Free Blood Rules by John Trenhaile

“Cabin crew take your seats for takeoff.”
    In the cockpit, Thorneycroft raised an eyebrow at his second officer, who nodded.
    “Right, gentlemen, let’s go to Bahrain. Three, two, one,
now.”
    He pushed the throttles forward.
    “Twenty knots … fifty knots … eighty knots … airspeed building.”
    The plane already felt lighter in Thorneycroft’s hands; he could sense its skittish desire to be airborne.
    “One hundred knots.”
    “Power checked.”
    “V-one … rotate.”
    As Thorneycroft used his palms to nudge the stick back, a frisky gust of wind celebrated the aircraft’s return home to where it belonged and he compensated gently; then they were up.
    When Halib was connected to Susannah Duclerc’s suite he waited to hear his sister’s voice before he spoke.
    “This is just to let you know,” he said, sounding almost brusque, “that your cargo got away safely.”
    NQ 033 was still a speck in his binoculars. While he waited for her to reply, his hand never trembled, keeping the plane in the dead center of his focal image. “Thank you.”
    He replaced the receiver with a slight frown, not even sure if he had really heard those whispered words. Halib justly prided himself on his command of English nuance: it occurred to him that Leila’s voice had sounded not so much distant as altogether absent.
20 JULY: NOON: BAHRAIN
    The light had changed now. It was stronger, even less kind than before. Leila sat in front of the mirror, with this new, hostile light coming from her left. She looked strangely pallid. The eyes reflected in the glass were never quite still, not even when she stared directly into them. She could not control the flickering of her own eyes, and that failure, petty in itself, disturbed her.
    She did not know how many hours had passed since Halib’s last call, informing her that NQ 033 was airborne. She had eaten nothing today, nor was she hungry. The coffeepot had been replenished twice, that she did know, because the waiter’s arrival necessitated action on her part, and she remembered action, always.
    Her right foot had gone to sleep. She wriggled the toes, wincing slightly as life flowed back into them. Soon it would be time to go. Soon she would look at her watch, but not yet. Her inner self would tell her, to the minute, when to consult her watch, knowing in advance what the watch would say. She had been programmed, as a child, by reference to a particular moment, and ever since then she had revolved around that moment, gyroscopically, without fault or flaw. So many years, months, days, hours, since
then.
    Leila stared into the mirror but did not see herself. She saw a man without a face, just a black oval above the shoulders where a face would normally be. This was her old friend. Lover, almost. She could not live without this man. He gave her existence whatever meaning it had managed to retain since
then.
    The glorious old house called Kharif in the hills overlooking Beirut. For some reason she had a memory of blue sea and white waves that day, she did not know why: the angle was wrong for a view of the beach; from the upstairs rooms you could only see the Mediterranean far out, beyond the harbor, where sunlight made it almost colorless. But azure sea and white-streaked waves were part of the memory. Part of
then.
    Grandpa had been telling her a story about Babar the elephant king. At nine she was really too old for Babar, but she did love him so! And even more his queen, Celeste, because that name reminded her of Grandmother Celestine; Leila felt she would never, never outgrow those stories. Grandpa had the book on his lap, she could see it now across the years, oh, so clearly. Beside him, on a cane table, the bowl of strawberries mixed with raspberries, still wet from their shower at the hands of Azizza. Leila was frolicsome that day; the math test had made her top of the class; she let everybody know.
    Grandpa had pretended to be incredulous. If only he’d taken her word for it,