Airplane- - Apertem Os Cintos O Piloto Sumiu -n... -

But turbulence doesn’t leave a captain’s wristwatch on the floor of a locked lavatory, still ticking. Turbulence doesn’t fold a uniform jacket neatly over the toilet lid, as if the body inside it simply evaporated.

Because whatever took him is still on this plane. And it’s learning how to fly.

Nobody.

The autopilot is still on. The heading shows we’re flying in a perfect 180-mile loop over dense jungle. I’ve checked every door, every closet, every crawlspace in this fuselage. There are 48 passengers, all calm because they don’t know yet. All I told them was to keep their belts fastened due to “mild turbulence.” Airplane- - Apertem os Cintos O Piloto Sumiu -N...

Co-pilot Araújo is strapped into his seat, but his hands are shaking too hard to work the radio. He keeps muttering the same phrase under his breath: “Apertem os cintos. O piloto sumiu.”

I looked out the left window. The stars are gone. All of them. Just a flat, velvet dark, like the sky has been painted over.

If you receive this log, do not look for us. Do not follow the coordinates. And for the love of God, do not unfasten your seatbelt. But turbulence doesn’t leave a captain’s wristwatch on

Araújo just pointed at the primary flight display.

But there is no pilot to verify. Only an empty lavatory, a ticking watch, and a message that keeps reappearing on every screen in the cockpit:

Aircraft: Embraer Legacy 600 Position: Unknown, over the Amazon Basin And it’s learning how to fly

The first thing I noticed was the silence. Not the peaceful hum of cruising altitude, but the wrong silence. The kind where the white noise stops, and your ears don’t pop—they just wait .

Captain Mendes had gone to the lavatory twelve minutes ago. He never came back.

I think the “N” stands for Ninguém .

I asked Araújo what the “-N...” at the end of the subject line means. He looked at me like I’d spoken a dead language. Then he typed it into the navigation computer.

Fasten your seatbelts. The pilot has disappeared.