And she stopped. The silver helicopter sat at the far end, catching the overhead fluorescence in its fuselage panels, and for several seconds Serafina did not move at all. When she finally stepped forward, she moved slowly, the way a person moves when they are not certain the thing in front of them is real. She reached the fuselage and placed two fingers against a crescent-shaped mark in the metal near the hatch locking mechanism, a shallow gouge about 3 in long, curved at one end, pressed into the aluminum with just enough force to catch paint. When she was 7 years old, she had ridden her bicycle inside her father's private hangar and caught the handlebar end against the fuselage of his personal aircraft, and Augustus Wickliffe had crouched down beside the scratch and told her he was not going to have it repainted because it meant the helicopter belonged to their family and not just to the company.
That mark had been on the aircraft the last time she saw it. And the aircraft had then been recorded as having burned to nothing in the Nevada desert on the night of November 4th, 17 years prior. She stepped up through the open hatch and stood in the cockpit for a long time. The stitching on the pilot seat was a pattern her father had specified. A diagonal cross stitch in burgundy on dark gray leather that no standard manufacturer had offered in that configuration.
The compass above the instrument panel was a mechanical unit from a maker that had stopped production before her father died. Installed at his specific request because he did not trust electronic navigation for low-altitude desert work. And behind the co-pilot instrument array, written in permanent marker on the bare aluminum skin of the forward bulkhead, were nine words in her father's handwriting that she recognized the way she would have recognized his voice. The machine flies honest when the builder was honest. She turned and told Clay that someone had constructed an extremely convincing replica.
Clay replied, in the same even tone she had used with him, that he would welcome the opportunity to have an independent forensic examiner review the airframe material, dating the paint layers, and the fastener corrosion profile. And that he would strongly suggest the examiner not be anyone affiliated with Wickliffe Aerospace or any company in its supply chain. He reached down and removed a maintenance access panel from the lower fuselage, exposing the structural identification stamps in the interior framing, and pointed to a number running in a sequence corresponding to the aircraft designation she had grown up hearing her father use. The paint above it was 2 years newer than the paint below it, and the original stamp beneath had not been ground out, only covered. She told him about the night her father died in a way that suggested she had not told the story to anyone in a long time.