Boarding

The last ten hours passed the way Cassian imagined the final hours before an execution must pass — too slow and too fast at once, every ordinary thing suddenly unbearable in its ordinariness, breakfast dishes rinsed and stacked exactly as they'd been rinsed and stacked a thousand mornings before, as if the world hadn't tilted permanently sideways sometime around dawn.

He did what his father had told him to do. He stayed visible. He stayed close to people, moved through the house in full view of whoever might be watching, said nothing about Renner, said nothing about the phone call, said nothing about a father who was supposed to be six weeks dead and was instead, somewhere out there, bleeding memory every time he got close enough to the truth to matter. He packed a small bag with hands that wouldn't quite stop shaking and told his mother, when she asked if he was all right, that he was just nervous about flying, which was, in its own way, the truest thing he'd said to anyone in days.

Zack texted once, just after noon. Stay sharp. I'll be watching everyone at the airport. Don't do anything alone.

Cassian wrote back a single word — okay — and did not tell him about the phone call either, not yet, not until he understood exactly what his father had meant by inside the family clearly enough to know who it was safe to say it to.

By three o'clock they were in the car, his mother driving with both hands locked hard on the wheel, Bastian in the passenger seat cracking jokes that landed flat and desperate in the tense silence of the cabin, Moira in the back beside Cassian with her hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had gone white. Nobody spoke about what any of them were actually thinking. The whole car felt, to Cassian, like a held breath.

The private airfield sat twenty minutes outside the city, a low modern building of glass and steel that looked, absurdly, exactly like an ordinary regional airport despite serving only a handful of flights a week — a runway, a scattering of small aircraft on the tarmac, and beyond the glass doors, waiting with his usual too-fast smile and a garment bag slung over one shoulder, Zack, who caught Cassian's eye across the lobby and gave him the smallest, most deliberate nod Cassian had ever seen a person give.

Stay sharp.

They cleared the minimal private-charter security in a blur Cassian barely registered — a bored attendant checking names against a list, a quick glance at bags, nothing like the airports Cassian had flown through before. His heart was hammering so hard he was certain everyone around him could hear it. He kept scanning faces — the attendant, a man in a high-vis vest fuelling a plane two bays over, a woman at the small café counter pouring coffee nobody seemed to be drinking — searching for anything wrong, anything that didn't fit, anything that might be the shape of the person his father had warned him about.

Nothing revealed itself. That was the worst part. Everything looked achingly, maddeningly ordinary.

"This is her," Bastian said, gesturing toward the tarmac with a forced brightness that didn't reach his eyes, and there she was — the jet, small and sleek and white, engines already beginning their low, patient whine, exactly the shape Cassian had carried behind his eyes for four days, exactly the metal tube he had already died inside once.

His whole body seized at the sight of it.

"Cassian." His mother's hand found his shoulder, gentler than he expected, and when he looked at her, she wasn't performing calm anymore — her face had gone open and frightened and honest in a way it hadn't been since the funeral. "We don't have to do this. If you're truly this afraid, we can turn around right now. I mean it."

For one full, aching second, Cassian let himself imagine it — turning around, walking back through the glass doors, driving home, letting the plane leave without them, letting the whole terrible machinery of this loop grind forward without any Wintermeres inside it to feed it.

But his father's voice was still in his ears. It doesn't matter what you do in the small moments. You can change a hundred small things and the plane still goes down. If avoiding today only meant living through some worse version of tomorrow, some version where he wasn't there to watch, wasn't there to see whatever finally happened in that cabin — then running wasn't safety. It was just surrender dressed up as caution.

"No," he said quietly. "We have to go. I have to see this through."

His mother searched his face for a long moment, and whatever she found there — some new, hardened resolve that hadn't existed in her son four days ago — seemed to convince her, because she nodded once, sharply, and took his hand, and didn't let go.

A man in a captain's uniform stood at the base of the airstair, clipboard in hand, checking names against his manifest with a professional, unbothered courtesy that made Cassian's chest ache — Malcolm, he understood immediately, matching the face against every fragment of memory he'd carried from a version of this exact moment that had already, technically, killed him once. Malcolm looked exactly as Cassian remembered him from the wreckage of that first, unlived Friday — kind-faced, unhurried, entirely unaware of what was coming for his own throat within the hour.

Zack reached him first, and Cassian watched the two of them share a brief, private look — no words, just the terrible weight of a man greeting his fiancé with the full, silent knowledge of exactly how this had ended before, and the desperate hope that this time it wouldn't.

"Afternoon, all," Malcolm said warmly, ticking names off his list. "Should be a smooth flight — good weather the whole way. Six of us today, I believe?"

Cassian's stomach dropped.

"Six," he repeated, before he could stop himself. "There's only five of us. Me, Mum, Uncle Bastian, Gran, and Zack."

Malcolm frowned down at his clipboard, running a finger along the manifest, and for one terrible, suspended moment, nobody on the tarmac breathed.

"My mistake," Malcolm said slowly, glancing up. "Looks like there's a sixth name listed here. Added late — this morning, actually, look at the timestamp." He turned the clipboard so Cassian could see, and Cassian's whole world narrowed down to a single line of handwriting, a name added to the manifest only hours ago, in the exact window of time between his father's fractured, desperate phone call and this moment, standing on the tarmac with the plane's engines already beginning to climb toward readiness behind them.

T. Wintermere.

Cassian stared at his own father's name, added to a flight manifest that was never supposed to include him, and understood, with a horror that arrived all at once and completely, that whatever his father had meant about someone managing this loop from the inside, about someone close enough to know the family's every rhythm — that person had just made absolutely certain that today, unlike every other version of this Friday that had ever happened before, his father was finally, deliberately, being brought on board.

"He's not here," Bastian said, baffled, looking around the empty tarmac. "There's no one else with us. Must be an admin error."

But Cassian was already turning, scanning the terminal behind them, the tarmac, the shadowed gap between two parked aircraft, some part of him certain, with a dread that had nothing rational underpinning it and everything instinctive, that his father was closer than any of them knew — and that whoever had added that name to the manifest this morning had done it not by mistake, but because they wanted, very specifically, for every single Wintermere left alive to be in that cabin when it finally happened.

"We should go," Karla said, voice tight, pulling Cassian gently but firmly toward the airstair. "Whatever this is, we can sort it out once we're moving. Come on, sweetheart."

Cassian let himself be led up the steps, throat dry, heart slamming, casting one last look back at the empty tarmac, the ordinary glass terminal, the fading afternoon light — and stepped, at last, back into the narrow, familiar cabin of the plane that had already killed him once.

The door sealed behind them with a soft, final hiss.