Chapter Text
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It was her last stop before Redwick.
Amelia has to jog to keep up with her internal clock. It’s ticking away in her head, second by second, as she hauls her messenger bag over her shoulder and makes a polite as run as possible through the Northern Bureau. She has four packages to deliver. Two are in her bag, nestled underneath cotton padding and held gently by belts fastened to the inside lining of said bag. The third parcel is a palm-sized thing that she’s got stuffed on the inside pocket of her jacket. In her other pocket, a letter.
Ordinarily, she’d just toss it off to the administrator and they’d doll it out as needed. The administrator was out to lunch and damn that timing. Amelia didn’t want to wait. She had to get clearance from the enrollment officer in order to even deliver the packages. After that, it’s ducking down every hallway through engineers and scientists while she follows the crummiest map she’s ever been handed by a government official.
Before she had landed in the Bureau, her last stop had been at Bromwich and god, god, what a hole of an installation. As a mail carrier, she thinks they’d have a better runway for her to land her bird on, but on landing, she nearly spun out when she hit a pothole. The thunderous noise her wheel made on impact was felt all the way to her teeth. That was her plane dammit, it was the only one she has! Other pilots had a few backups they could rely on while in repairs, but Amelia was not that type of pilot. While the whole world lost its marbles over the continental shift she was left to deal with the outcome of that: the shittiest air control towers in the last century.
She just wants to deliver mail.
It’s a tight business. With the continental shift happening, all businesses and governments around the world were looking for the most experienced pilots they could hire. Business mail had an expectancy of months to reach a customer. Mercenary hires, like Amelia, cost more but they delivered in nearly a quarter of that time. Time was precious. Every pilot was a leaderboard of how fast they were. Amelia aimed for the top in all her deliveries. It’d be on her profile. Customers would see her timing and like her better than other pilots. It’s very simple.
She just wishes the rest of the world understood that.
She’s worried about the wheel suspension ever since her flight from Bromwich. Ordinarily, she’d just fix it herself. That’s how she prefers it. She knows every nook and cranny of her plane and she knows how to get it purring. She doesn’t want anyone else messing with that. She would have done just that, but her next delivery is Redwick.
It’s over the goddamn ocean. Not just any ocean, the new one, the big scary one that formed when North America decided to summersault over to Europe but didn’t want to leave South America behind so now the Atlantic is bisected by the Mexican Islands. To the north, big scary unknown. She thinks they planned on merging it with the Pacific at some point, but the waters were too treacherous by boat. It was nothing like its southern sister.
They’ve started calling it The Barren Deep. It’s dramatic as hell for rough waters. It’d be funny, but the rough seas made for ocean storms and Amelia is less of a fan of that. Redwick is right smack dap on the other side of it, leaning precariously close to losing itself to the Deep. It’s half of what Alaska used to be. The other half decided to join up with Japan and crash into the Philippines decades ago. There’s no control over air space. There’s nothing to salvage coordinates and readings when everything is constantly moving. Pilots just have to eyeball it.
Redwick is dangerous. It also pays extremely well. She’s on a time limit- two days to fly there- and she has packages to deliver here first before she can tackle that. She made the agonizing decision to allow the airframe mechanics to fix up her bird.
Which is why she’s just one stressful second away from saying fuck it and sprinting around the base like an idiot. Anyone touching her plane is making her skin itch. Her internal clock is crying. She delivers her packages in record time.
Her plane is fine.
She slouches as the airframe engineer looks at her like she’s lost her marbles.
“Wheel was knocked loose.” He tells her what she already knows. “Landing gear was bent. Didn’t need a replacement.”
“It didn’t?” Amelia asks suspiciously.
He looks at her, “It didn’t.”
Well. Fine then.
She wants to look over their work. More than anything, she wants to crawl under the hull and see what they’ve poked at. She’s out of time and it’s making her want to crawl out of her skin and howl like a deranged creature. The thank you she gives is through a tightly clenched jaw.
Take-off is slow. It helps settle her nerves when she has to wait on four other planes to take off first and two more to land. She gets the all-clear and cruises. The runway is smooth. The inertia presses her down against her seat. The seatbelts are tight, but nothing is more grounding than the force of speed. Her bird hums as she ascends, the installation shrinking behind her. There are no planes headed where she’s going.
Good thing I brought snacks. She thinks.
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Her plane is not fine.
She’s white-knuckling the controls. The lights are flickering and that’s normal, actually, it’s normal enough she keeps laughing about it. Flickering lights shouldn’t be normal but her bird has been patched by her every time. It’s a few loose wires behind the lights she has to repair. The flickering lights are not the issue.
It’s her landing gear that’s now sticking sideways out of her fucking plane. She stares at it angrily. Dark grey clouds keep obscuring her vision, but there it is, like her plane is sticking one cheeky little leg out. It’s bent at a near ninety-degree angle and curling. Interia felt good. Apparently, it didn’t feel good for her wheels.
“You’re fucking joking.” Amelia seethes. Aside from the wheel, everything is fine! Oxygen is fine, her seat isn’t jammed, she’s got her helmet on and she’s transmitting clearly back to the Bureau that, hey, you fucked up! You fucked me up so bad!
She’s fine.
Her plane is not fucking fine.
She thinks the most ridiculous part about this is the response she’s getting from the bureau which is essentially, you have really great weather right now you should be fine. Amelia thinks she should turn around and nose-dive right into their stupid tower. I don’t have landing gear you pricks!
She has a raft, she supposes, but the whole point was keeping her bird. She only has one plane.
“How the hell am I going to do this?” She mutters. Landing in Redwick was a toss-up. Ideally, if nothing else occurred, she could just fly on there and perform the world's most dangerous emergency landing. She has three wheels. One of them is currently trying to curtsey in the wrong damn direction.
Otherwise? She’s perfectly fine.
For twenty minutes, she breathes through her nose to calm herself down. Nothing catastrophic is happening. The landing gear is bent but it’s not a currently life-threatening issue. It’s a later life-threatening issue and she can handle that better. It helps her focus. She has time to plan.
Redwick is an island. It’s a huge chunk of land with just a bit of the Yukon Territory kissing its flank. It doesn’t have any lakes to speak of. She’d have to risk a landing in the Deep and isn’t that just swell? She has to aim it just right so that her plane is close enough for rescue and salvage. If she lands too far out, her plane is gonna get taken by the sea. She doesn’t know what’s better. Drowning or stranded in Redwick.
“Ugh.” She says.
At least the lights are still flickering.
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She flies for two more hours before later life-threatening becomes very suddenly current.
She hits turbulence. She fights through it as normal, letting it jostle her as she checks the windspeed and tries to figure out the best course. She’s proud of herself. She’s doing extremely well given the circumstances. She barely has time to plot out a course before her plane trembles.
From her peripheral, she watches it happen in horrifying clarity. The landing gear buckles. There’s a screech of metal. It curls again and snaps. It misses her engine- oh god- but sears through her wing, tearing back the metal and throwing metal frames off into the wind. The force jerks her plane sideways. Amelia is slammed against her seat. All the breath in her lungs leaves her in a cough. Her plane is spinning.
Oh god, she’s spinning.
Parachute- She reaches down for the hooks that clasp her seat to the plane. If she unlatches them, her seat acts as a makeshift raft. Her parachute is stowed inside. She just needs to unhook it and pull the cord and-
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In her wild dreams, she’s flying.
That’s all she wants to do. All her money goes to her plane. She upgrades it. She flies. The world changes below her, a shifting storm of fear and chaos. She’s a free bird. As long as she keeps flying, the world will never catch up to her.
The ocean swallows her whole.
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