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reassurance, inaudible even to my own ears.
    In the blink of an eye, the world disappeared, and we were bundled into a grey and featureless nothing. Following one last tight circuit of the corkscrew, our wings tilted the other way and we grew level. I could feel Estelle sobbing, although I could scarcely hear her against the wind that battered through the broken pane. I rocked the armful of fur as my eyes darted around the little compartment, trying to see where all that glass had gone.
    But what drew my gaze was not the jagged glass: It was the neat hole punched through the front wall of the passenger compartment.
    Javitz spent a moment settling the controls, then gingerly swivelled in his seat to see if we were still intact. As his eyes came around, they found the hole: From his position there would be two—one in the partition between us, and one through the bottom of his seat. Had he been seated,the round would have passed straight through him. We looked through the glass at each other, and I watched his eyes travel to the smashed window, then to the child in my arms. I saw his mouth move, and although I couldn’t have heard if he’d shouted, I could read their meaning.
    I lifted the coat until my lips were inches from the child’s head. “Estelle, are you all right? Estelle, child, I know you’re scared, but I need to know if you’re hurt at all.”
    The head stayed tucked against me, but it shook back and forth in answer. I smoothed the coat back around her and mouthed to Javitz, “We’re fine. What happened?”
    In answer, he raised his right hand and made a gun out of it. Yes, I thought—although it had to have been a rifle, not a revolver. Before I could say anything, he turned around again and set about getting us below the clouds.
    I studied his back, seeing the motion of his head and shoulders as he consulted the instruments and worked the control stick between his knees. The grey pressing around us thinned, retreated, and eventually became a ceiling.
    Javitz craned over the side at the ground, made a correction on the stick, then hunched forward for a minute before turning to press a note-pad to the glass between us. On it was written:
NOT THURSO, THEN. WHERE?
    All I could do was shrug and tell him, “South.”
    He looked from the window to the lump in my arms, then wrote again.
SHALL I LAND SO WE CAN FIX THAT WINDOW?
    I shook my head vigorously. If he could survive in the unprotected front of the ’plane, we two with our fur wrapping could hold out until we had reached safety.
    Wherever that might be.

Chapter 10
    W e flew on through the grey, light rain occasionally streaking back against the glass. I had hoped the warm furs and steady course might reassure the child, but she remained where she was, a taut quivering ball.
    Could I remember being three and a half years old? Not really, but my childhood had been a comfortable place until I was fourteen and my family died. This soft creature in my arms was too young to have a sense of history, too new to understand that terror passes, that love returns. In the past month—for her, an eternity—her mother had disappeared (died, although I was not going to be the one to tell her) and left her with a strange man (who had, in fact, been the one who killed Mother) until Papa came and joined the man for a furtive series of trains and boats to a cold, empty, smelly house, where she had wakened to find herself in the possession of a strange woman. A woman who had then hauled her through the night and pushed her into a noisy machine that was fun for ten minutes before it turned very scary.
    My hand stroked the child’s back, counting the faint vertebrae and the shape of her shoulder-blades. What must it be like, to be so without control that one would submit to a stranger’s comforting?
    But my hand kept moving, and after a minute, I bent to speak to the scrap of black hair and pink ear that emerged from the fur. “Shall I tell you a story,