The cabin smelled of recycled air and cheap coffee, the kind of scent that settles into your clothes and refuses to leave until you’ve scrubbed your skin raw. Seat 12A. Window. That was my world now. A sixteen-inch square of fabric and plastic where I was supposed to fit a life that used to take up entire drop zones.
I stared out at the desert floor miles below, a patchwork of burnt orange and brown, endless and indifferent. It looked like the kind of terrain where I’d spent the last decade of my life, but it wasn’t. It was just Nevada. It was “safe.” That’s what the paperwork said. Honorable Discharge. I called it being put out to pasture.
My right knee throbbed—a dull, rhythmic ache from a hard landing outside the Vaneck Spire three years ago. I didn’t wince. Pain is just data. It tells you you’re still alive.
“Excuse me,” the man in 12B muttered, his elbow encroaching on the armrest. He was typing furiously on a laptop that probably cost more than my first truck. He wore a $3,000 charcoal suit and a gold watch that screamed “middle management.” He looked at my hands—scarred, rough, and stained with the permanent grease of the motor pool—and then at my worn leather boots.
