone to see.
“You’re smuggling something,” he says, grinning.
“Look,” I say, “I need to go down there and check.”
“What are you smuggling?” he asks, this time more conspiratorially. I get up from my seat, but he grabs my arm to stop me. And I turn to him with a fire in my belly so clear I think it’s gonna come out through my teeth when I speak.
“Have you ever loved someone so much you’d burn the entire world to ash to protect them?”
“The world’s already ash, bud,” he says. I swat his hand away and go for the cockpit door. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone. Please,” I say, as a command. As an appeal.
Morgan tries to stop me as soon as the door swings open. But she’s just a body in my way. I push past her. Pounds of fatty flesh and wiring standing between me and Sara. In danger, below my feet. These tech acolytes, all of them, laughing and swapping war stories across the aisles, eating and drinking, on their way to Sara’s paradise without a care in the world. I pity them more than I hate them. Their faith in humanity was lost a generation ago with their parents. It’s not their fault. All they know today is dependency. Ask the algorithm for the answer. What is happiness? What is love? Am I fulfilled? They never had to work for the things they cared for, because they didn’t even know they could. Or should. I march down the aisle, some of them raising their hand to ask me a question, but my eyes are on the back of the plane and I just mutter ‘emergency’ as I walk, and they slink down in their seats and leave me alone. But Morgan doesn’t. She’s on my heels and every few paces, I hear ‘Captain’, but I continue forward. Until I feel her metal hand grabbing my shoulder, halting me as I arrive at the rear storage section.
“Captain,” she says, out of breath.
“What?” I breathe fire back. Enough to see the flames in her eyes and her skin singe.
“Where are you going?”
But before I could answer, she tumbled backward.
At the same downward angle the nose of the plane is pointing. Passengers scream and grab hold of their seats, as I hold onto the doorway, looking back at the stairwell leading down to the baggage hold. Oxygen masks fall from overhead. A drink cart careens down the aisle.
I use the chaos to claw my way down the stairs into the baggage area, and I hear Sara’s scream from across the darkness. Her fear propels me toward her. Unstoppable. I lunge forward, throwing suitcases out of the way as I push toward Parsons standing over my daughter. My princess. My love.
I reach around the back of his neck and pull the inside of my elbow into his throat, squeezing tightly, imagining myself as a starved boa constrictor desperate for a meal. The emotion of this killing fades away into my primal urge to protect. To preserve life. To defend. Parsons struggles against my grip, but I hold firm. My cheek flush against his. I feel his tears running down both of our faces, as his struggle softens and then stops altogether. Life fades from him, and all that’s left is what’s in front of me now.
Sara stares into my eyes with a horror I’d never seen before. A horror I’d always tried to keep from her. To shelter her against. But she’s been exposed to it now. The polluted air outside her castle has filled her lungs with a reality I’d worked so hard to spare her from just a little while longer. The reality that her knight was a dragon. That her father was no hero, but a survivor in a dying world who’d failed in his one mission to deliver his daughter to paradise unscathed.
The plane rattles as it noses down toward the ocean. Luggage tumbles all around us, and I scoop Sara up, and I feel her tense against my touch. A new sensation that I fear will survive into the next era of our relationship, if we survive at all. I hold her rigid body against mine, stroking her hair, saying nothing, as the plane descends. I feel her breathing constrict and sputter and all I can think is the air is clean in paradise. Over and over. My desperate plea for forgiveness.
I wake the same way every morning. The ocean smacks against my face and I spring up in bed, drenched in sweat. But the world is silent, except for the parrots in the trees and people fishing out on the bay. I listen for awhile, trying to recall my father’s face all those years ago. The look on his face, straining over Parsons. The way his expression drooped when he realized what I had witnessed. His grasp of me when the plane shook and fell from the sky. His tightening hold when we hit the water. The way he dragged me from the hull and found air for me to breathe. But the memory has decayed, grown hazy, restricted to my unconscious mind where I find it in dreams or when I visit one of the Resistance contacts who scooped me from the wreckage. Who sheltered me from the hoards of tech-dependent tourists on their respite from killing the people I love.
There are more and more of them coming here now. Planeloads emblazoned with the same Haxon | Lo logo branded on passengers taking that harrowing trip. But its acolytes stay longer and longer. They crowd restaurants, buy property, build cell towers, rather than continue the endless war. Their cowardice is the most human thing about them, I think secretly, every time I run into one of them.
The air smelled sweet when I arrived, like breathing in the ripest fruit or sticking your nose into a freshly opened flower bloom. The air is clean in paradise. Those words played on a loop in my mind for a long time. Words that felt like a protective spell warding off the evils of the world. A phrase I was anointed with before arriving in this strange and beautiful oasis. But now the air is thick with the scent of batteries and the buzz of electricity, worse the closer you get to their ever-expanding hub. I wear a respirator, the same way I did when I was little, any time I had to leave the castle to visit the doctor for my breathing. But that doesn’t scare me anymore. The only thing that scares me now is that my lungs will get bad again before I have a chance to continue my father’s work. To become the knight with a dragon in her belly, fighting to keep princesses safe in their castle. Before there is no castle. Before there is no princess to protect.
