White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twenty-Six

Every one of the two hundred and eight passengers, pilots, and crew on board survived.

I was on the news across the UIS as a hero for weeks. To this day, I still dodge the press. I've had citizens walk up to me and tell me they rebooked their tickets to fly on my liner because they felt safer there. But that's not what I remember most clearly.

What I remember is the feeling I had in the cockpit from the moment I chose Tikokura to the moment the liner came to a halt. For those twelve minutes, for the first time since my final Aventureros trip, I felt completely and utterly calm.

Yahvi and I thrived on chaos. Not because either of us liked it when things were falling apart, but because it was in those moments that all our skills and experience came to bear. On that F-300, in that critical time, I could see everything I'd ever learned, every hour I'd ever trained, and every option I could possibly think of laid out before me. I trusted the F-300 to do what I needed it to. And I trusted myself.

I trusted myself.

That's what I lost. I would have trusted Liu and Krüger more if I could trust myself to save them if they got in over their heads. Liu might be inexperienced, but the real problem was never with her. With either of them. It's my own incompetence that's to blame here.

I don't even need to read the article. I know every detail. How they salvaged the liner, damaged beyond repair. How they used my flight data to design a new simulation and add water landings to the F-300 pilot curriculum. Apparently I even inspired a movie.

They said the asteroid swarm that hit us was a freak event, the offspring of two comets that smashed into one another only hours before. By the time the Hub's large-object detection and warning system picked up the new shards in our flight path, it was too late to warn us.

They said the earthquake in the Philippines was a freak event, a slip that even that generation's sophisticated fault-monitoring equipment did not predict. Unlike most earthquakes in the area, it came without warning.

Everyone said I responded the best I could then, too. Everyone said the interns and I were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only difference between it and the Tikokura landing is that my own decision helped put us all in the wrong place in the Philippines... but even that doesn't hold up. All the pilots on an F-300 look at the data before they leave, and plan the flight path together. I helped make that decision, too.

In the Philippines, I was the last in a consensus circle of approvals. I might have held a veto by happenstance, but I was not the only one to say yes to that outing. I was one of many. And for all intents and purposes, only one chaperone should have needed to come along. The head researcher on the team even said that sending one of the two Aventureros leaders as a lifeguard was overkill.

On Mahaha, there is only me making decisions about where we go or what we do, provided my team doesn't mutiny and strike out on their own. But I drove them to that mutiny. Kwon answered my question honestly: I should have listened better. Made our decision-making process a consensus one. Trusted Liu and Krüger to know what they were doing. Stopped setting myself up to bear that burden alone.

Even that might not have averted this. But there is nothing I could have done about the other factors at play.

We're in a crisis now like I was after the landslide in the Philippines, and in the minutes before the landing on Tikokura. Why is this any different? Why is discovering sentience beneath our feet any less unexpected than an earthquake or an asteroid strike?

And why can't I handle it?

My hands sink to my bed, taking the magazine with them. I feel like something has lifted, leaving me with a clarity I haven't felt in at least two months. I have all the skills I need for a rescue on this landscape, and I've trained Liu in the most critical ones, too. She's proven capable enough, and she follows orders. The only thing standing between us and Krüger, then, is the planetary equivalent of a toddler with all the ammunition in a snowball fight.

I can't control everything here. It's just not possible. But I can adapt.

In seconds, I have my recording app open on my phone. I pace around my room, talking out a quick plan. There are still logistical hurdles in the way: things we'll need and precautions we'll have to take. One item on the list makes me pause, tapping my hand against my desk. Kwon will have to stay back, but I'm not comfortable leaving her without an oxygen mask given that Mahaha can send ice far enough into the Pod to cause a power failure. Krüger is gone with one of our last ones, which leaves only two others. There are three of us.

I pause the recording and crack open my door. I can hear Kwon and Liu talking in the common room, the latter with the sleepy tone and slow pauses of one who's just woken up. Good. If she took a nap while I was losing it in my bedroom, that's a point in our favor; there's enough daylight left today to set out, and I don't want to take Mahaha on after dark or leave this until tomorrow.

I slip around the corner to Kwon's workshop and pull open the drawer I know contains all the projects she and Liu have been working on. Bits of probes and other damaged material crowd over its edges as I dig, wires waving like vine tendrils and metal components clattering. At the back, wrapped in fabric for protection, is the thing I'm looking for.

Liu doesn't look up as I enter the room. There's an empty bowl on the table—thanks to Kwon, she's eaten properly, too—and a new mug in her hands. Her shoulders curl inwards as I approach, like she already thinks she knows what I'm going to say.

Instead, I drop the water-run oxygen mask she and Kwon repaired on the table in front of her. "So, we going to test this thing or what?"