"How's the packing?" he asked.

"Done. Triple-checked."

"Of course it is." A pause. "Are you nervous about the flying?"

Lena hesitated. She didn't want to lie to him. "A little. Not the flying itself. The — being in charge of it all. If something goes wrong with the seat, or the note doesn't show up —"

He didn't tell her there was nothing to fear. That wasn't his way. Instead, he asked: "What parts of the journey can you control?"

She thought. "My medication and water. My headphones. The window and my sight line. The documents in my backpack."

"Good," he answered. "And what if something changes?"

She glanced at the confirmation on her phone. The seat number glowed there, certain and official. "Ask for the actual record," she said. "Then call you."

"Exactly." She could hear the smile in his voice. "The record, Lena. Not the opinion. The record."

After they hung up, she sat on the edge of the bed for a while, looking at the three things on the desk. Battery pack. Notebook. Backpack. She added a fourth: the small labeled pouch with her migraine tablets and the card explaining her symptoms. She zipped it into the backpack's front pocket, where she could reach it without looking.

Then she slept — or tried to. She lay awake for a while, listening to the house settle: the refrigerator's hum, a branch tapping the window, her mother's soft footsteps in the hallway, pausing outside her door the way she always did, just to listen. Lena pretended to be asleep. It was a kindness they performed for each other.

She thought about the seat — 2A, window, over the wing. She pictured the view: the wing stretching out, the horizon steady beyond it. For someone whose inner ear sometimes lied to her, the horizon was truth. It didn't move. It didn't tilt. It was the one fixed point she could always trust.

She thought about Tidepool, crated and waiting in Seattle. She thought about Sam's impatience, Priya's checklists, Micah's quiet competence. She thought about the final round starting tomorrow afternoon, and the practice window she'd planned, and the way plans had of bending.

At some point she must have slept, because the alarm went off at four and she woke with the particular clarity of someone who'd been half-awake all night. She dressed in the dark, splashed water on her face, and went to check the three things on the desk one final time. Battery pack. Notebook. Backpack. Plus the pouch, zipped where she could reach it.

She didn't go back to sleep. There are mornings when sleep would be a waste.

At fourteen, Lena Ortiz had learned that adults often decided what she could do before they asked what she wanted. They decided she was too young to understand a schedule, too small to carry her own suitcase, too quiet to have an opinion. At Northstar International Airport, a man in a navy uniform decided she could not possibly belong in seat 2A.

She had first learned this on a school trip to the science museum in seventh grade, when a teacher, meaning kindly, had told the bus driver to skip the robotics hall because "the younger ones won't follow it," without asking the younger ones whether they followed it. Lena had followed it. She had read every placard in the robotics hall the previous summer, with Mateo, who had waited beside each one without hurrying her, and who had answered her questions with more questions, the way he answered everything. She had not argued on the bus. She had written, in the notebook she carried even then, a sentence she would keep for years: They decided before they asked. The second time was at a doctor's office, when a nurse, explaining a balance test, had spoken entirely to Ana — "She'll feel dizzy, but that's normal, she'll be fine" — while Lena sat on the examination table, fourteen years old, fully capable of hearing the words "dizzy" and "normal" and of having her own opinion about whether being dizzy counted as fine. Ana had noticed. Ana had said, gently, "Lena, do you want to ask anything?" and Lena had asked three things, and the nurse had answered all three, and the rest of the appointment had gone differently — not because the nurse was unkind, but because someone had moved Lena from the category of patient being discussed to the category of person in the room. She carried both memories onto the airplane, the way travelers carry documents: not as grievances, but as evidence about how rooms work. Rooms work, she had learned, by deciding who counts as a speaker before anyone speaks. The gate, the cabin, the cockpit — they would each make that decision, in their own way, before the day was over. What Lena did not yet know was that she would be asked, before the day was over, to speak in a room where the decision had already been made about her, and that the notebook in her backpack, with its folded diagrams and its sentence about deciding before asking, would turn out to be the most practical thing she owned.