“You’re all right, Dinah,” Brian repeated. “There are other people here. Can you hear them?”

“Y-Yes. I can hear them. But where’s Aunt Vicky? And who’s been killed?”

“Killed?” a woman asked sharply. It was the one from the starboard side. Brian glanced up briefly and saw she was young, dark-haired, pretty. “Has someone been killed? Have we been hijacked?”

“No one’s been killed,” Brian said. It was, at least, something to say. His mind felt weird: like a boat which has slipped its moorings. “Calm down, honey.”

“I felt his hair!” Dinah insisted. “Someone cut off his HAIR!”

This was just too odd to deal with on top of everything else, and Brian dismissed it. Dinah’s earlier thought suddenly struck home to him with chilly intensity — who the fuck was flying the plane?

He stood up and turned to the older man in the red shirt. “I have to go forward,” he said. “Stay with the little girl.”

“All right,” the man in the red shirt said. “But what’s happening?”

They were joined by a man of about thirty-five who was wearing pressed blue-jeans and an oxford shirt. Unlike the others, he looked utterly calm. He took a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, shook them out by one bow, and put them on. “We seem a few passengers short, don’t we?” he said. His British accent was almost as crisp as his shirt. “What about crew? Anybody know?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Brian said, and started forward again. At the head of the main cabin he turned back and counted quickly. Two more passengers had joined the huddle around the girl in the dark glasses. One was the teenaged girl who had been sleeping so heavily; she swayed on her feet as if she were either drunk or stoned. The other was an elderly gent in a fraying sport-coat. Eight people in all. To those he added himself and the guy in business class, who was, at least so far, sleeping through it all.