Chapter 19: The Recording

"Emmett," my father said again, low and warm. "Give me the microphone."

"No."

"You're upsetting people."

"Joan," I said into the microphone. "Play it."

At the north wall, Joan put one finger on a key.

The hangar speakers hissed.

Six hundred people looked up at the ceiling.

A chair scraped, from a room none of them had ever been in.

"Take one," said a man's voice.

Then Kit's voice filled the hall, thin and shaking.

"Taking on water. Thirty-five thousand feet. Em, please come. I'm out of air."

A ripple went through the crowd.

"Flat," said the second voice.

Everybody in the hall knew it.

It was the voice that had just told them about boat builders.

"Softer, Kit," my father's voice said. "He has to believe you're drowning, not reading."

Nobody moved.

On the stage, my father stood perfectly still.

"Dad, it's a stunt," said Kit on the recording.

"Then it's a stunt that has to work. Again."

The press section had gone dead silent.

A hundred phones were up.

The recording ran.

Kit said the line again.

And again, and again, eight times, while my father coached him like a director.

Then the speakers changed.

The echo of a corridor.

A muffled voice through a door.

"The flange is in," Quist's voice said, smooth and pleased. "It'll hold two cycles. Past thirty thousand, it goes."

I watched Quist's face.

He had not moved from the edge of the stage.

His folder slid out from under his arm and hit the floor.

"And if the Tern comes back up?" said my father's recorded voice.

"It doesn't have to."

"No. It doesn't."

The long silence.

Then, over six hundred people, over the hull and the banner and the cameras, my father said:

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