Chapter 2

Purser Renn smiled the way people smile when they are certain the ground under them is solid.

"Ma'am, the captain is running final paperwork. We are nine minutes from the slot."

"Then she has nine minutes," Iris said.

"She-" Renn stopped. "Yes. She does."

Victor laughed - a short, performative sound aimed at the rows around him, not at her. "She wants the captain. For a bin."

"I'd like the case opened in the captain's presence," Iris said. "Not before."

She did not explain. She did not reach for a wallet, a phone, an upgrade receipt, a name. She put her hand flat on the lid and left it there.

Nadia Ferrer had been flying for six years. She had given this exact order a hundred times - polite, repeated, obeyed. Nobody had ever repeated it back to her as a request.

She looked at the key on the armrest. Plain steel ring. No fob, no monogram, nothing.

"I'll get her," Nadia said, and went forward.

Renn held his ground half a second too long, then followed.

Victor stayed where he was, which was worse. He filled the aisle. He spoke to the cabin now instead of to her.

"Every flight. Every single flight, somebody in the wrong seat."

Behind his shoulder, his wife had her phone up. Not filming him. Filming Iris. Lens steady, angle careful, the wronged party documented.

Tamsin Sloane, forty-four, cream silk blouse, diamond studs, a thin gold bracelet she kept turning around her wrist. She gave Iris a bright, closed smile with nothing behind it.

"For the record," Tamsin said.

Iris looked at her a moment. Then she looked past her, forward, at the bulkhead beside the open cabin door.

There was a plate on it.

Brass, polished, about the size of a paperback. It had been there since the aircraft was delivered. Everyone who walked into the Clover Cabin walked past it at eye level and read it exactly the way people read a fire extinguisher.

Iris looked at it the way you look at a clock in your own kitchen.

Nadia, coming back up the aisle behind the purser, noticed where the woman's eyes had gone. She glanced at the plate herself.

She didn't read it. Nobody ever did.

"We'll hold the door," Renn said, and his voice had a new edge, because now the delay had a name and the name was hers. "But I need to be clear, ma'am. If this becomes a security matter, you will be removed."

"I understand," Iris said.

Nine minutes became seven.

Then the forward curtain moved.