Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
DAY 2: SUNDAY 20TH AUGUST, 2017
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
DAY 3: MONDAY 21ST AUGUST, 2017
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
DAY 4: TUESDAY 22ND AUGUST, 2017
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
One Year Later
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
On the I-81, heading for Nashville, a yellow Buick comes to an abrupt halt.
A girl swerves onto the hard shoulder and hits the brakes.
Then she checks the message on her phone again.
Damn it!
She thumps the steering wheel.
She checks the clock on the dashboard, takes a breath and then puts the car back into gear.
She takes the next exit, gets back onto the I-81 and heads back to DC, praying that her brother’s plane will be on time.
A continent away, a pilot looks at the paper model sitting on the dashboard in his cockpit: a warbler, a tiny bird that can fly for three days across the Atlantic without landing.
He never takes it for granted: how miraculous this is, to be up here, hundreds of miles from the earth. And at night, to see the stars, up close.
He thinks of his son, who made the paper bird. In a few hours, they’ll be together and then a holiday, just the two of them. He’s going to try harder this time.
Beyond the paper bird, through the thick glass windows, the sky is that endless kind of blue. His eyes aren’t big enough to take it all in.
It’s morning. The day is starting.
It’s going to be a beautiful day, the pilot thinks. A beautiful flight. Not a whisper of wind. A smooth parabola through the sky from one continent to the other.
He’s done this route hundreds of times. Sometimes, he jokes that he could do it in his sleep.
He cranes his neck and looks down. They’re passing the west coast of Ireland. In a few more minutes they’ll leave behind the land and then, for thousands of miles, it’ll be just him and his passengers and crew, flying between sea and sky.
There are times when he’s so happy up here that he wishes he could fly for ever. That there was no land to go back to.
The plane is flying steady now. He switches the controls to autopilot; there’s no more need for his intervention, not for a good while.
He sits back and looks back out at the sky.
Across the Atlantic, at Dulles International Airport in DC, a seventeen-year-old boy waits by the arrivals gate. He sits on the floor, his back pressed into the wall.
It’ll be hours before his father’s plane lands, but he doesn’t mind waiting. Airports are like home for him. He’s good at blocking out the noise and the people. All those comings and goings.
He pulls a scrap of paper out of his backpack and starts folding.
A few miles off the coast of western Ireland, where the sea is so deep it’s black, a fisherman stands in his boat, pulling in a net. He’s been out since before light.
He hears the drone of the engine before he sees the plane. He lives under the flight path, so over the years he’s become used to the sound, to how the rhythm of the planes weave between the currents of the sea.
But still, it takes him by surprise: to see them up there, those big metal birds, carrying all those people through the sky.
The sea he understands: a wooden raft
