The attendant at the entrance was a young man with a precise haircut and a name badge that said DEVIN. He looked up as Naomi came around the partition and his eyes went over her once, quickly, from the braids to the shoes and back again.
"Good morning," he said. "Can I help you?"
"Good morning. I'm checking in for 247 to London."
He hesitated. It was a small hesitation, less than a second. It would not have shown up on any survey. "This is the Signature check-in area, ma'am," he said. "For premium cabin passengers. Economy and premium economy check-in are just through there, on your right. If you'd like I can..."
"I'm in Signature," Naomi said.
"Oh." He smiled, a professional smile that arrived a fraction late. "Of course. My apologies. Can I see your passport?"
She handed it to him. He glanced at it, and at her, and then gestured toward the second desk, where a woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain was already looking up expectantly.
"Ms. Morgan for London," Devin said to the agent, and Naomi saw the agent's eyes flick to him and back to her, and something unspoken passed between them, the kind of silent question that colleagues ask each other when a passenger has caused some small friction. Naomi did not know what the question was. She had a good idea.
The agent's badge said MARGARET. She took the passport and typed for a moment. "Morgan, Naomi. 2A. Any bags to check today?"
"Just the one."
"Lovely." Margaret printed the boarding pass and the bag tag and slid the pass across the counter in a small walnut-colored folder. "The Signature lounge is past security on the left, one level up. Boarding will begin at 8:05 from gate B23. Enjoy your flight, Ms. Morgan."
Nothing in her voice changed when she said the name. Naomi had not expected it to. Her name was common enough, and her face, though it had been in the trade press and occasionally on business television, was not one that most people in the airline would recognize out of context. The executives knew her. The pilots in the union leadership knew her. The people at the operations center knew her, because she had worked there, and because she still walked through it two or three times a week. The rest of the company knew her name, mostly, and a photograph that ran in the internal newsletter and on the last page of the inflight magazine, a professional portrait in which her hair had been in a different style and she had been wearing a navy suit and a polite, closed-mouth smile.
She thanked Margaret and took her boarding pass and walked toward security. Behind her, she heard Devin say something in a low voice and Margaret laugh softly, and she did not turn around. It was possible they were laughing about something else. It was possible they were laughing about nothing at all. She had spent a good part of her life learning not to turn around for that sound, and she was not going to start this morning.
But she took out her phone as she walked, opened a note, and wrote: 06:38. Signature CI. Attendant redirected me to economy before asking name. Didn't happen to man in gray coat ahead of me (observed). Agent fine. Then she put the phone away.
* * *
The Signature lounge was quiet and warm and smelled faintly of coffee and cedar. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the apron, where a Meridian jet with the dark blue tail was parked at a gate below, its cargo doors open, a belt loader feeding bags into its belly. The sky had gone from bruised blue to a flat, overcast white. It would be a gray morning. It would be a gray day in London too; she had checked.
Naomi took a seat by the window with a cup of coffee and a plate of fruit she did not intend to eat. She watched the airplane below. She watched the people around her.
There were perhaps thirty of them, scattered across the low chairs and the long communal table and the bar, where a bartender in a white jacket was making espressos. Most were men in suits, or in the kind of expensive casual clothing that men wore when they wanted to signal that they did not need to wear suits. A few were women traveling for work, laptops open, earbuds in. There was a family with two small children who were being kept quiet with