Something was happening to the plane.

  Darrow straightened, one hand on his armrest. Hatch didn’t seem to notice. “What is it, then, corporate espionage? You get someone to skim some of my patents? I get a whiff of that and I can bury you in lawyers. You’ve done okay for yourself, but I’m fuckin- I’m a whale. I’m huge. I’m the one with actual power here.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Rai asked. There was another bang, and Dyantyi was thrown against the wall of the cabin. Lennox had braced himself in time, he’d seen something Dyantyi couldn’t have, but Darrow and Hatch had been tossed to the floor.

  The metal around them now was screaming, groaning, threatening to split. Dyantyi heard surprised shouts from the cockpit, hurried instructions. Then, quickly, the roaring came to a standstill. Other than the muffled scurrying of panicked flight staff, things were silent.

  Completely silent. Diaynti realized he couldn’t hear the engines.

  Lennox was gawking at the air around him, squinting like he was about to cry. “Holy shit,” the huge man muttered. “Holy fucking shit. She’s big.”

  Dyantyi knew better than to ask what the hell his coworker was talking about. His eyes locked on something over Lennox’s shoulder, though: the clouds, outside, visible through a window. They weren’t moving.

  “Did we hit something?” Hatch barked as he shakily drew himself up. “Did we crash?”

  “We’re eight miles up, there’s nothing to hit,” Darrow muttered, back to staring out his window. His mouth was drawn into a tight line, his face pale as he studied the motionless sky outside.

  “The fuck- What does that-” Hatch wheeled to face Rai. “The fuck did you do?”

  “I stopped the plane,” Rai explained.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t just park a plane midair, we’re not in a fucking blimp.” Hatch growled, then yanked Darrow away from the window. He made a few feeble, blustering noises as he stared out, then whipped back around to Rai. “This is a trick. You faked this.”

  “Please, explain how I’d do that.”

  “You- I don’t know. This is a soundstage. We’re still on the tarmac. The crew’s in on it, and the sky outside-”

  The emergency exit crashed open, seemingly of its own accord. There was an ear-popping roar as the pressure in the plane violently equalized itself, but the sucking gale went away as quickly as it appeared. Wind wailed around the plane outside as Rai paced over to Hatch and snagged his collar.

  She plucked him easily from his feet and walked to the open door.

  “What are you- Get your hands-” Hatch’s protestations were cut short when Rai lifted him, one handed, and dangled him out of the plane. Hatch decided to use his increasingly limited oxygen supply to scream and kick his legs in the open air.

  Tranquil clouds puttered around under his feet. Miles beneath, countryside yawned, roads snaked. A “V” of birds flew below, distant dots. The airplane behind him creaked and groaned as it maintained its impossible, frozen position in midair.

  “This would have to be quite the soundstage.” Rai said.

  “Put me back!” Hatch pleaded, face reddening, voice thin and hoarse. “Please, God, put me back in the plane!”

  Rai shrugged. She tossed Hatch back into the cabin and shut the exit behind her, maneuvering the huge metal hatch with the ease one usually reserves for a screen door. Hatch fumbled around on the floor, grasping at his throat, taking huge, greedy gulps of air as the plane began to repressurize.

  “You’ll give me the satellites for free, now,” Rai explained, her voice like a patient professor’s, laying out the weekend’s homework. “We’ll dress up the contract so it doesn’t look like a handout, make some sort of implication that I’d traded other services for it, but it’ll be free.”

  “Why-” Hatch coughed. “Why would-”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll hurt you, Hatch. I’ll pluck your penthouse from its foundations and hurl it into the sky. I’ll crush your Maybach like a soda can while you’re in it. I’ll break every one of your bones at the exact same time.”

  “You’re… Is this…” Darrow interjected, eyes still glued to the window, fingers tapping as if he was doing some complicated mental math. “China? Russia? Where’d you get the tech to do this?”

  Rai sighed. “If Russia had the ability to freeze planes in the air at will, do you think the world, geopolitically, would look like it does right now? If Putin could ground the world’s nukes whenever he wanted?”

  Darrow turned and studied Rai’s face, and comprehension began to dawn on him. “Oh Christ. Oh, you’re one of them.”

  Rai brightened a shade, pleasantly surprised. “Oh good, I was hoping you of all people wouldn’t be completely in the dark.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “You’re really coming right out, aren’t you? Showing your true face, to two very influential people.” Darrow was making some kind of mental calculations, and the dread of his conclusion showed on his face. “You don’t think it’ll matter. Is the world ending? What do you know that I don’t?”

  Rai ignored the question. “How much have you been briefed on Sensitives? Or, what term do you use, Field Manipulators?”

  Darrow took a moment to sift through his own memory. “Not much.”

  “Do your best. I’m curious.”

  “S-Something to do with energy manipulation. I know it’s very rare for people to be able to do. So rare, that I know we tried to make our own, and shit the bed.” Darrow chuckled darkly. “And I know China are apparently in the process of shitting their own bed right about now.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Listen, even at my level, we keep things pretty compartmentalized. I’m sure there’s a number of top brass out there who’ve got the full picture, but if that number is any bigger than, say, three, then someone’s ignoring policy.” Darrow shivered. “Jesus, can we get the plane moving again, please? You made your point.”

  “To Hatch, sure, but I have a demand of you, too,” Rai said.

  “She’s crazy, man. She’s-” Hatch began.

  “Aldo,” Rai chided. “Shut the fuck up for a moment, please.”

  “Right,” Darrow sighed. “What, you want executive access to some sort of database, and if I don’t hand it over, you’ll blow up my kids’ pets with your mind?”

  “Nothing so transactional,” Rai shook her head, curt. “I need you to carry a message as high up your ladder as possible. I don’t know if your access reaches the president, or stops at some general or secretary, but I need you to make the following as clear as you can, to as influential a figure as you can: do not intervene in Minnesota.”

  “Minnesota?” Darrow said. “I was wondering why you were stoping in such a flyover. What’s supposed to happen in Minnesota?”

  “I’ll put it in terms you’ll understand: someone, somehow, struck oil. Not real oil, obviously. A power source, a rare one, that people like me are desperate for.”

  “Right. And I’ll wager a guess that it’s, uh, pretty limited? And something you can take by force?”

  “It can really only be taken by force.”

  “Hmm. Okay.” Darrow looked back out his window. He was silent for a few seconds, lost in thought. “It sounds like a lot of American citizens are going to die.”

  “Most likely,” Rai nodded. Diyanti noticed what seemed to be a genuine tone of regret to her voice there. “Despite efforts I plan to make to the contrary, that’s how it’ll probably go. Don’t pretend that you’re drawing some sort of moral line at collateral damage, Darrow. You make drones.”

  “I’m not. I’m just thinking about how the US military industrial leadership loves to cite civilian casualties as a reason to give themselves carte-blanche to intervene in whatever they please. Almost as much as they love oil.”

  “It’s not real oil.”

  “I’m aware.” Darrow took off his glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose. “You just want us out of the way?”

  “For your sake, not mine. The military is physically and technologically incapable of hurting me in any real way. But personally, I’d rather not have a bunch of 19-year-old National Guard lackeys shouldering their way into my line of fire.”

  “The Ray Kroc of discount wetwork is worried about sleeping at night?” Hatch chuckled, throat still a little mangled. “Fuckin’ classic. You’re a monster.”

  Rai leveled her gaze on the man, who, despite himself, succumbed to an animal instinct to shrink and look away. She paced over to him, lip finally curling into an honest expression of disgust. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are, Aldo, that I’m the one with this kind of power? That it’s me, and not Putin, or the Pentagon, or the free market, or the pope, or, fucking, you?”

  Aldo muttered something and Rai snapped her fingers in his face. An unseen force jarred Hatch’s head over toward Rai, and he yelped at the suddenness of it.

  “If someone like you could do what I can do, the world would be a smoldering heap. Humanity would be an endangered species scrounging around a levelled wasteland. Do you know why?”

  Aldo ground his teeth, keeping his eyes averted. The unseen force jostled his head and he gasped again.

  “Go on, guess. I would like to hear you guess.”

  “Because you think we’re stupid,” Aldo spat.

  Rai shook her head. “Because I know myself, my motivations, and you don’t. Oh, you all pretend to be about something. Darrow probably thinks he’s motivated by his legacy, or his family, or, maybe, if he’s feeling misty-eyed, some kind of twisted patriotism. You say you’re motivated by money, or pussy, or sadism, because you’re the kind of person who likes to get ahead of criticism by just spewing it yourself first, but you don’t get any points for that, because you don’t actually believe it. You think you do what you do because you’re somehow superior, and that every quarter in the green, every hike in stock price, every predatory acquisition is a way for you to rub that in the face of the people who dare to tut at you when you act like a spoiled child.”

  Rai backed off a step, and the invisible force relinquished Aldo’s head. He snapped away, flailed, tripped back onto the ground. She paid him no mind, turning her attention back to the motionless sky outside.

  “No. You, Darrow, the president, all the oligarchs and prophets and generals, you dress it up in your own way, but you’re all motivated by mortal fear. You know what everyone knows, deep in your gut and certain as the sunrise, that you’re going to have to die someday. And everything you do, all the kids you pop out and all the net worth you accrue and all the statues you have commissioned, it’s all a useless attempt to cheat the thing you know is uncheatable. And it makes you irrational.”

  “Unlike you?” Darrow challenged, part intrigued, part impetuous.

  Diyanti felt a surge of loyalty, something he’d only ever begun to feel for anyone once he started working with Rai. He knew what she was going to say next, and hearing her say it never failed to make him feel oddly reassured, even though he knew it didn’t apply to him.

  “Unlike me.” Rai said, her polite smile returned. “I’m free of that.”

  “Because you think you know better?”

  “Because I’m never going to die.”