I didn’t hear anything, not a damn thing.
The lights glowing on the surface of the plane pulsed, throbbing red like a heartbeat. Nothing about the plane’s mechanics had changed—still running at the same speed, altitude, RPMs. Fuel still good, pressure gauges normal. Everything normal, as far as the dials were concerned. But this plane was haunted.
The skin glowed so brightly now, I couldn’t see anything outside the plane. The world was a circle of light. Beyond that, blackness, emptiness. We had to fly by compass readings.
“Evie,” I said, quelling the desperation that tinged my voice. “What is going on?”
She flashed me an achingly familiar look of annoyance. “This plane . . . it’s different. Look.” She wasn’t holding her yoke. I wasn’t holding mine. Yet we were aloft, maintaining speed and altitude. “What if it’s alive, Jane? I can hear it talking to me.”
Ray guns. Smart machines. Strange ideas, like Avery said.
“What did you do to this plane?” I said to Cook. “To those pilots?”
He shook his head continually, a fast, trembling gesture. “This shouldn’t be happening, it can’t be happening.”
“What can’t be happening?” I had to shout in his ear before he responded.
“This. The link-up,” he said weakly.
“Link-up?”
“She’s not really hearing anything. She’s talking to herself. It’s a hysterical response, women are unstable in stressful situations—”
“Does she look like she’s under stress?” Evie’s fingers hung loosely on the yoke, her smile was easy. “You’re the one who’s hysterical, Cook.” The psychologist cringed on the floor of the cockpit.
“Why, thank you,” Evie said—not to either of us, but straight ahead, to the canopy. “I always sing to my planes.”
A finger of luminescence seeped under the canopy. It had substance, mass, like a pool of honey pushing into the cockpit. Evie unbelted her harness, reached over the yoke and touched the pool of light. Her hand went into the light, through the light, and kept going into the instrument panel. She pushed her arm into the metal of the plane. Her face glowed, her eyes were half-lidded with a look of bliss. “Yes, I can feel it,” she murmured. “Flying, oh yes!”
I grabbed a fistful of her flight suit and pulled her back. “No, you don’t!” I didn’t know if I yelled at the plane for taking her, or at Evie for letting it take her.
She cried out. The light flashed to orange, angry as fire as her arm came free and she wrenched away from it. The engines revved—all on their own—like a growl. I grabbed her around the waist and held—she tried to lunge forward to the instrument panel, back to the light.
“Cook, help me hold her!”
Cook was pulling on the straps of his parachute. “We’ve got to either land this thing or get ou
t of here. If this goes on, we’ll all die.”
“We won’t,” said Evie, struggling against my bear-hug. “The other pilots aren’t dead. You don’t understand, they wanted it to happen. They’re still here. They’re flying.” She pulled my fingers, desperate to wrench out of my grasp.
We fell off balance as the plane pitched into a dive. The lights on the hull were searing, hot like flames. All around the canopy seams, the glow pushed inside the cockpit, oozing like slime.
“See, Jane? You’re upsetting them.”
I grabbed the copilot’s yoke and pulled, leaning against the tension, trying to level us off before we plunged into a spin. Altitude dropped, speed increased.
Evie took the pilot’s yoke and helped. Together, we pulled the bomber back under control.
She whispered, “It’s okay, baby. You just scared her is all. She doesn’t really want to hurt you.” Tears glistened on her cheeks.
“Who the hell are you talking to?”
“Jane, if you’d just listen.”
“This is crazy,” I murmured.
A sputter rocked to starboard, followed by an ominous quiet as the usual background roar diminished by half. I looked out the window; the right prop fluttered, stalled.