Chapter 21: The Booth

Jonah's POV

I had my hand on the fader before she nodded.

The cousin's hand was on the one beside it, and neither of us said anything.

She stood at the podium in her grandmother's red coat, small under the lights.

She was the only person in the pavilion who knew what she was doing.

Then she nodded, and I pushed it up.

The first part was hers.

Four hundred people heard her call, her voice thin and strange, begging a stranger on a phone.

I watched the faces along the aisle go still.

Next came the dispatcher's voice, and then Dalton's.

"Two, Ames-One. Divert to Cedar Bench. Priority."

A man at table nine said something under his breath.

On the stage, Dalton had reached the steps.

He didn't run.

He walked fast, in his black tuxedo, with his face set.

Two men from Redwing's board stood up from table two and got in his way.

"Ames-One, Two."

My own voice came out of every speaker in the building.

"I have an inbound medical, four minutes out. Say again your last."

I made myself listen to it.

It sounded young.

That man still believed an argument could stop Dalton.

"I heard you. Divert."

The pause came next, and I had counted it a hundred times.

It was long.

I stood in the booth with my eyes open and listened to myself breathe.

"Copy," I said, to four hundred people. "Diverting."

Nobody coughed.

Nobody moved a glass.

The cousin looked over at me.

"There's one more cue," he said.

"I know."

"You want it?"

"All of it."

I had copied it last, off the dispatcher's channel, and I hadn't played it for Hannah, because it said her name.

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