THE BABY WOULDN’T STOP SCREAMING—UNTIL A TEN-YEAR-OLD FOUND WHAT WAS HIDDEN UNDER HIS BLANKET

Eighty-seven minutes into the flight, the baby in first class was still screaming, and every adult on board had already given up. The father had tried three bottles, four blankets, a private doctor on the ground, and a security detail that made grown men look away. He was still failing. Then a ten-year-old in borrowed sneakers walked past the curtain and told him to stop feeding his son — because the baby wasn't hungry, the baby was afraid. He almost had her removed from the cabin. Until she lifted the edge of the blanket and found the small black disc pressed against his son's ribs. The father went white. Not confused. Recognized. The kind of recognition that ends with a locked cabin and names being taken. And when he turned to the girl and asked how she knew to look for it, she couldn't answer, because her own kitchen had been hiding one for four days.

The crying had been going on for eighty-seven minutes when Leah started counting.

Thirty-one. Then forty-two. Then she stopped, because counting had stopped helping.

The sound came from behind the curtain at the front of the plane, where the seats went flat and the glasses were glass and the air smelled like somebody else's money. It wasn't the thin, hiccupping wail of a tired baby. It was ragged. Worn down to the bone. A sound that had already spent everything it had.

A flight attendant hurried past with a bottle. Five minutes later she came back with a blanket. Ten minutes after that she came back with nothing at all and a face like a closed door.

Refused three bottles, Leah heard her whisper. I don't know what else to try.

Leah looked down at Maya.

Her sister was three, asleep, one fist curled around the ear of a stuffed rabbit that had once been gray and was now mostly gray-brown. Curls stuck to her forehead. Her breathing was slow and even, and Leah counted it the way she counted everything now — six in, six out — because counting was the only thing keeping her hands still.

Four days ago, she had been standing on kitchen tile in bare feet.

A suitcase in the overhead bin. Two hundred and seventy-four euros folded inside a sock. A phone with no messages from her mother. A travel letter signed eleven months earlier for a trip that never happened.

Rome. Aunt Celia. One job: keep Maya safe.

Nothing else.

The baby screamed again, and this time the sound broke in the middle, the way a voice does when there's no air left to spend.

Leah's jaw tightened.

She knew that cry.

She'd heard it from Maya on the bad nights, when the house went quiet in the wrong way, when the office door downstairs stayed shut and their mother was always traveling for work.

She tucked the blanket around Maya's shoulders.

Then she stood up.

The curtain to first class was three steps away. The security guard was already in the aisle, and he'd seen her coming before she arrived.

Back to your seat.

I think I know what's wrong.

He was enormous — shoulders like a doorway, hands folded like he'd done this a thousand times. He didn't move.

Miss. Back to your seat.

My name is Leah.