Page 2 of Shielding Instinct

Tamika was panting loudly, then mustered, “I shouldn’t have said pizza. Ugh. Got to go—in every sense of the word.”

The phone clicked; the call had ended.

Petra wrinkled her nose, feeling a wave of sympathy-nausea sweep over her. Once it passed, she toggled on herbedside light, climbed from her bed, and headed toward her toothbrush.

She made it as far as the bathroom when, at five-forty, a text from the airline struck her with the next blow of bad news.

Winter weather elsewhere rerouted their plane. The airline was consolidating two smaller flights onto a single larger plane. Please check your tickets for your updated seating assignment.

Elsewhere? It wasn’t even six in the morning. What plane could have been in the sky when it hit winter weather?

Petra hadn’t upgraded and paid for a better seat on this flight because Tamika was pinching pennies as she saved for Diamond’s inevitable braces. Before she even tapped the link, Petra knew that choice would come back to bite her.

All through her military and FBI careers, Petra was taught to preserve her reaction space—keeping people or situations outside of arm’s length gave her time to observe, decide, and react.

On a plane, that wasn’t simple to accomplish.

When traveling for work, Petra did her best by choosing aisle seats on emergency exit rows.

Why yes, she was able and willing to be helpful should the plane go down.

Today, though, she’d be traveling in the backety-back-back. The farthest seat from an emergency door.

While Petra didn’t love flying, she also didn’t hate it. Flying was a conveyance, a means to get from Point A to Point B. So, the seats in and of themselves weren’t upsetting. It was just that the images of the upside-down plane on the Canadian runway with people dangling from their seatbelts and the exit with the jet fuel waterfall were all pretty vivid in her mind’s eye.

At the back of the plane, in her new seat, with a plastic indentation for a window and the toilet behind her head, Petra would be the very last passenger off the plane in an emergency.

Normally, Petra’s brain wouldn’t immediately go to the possibility of escaping a crash, but today kind of had the taste of a soup sandwich.

She rolled her lips in and gave herself a minute to adjust. “This is fine,” she cajoled herself. “You had a plan all along. In this seat or that, you can still work your plan.”

And she did have a plan. Borne of both nature and career training, she always had a plan. And a contingency plan.

In this case, her plans might be helpful, but they could also be making life so much harder than it needed to be.

Like Tamika, Petra was exhausted.

Unlike Tamika, Petra’s exhaustion was by design. She’d purposefully stayed up all night reading a thriller, thinking that once seated and up in the air, she could sleep through the whole event and not fight the fidgets and discomfort of being on a flight for seven hours.

Her plan had been to sleep until she and Tamika reached St. Croix, where the beautiful white sands and clear turquoise waters would surround them—it would have been good.

“It’sgoingto be good,” Petra rallied herself. She knew that Tamika would, for sure, suffer a guilty conscience if Petra didn’t go to St. Croix and come back with some good stories.

Petra did as was required of her—she got ready, got into a taxi, and got to the airport. She deposited her suitcase on the conveyor belt and made her way through security.

Sure, they lost her shoe in the X-ray machine.

Then, with her hands over her head, she got buzzed twice before she got a full pat down by TSA.

And when she filled her water bottle, the gasket was missing, so it leaked oneverything.

But these were minor annoyances.

She reminded herself that it was a trick of the brain, amplified by fatigue, that made her hyper-aware of the things that went awry.

It was merely the idiom, “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

While linguists speculated that the phrase dated back to ancient Rome and that it referred to getting out of bed on the left side (sinister being the Latin word for left), Petra had always believed that it was a reference to waking up with bad thoughts or to a bad turn of events—a direction of the mind and environment more than the person’s actual body placement. After all, who would get out of bed on the left if they knew that bad would follow them around all day? “Yeah, that didn’t make any sense at all,” she murmured under her breath as she hiked her way toward the gate.

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