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~PART 1~

“Attention- this is your captain speaking. We may experience some turbulence. Please fasten your seat belt; I am turning on the sign…now.” *Bing*

Danielle looked up from her book, the captain’s voice startling her out of her doze. The plane cabin was dimly lit, with soft, blue lights leading a path through the center aisle, and all the windows were shut. Fumbling for her watch, Danie’s eyes brushed over the two other passengers in her row next to her. One was fast asleep, with soft brown hair plastered across her chest, but the other was wide awake and staring at her phone with luminous teal eyes. Her hair was a vivid blond-white that almost glowed in the semi-darkness, making Danie wonder if it was dyed.

Quickly checking to make sure nobody was watching, she pushed up the window covering an inch and was shocked to see pale rays of sunshine streaming through the glass. She hurriedly pulled the cover shut, but not before the sleeping lady in the seat in front of her mumbled something incoherent and shifted slightly to the left. Danie’s shock quickly turned to annoyance: how was it dawn already? Her watch said 12:57. She knew that they were passing through a bunch of different time zones, but this was insane. All her senses were telling her it should be the middle of the night.

“Hey- um, how close are we to landing?” she asked the white-haired girl, who was the only one awake in the near vicinity. “I have no clue what time it is.”

“About thirty minutes,” she replied, without glancing up from her phone.

“What? What put us behind schedule?”

“Apparently there was an unexpected storm they had to avoid. Something like that. Probably a lapse of their equipment, or misrecorded data, or just general laziness.” She fixed Danie in a sharp, clear-eyed stare. “You tell me.”

The time on her phone said 12:58.

“Okay…” said Danie, who broke the stare to unscrew the top of her water bottle. She paused to take a sip, and then said, “You know, it was probably just a mista-” She was cut off by a sudden lurch that sent the water flying and tipped everybody to the right, so that she slammed into the window. Several people woke up and started yelling, and one Chinese man in the row in across from Danie was desperately searching for his laptop that had fallen on the ground. The plane shuddered with effort and then righted itself somehow, like a nervous tightrope walker that had just about fallen off.

“Some turbulence,” muttered Danie. Her still-American timed watch said 12:59.

And then the girl with white hair sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. Her phone dropped out of her hand and clattered to the floor, but she paid no notice. “What?!” she whispered, with genuine fear in her voice.

“What is it?” asked Danie.

“Nothing,” she replied, shaking her head. “I just had the weirdest deja vu…”

And then the drop came.

50 seconds- Danie had fallen flat on her back on top of a seat that was now horizontal.

45 seconds- The passengers had gotten it into their heads that they were going to die. The usual screaming, crying, and last-minute cursing followed this realization.

35 seconds- Danie’s ears were popping out of her skull.

30 seconds- The captain’s voice came over the intercom, but something must have broken because it was all garbled. Nobody could hear it over the screaming, anyway.

24 seconds- Danie’s blood was rushing to her head. She felt like her life should’ve been flashing before her eyes, but it wasn’t.

15 seconds- The girl with white hair screamed.

5 seconds- Danie had the strangest feeling of being weightless, suspended in a world where the only connection to reality was her seat belt…

3 seconds

2 seconds

1 second- Someone yelled “Cover your head!” just as the world was swallowed whole by a tremendous, ear-splitting noise-