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big blue tick. She’d come into Surabaya at night on the ship’s sailing dinghy. As for the ship, it had sailed on alone for years, still a legend among humans, the Flying Dutchman .
    Shuddering, the jet rose into the air. Fog, touched golden by the sun, hung over the ancient Thai city below. Miriam gazed down at the temple district, at spires just visible through the billowing fog, and wondered.
    The hunger was beginning to claw at her belly. Her muscles were tensing, instinctually getting ready for a kill. Her mouth was filling with the sour flavor of need. The scent of people swept through her with every breath.
    She turned on the air nozzle above her head to full force, but there was no escaping the succulent odor of her fellow travelers, not packed into this tin can.
    You certainly couldn’t feed on a jet. If you stuffed the remnant down the toilet, it would be found later in the plane’s holding tank. Remnants had to be completely destroyed — ground up and burned, usually. Humans had found just a very few of them over the generations, generally taken for mummies. In fact, she’d once wrapped a news hawker in tape and put him in a mummy case in the basement of the British Museum. That had been when — oh, a few hundred years ago. He was probably still there, her old hawker. It had been the St. James’s Gazette that he’d been selling. Pretty good paper in its day.
    Look at the humans around her, she thought, all happy and fluttery and unconcerned about the thirty-thousand-foot maw of death beneath their feet. How could anybody be as careless of their lives as humans were? They flew all the time; they raced around in automobiles; they went on roller coasters and fought wars. Miriam’s theory was that humans did indeed have souls, and inwardly they knew it. That was why they came to her for sex, thrilled by the danger they sensed. They weren’t really afraid of death, the humans. For them, it was nothing more than another thrill ride.
    For the Keepers, death meant leaving the cosmos forever.
    The plane leveled off. Miriam knew by its motion and sound exactly what it was doing at every moment of the flight. Actually, she could have flown it herself. She’d trained herself on her PC with a flight simulator, just in case some pilot died from the airline food or something. If some fool were to attempt to hijack the thing, she’d hypnotize him immediately and simply sit him right back down. They’d have to try to figure it out later.
    Two shy children peeked at her over the seat ahead. They gazed steadily at the European, but it wasn’t only curiosity in their eyes. She knew that the longer the flight, the more uneasy she would make her seat-mates. The presence of a Keeper evoked instincts that humans, being so near the top of the food chain, were as unfamiliar with as she was with fear. What a human felt in the presence of a Keeper was what a mouse felt in the presence of a snake — a sort of horrible question.
    They would grow unaccountably suspicious of her, be strangely drawn to her, grow sick in her presence, and if they slept, they would have nightmares about her, every single soul in this airplane.
    The stewardess came, her smile fading as she laid eyes on Miriam. She had a cart full of boxed food and piles of plastic chopsticks. She stood close, handing food to the people jammed in the nearby seats.
    Her blood had a soft, plain scent, like Beaujolais from an uninteresting year. Even so, it would be smooth and warm and wonderful as it went down. Miriam kept her eyes closed, barely breathing.
    Never guessing that Miriam could see through her own eyelids, the stewardess took the opportunity to look long at the tall European in the old suit. Miriam worried that her makeup was too light. By now, her skin would be terrifying to a human. She’d appear as pale as a corpse. But she was also thirsty, so she had to interact with the girl, risk a moment of the creature’s attention. “Excuse me.”
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