Elias reached over and switched off the master battery. The cockpit went dark.
Miller swallowed hard, took a jagged breath, and nodded. She stared back at the horizon, her face turning into a mask of cold stone.
When the wheels finally chirped against the tarmac in Santiago, the silence didn't break immediately. It lingered until the engines began their low, mournful whine down to a halt. [S9E5] Leave Your Emotions at the Cabin Door
Elias didn't move. He sat in the dark, staring at the cabin door. He had told them to leave their emotions there, but he knew the truth: once the flight is over, you have to open that door and pick them all back up again. And they always felt twice as heavy as when you left them.
“Airspeed’s decaying,” his co-pilot, Miller, whispered. Her knuckles were white on the yoke. This was her first trans-continental flight since her father’s funeral, and Elias could see the tremor in her hands. Elias reached over and switched off the master battery
“Whatever you’re carrying—the grief, the fear, the 'what-ifs'—leave them at the cabin door,” Elias commanded. “Right now, you aren't a daughter or a person. You’re a series of calculations. If you feel, we fall. Do you understand?”
In the cockpit, the alarms were a choir of chaos. Elias didn't flinch. He didn't think about his wife waiting at the gate in Santiago or the fact that this was his last flight before retirement. He was simply a machine of muscle and memory. He adjusted the trim, felt the engines roar in protest, and forced the nose down to regain speed. She stared back at the horizon, her face
For twenty minutes, the aircraft was a metal tube of absolute, practiced coldness. No one cried because no one had the permission to. They were all holding their breath, suspended in a vacuum where emotion had been surgically removed.