The Red Icon On Her Phone

It buzzed against her palm, and her whole body went still the way people go still when they're bracing for something rather than reacting to it.

I saw the screen light up before she flipped it face-down against her thigh. A red banner across the top, the icon a small building outline, gone before I could read a single word of it.

I didn't say anything about it. Not yet.

"I'm not moving," I said again to Captain Reyes, calm, because calm was the only tool I had left that hadn't been used against me yet. "You can close that door with me standing right here if that's really the choice you want to make."

Reyes's radio crackled at his hip, dispatch asking about the delay. He didn't answer it. He was watching me the way a man watches a wall he expected to give and hasn't.

I set my stained folder down on the drink cart, next to Malik's still-glowing scanner, and reached into my backpack instead.

Fiona's eyes went to my hands the second I unzipped it. Not casual. Fixed.

I didn't pull anything out yet. My hand just rested on what was inside while I watched Fiona watch me, and for the first time since I'd walked onto this plane, something other than irritation crossed her face. Fear.

"What is that," Cordelia said, sitting up straighter in 2A, her voice losing some of its polish.

"Something you should have let them check an hour ago," I said.

Fiona's phone buzzed again in her palm, and this time she didn't flip it away fast enough. I caught the corner of it, the same red icon, insistent, the kind of notification that keeps coming because someone on the other end needs an answer she isn't giving.

"Fiona," Malik said quietly. "What's going on with you today?"

She didn't answer him. She was looking at my bag, and at the folder on the cart, and doing the math on exactly how much longer this was going to be her problem to control.

"Captain," I said, keeping my hand where it was, "before you close that door, I think you should ask her what's actually on her phone. And then I think you should let me finish what I came here to say."