Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Raven glanced at her. Something in Ciana’s face must have shown, because her voice shifted: still Raven, still dry, but with the structural reinforcement underneath that she deployed when she could tell Ciana’s foundations were swaying. “Hey. It’s probably nothing. Airlines change hands all the time. Our contracts are solid.”
"I know."
"And if anything changes, we deal with it. You’re the best crew on this fleet, and I’m saying that only partly because I’m biased."
Ciana nodded. Managed a small smile that felt like it fit correctly on her face.
They turned the corner toward the crew exit, and Ciana’s gaze swept the row of security monitors mounted above the corridor junction. Most of the screens showed empty gates, motionless jetways, the hollow architecture of an airport between shifts.
One screen showed the first-class cabin. Her cabin. The image was frozen, a still frame, not a live feed. It showed the aisle, the seats, the low amber lighting. And in the centre of the frame, caught mid-motion, pouring champagne with her face turned slightly toward 1A: Ciana.
Her own face looked back at her from the monitor. Eyes soft in a way she didn’t recognise. Mouth slightly parted. She looked like a woman noticing something she wasn’t supposed to notice.
Then the screen flickered. Cycled to another feed, an empty gate, grey carpet, nobody there.
Ciana stood very still.
"Ci?" Raven was ahead of her, halfway to the exit. "You coming?"
“Yeah.” She didn’t look at the monitor again. She walked. Her heels clicked against the terminal floor and she counted them the way she always did when the ground stopped feeling solid. One, two, three, four.
Her flat was a third-floor walk-up in the Libération quarter, four hundred square metres of careful independence: white walls she had painted herself, a shelf of paperbacks organised by colour because it soothed something in her that she had never bothered to name, a kitchen window that framed a rectangle of Nice sky that changed colour seventeen times between dawn and noon. She had counted.
She made tea. Sat at the table. Opened her laptop and deleted the airline acquisition email without reading it because Raven had already summarised the only parts that mattered and because the rest would be noise designed to make upheaval sound like opportunity, and Ciana had no patience for that particular fiction.
She thought about the security monitor. The frozen image. Her own face, softened toward 1A, caught on camera and displayed on a screen that should have been showing live feeds from the terminal.
It was a glitch. Screens cycled. Feeds lagged. It meant nothing.
She washed her cup. Set it on the rack. Stood at the kitchen window and watched the streetlight throw its orange circle on the pavement below, and inside that circle a cat moved, slow and deliberate, as though the light were warm.
Her phone buzzed.
A company memo, different from the acquisition email. This one was addressed to her directly. She read it standing up, because some things were easier to absorb when your body was already braced.
INTERNAL MEMO — CONFIDENTIAL
TO: C. Reyes, Senior Cabin Attendant
RE: Reassignment — Private Charter Division
Effective immediately, you’ve been reassigned to the newly formed Private Charter Division of Côte d’Azur Atlantic. You’ll serve as sole cabin attendant on an exclusive client account. Details of the client and flight schedule will be provided upon your first briefing.
Please confirm receipt and availability within 24 hours. Refusal to accept this reassignment may result in termination of your current contract.
She read it twice. Three times. The words didn’t change.
Her entire professional life—the routes she knew by heart, the cabin she had made hers, the rhythm that kept her steady—rearranged. By someone she had never met, for reasons no one had explained, with the quiet administrative violence of a memo that didn’t even bother to name the client.
She called Janice. Her supervisor’s phone rang four times and went to voicemail. Ciana didn’t leave a message. What would she say? She didn’t have a question yet. She had something worse: the feeling of walls moving around her while she stood still, the floor plan of her life redrawn by an architect she couldn’t see.
She set the phone down on the counter. The screen glowed for a moment, then went dark.
Outside, the cat had left the circle of light.
Ciana stood in her kitchen and counted the things she could control. The tea she had made. The cup she had washed. The steadiness of her own breathing.
It was a short list.
It was getting shorter.
Chapter 2
THE JET WAS MATTE BLACK and it sat on the private apron at Nice Côte d’Azur like something that had landed from a country that didn’t appear on maps.
Ciana stood at the base of the airstairs with her crew bag over one shoulder and her contract in the other hand. Not the physical document, but the weight of it, the invisible leash of a clause she had read four times that morning: Refusal to accept this reassignment may result in termination of your current contract. She had called Janice again at seven a.m. This time Janice had answered. This time Janice had sounded like a woman reading from a script someone else had written.