The Climb Away

After a DHL cargo plane collides with an unknown object leaving Leipzig and lands in Hanover, four people hold themselves to plain facts while the night presses on their work, their homes, and each other.

By Nora Vale, a fictional Bunko byline · Intimate contemporary social fiction with aviation-suspense elements · 15 min read · Published 2026-08-05

Mara Linden was in the cockpit of a DHL cargo plane climbing away from Leipzig airport in the early hours of 2026-08-05 when the aircraft collided with an unknown object, and the night narrowed to instruments, procedure, and Jonas Rehm beside her. What had been a climb became a crisis, and what had been a route became the urgent decision to make an emergency landing in Hanover.

Mara did not have room yet for fear in its full size. Fear came as details: the pressure of her headset, the dry roof of her mouth, the bright authority of the panel before her. She kept her hands where training had taught them to be. She kept her voice low because a raised voice would not make the aircraft more obedient.

Jonas worked beside her with a restraint that looked almost ordinary, except for the way his jaw held still between words. He was a person who usually filled small spaces with some harmless complaint about coffee, paperwork, or the dull ache of night work. Now he gave only what was needed.

"Confirmed," Jonas said, his hand moving with care. "Unknown object. We continue."

Mara heard the word unknown and did not enlarge it. There would be time later for other people to want shape, cause, explanation. In the cockpit, the word was a boundary. She stayed inside it.

"Hanover," Mara said.

Jonas looked once toward her, not for permission but for the human fact of another face. "Hanover," he said.

After that, the work took them. The aircraft had collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport. The aircraft would make an emergency landing in Hanover following the collision. Between those two facts lay minutes that Mara would later remember in pieces too clean to trust: her own voice, Jonas reading, the stubbornness of breath, the way a familiar procedure became intimate when the world outside it had stopped being familiar.

In Leipzig, Elise Hartmann was awake before the phone rang. The washing machine had finished its cycle and clicked into silence with the little satisfied sound she disliked. She lay in bed listening to the apartment settle around Mara's absence: pipes, the refrigerator motor, a loose window latch that only complained in certain wind.

Mara's side of the bed was smooth except for the dent Elise had made by resting her hand there after midnight. Elise had meant to sleep. Instead she had folded laundry at the kitchen table until the stacks looked severe and accusatory. Mara's black socks in one pile, Elise's towels in another, two pillowcases folded so sharply they seemed to belong to a stricter household.

When the phone rang, Elise sat up too quickly and knocked her knee against the low drawer of the bedside table. The pain was immediate and useful. It gave her something to do with her body while she reached for the phone.

The voice was official and careful. A DHL cargo plane had collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport. Following the collision, it had made, or was making, an emergency landing in Hanover. More information would come through proper channels.

Elise stood without remembering to stand. The floor was cold under her bare feet.

"Is Mara Linden able to speak?" Elise asked.

The voice said not yet.

"Is Jonas Rehm with her?" Elise asked, because Jonas was a person, and a person beside Mara was better than the faceless idea of crew.

The voice answered carefully again, giving no more than could be given.

Elise did not ask what the object was. Unknown meant unknown. She had lived long enough with Mara to know that guessing was not the same as knowing, and long enough with herself to know she would want to guess anyway if someone gave her a crack to push through.

"Thank you," Elise said, because she had been raised to thank people even when the thing handed to her was terror in a plain wrapper.

She went to the kitchen after the call ended. The lamp over the table made the mugs look theatrical. One was hers, tea-stained at the rim. One was Mara's, clean and waiting because Elise had left it out the way she did on flight nights. Not superstition, she always insisted. A placeholder. A courtesy to return.

Beside the mugs lay a small packet of black buttons. One had come loose from Mara's coat two days earlier, and Elise had promised to fix it. Mara had said there was no hurry. Elise had heard, as she often did, the unspoken addition: because I am always leaving anyway.

At Hanover, Tomasz Keller was in ground operations when the emergency landing became the center of the night. He had been halfway through coffee that tasted burnt and metallic, the kind that remained bad no matter how much milk was added. The operations room smelled of damp jackets, printer heat, and tired people trying not to become impatient with one another.

When the call spread through the room, no one became dramatic. That was what Tomasz noticed. Urgency did not always arrive with shouting. Sometimes it made people gentler with objects. A folder placed flat instead of tossed. A chair pushed in quietly. A pen held ready above paper.

He did what he was told to do. He checked what he was told to check. The known facts were spare enough to fit in a single breath and heavy enough to change every face around him: a DHL cargo plane had collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport; following the collision, it was making an emergency landing in Hanover.

Tomasz did not speculate aloud. He had learned in ground operations that speculation could move faster than help and leave more clutter behind. Still, his mind tried to make pictures. He stopped it each time. Unknown was not an invitation. It was a locked drawer.

When the aircraft was down in Hanover, relief did not enter the room like celebration. It came in private collapses. One person leaned both hands on a desk. Another closed their eyes for a second too long. Tomasz looked down and found a red mark across his finger where he had gripped his pen.

Later, he saw Mara Linden and Jonas Rehm from a distance. They were upright. They were speaking. They were not, Tomasz thought, to be mistaken for fine. Mara's hair was pulled back, but strands had loosened at her temple. Jonas walked near her with the careful posture of someone carrying a bowl filled to the lip.

A question was asked by someone whose job was to ask. Mara answered evenly.

"The DHL cargo plane collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport," Mara said. "We made an emergency landing in Hanover following the collision."

She did not improve the sentence. She did not make it more interesting. Tomasz respected her for that with a force that surprised him.

In the room where they were told to wait, Mara sat on a vinyl chair with a split in one corner. Someone had placed bottled water on a low table. The cap on hers would not turn at first, and this small refusal came near to undoing what the larger night had not.

Jonas noticed. He took the bottle, opened it, and handed it back without ceremony.

"Thank you," Mara said.

"For a bottle?" Jonas said.

"For not making me ask."

He nodded and sat one chair closer than he had before. Not touching. Close enough that the gap between them acknowledged the cockpit without recreating it.

Mara drank. The water tasted of plastic and cold storage. Her throat hurt in a way she had not noticed until it had to swallow.

"People will ask," Jonas said. He was looking at the floor, where a strip of tape had collected lint along one edge.

"Yes," Mara said.

"If I say I was afraid, it sounds small. If I say anything else, it sounds like decoration."

Mara held the bottle between both hands. "Say we were afraid and we did our jobs."

Jonas gave a short, dry laugh. "That sounds like something written on a poster."

"Then say it badly."

"Were you afraid?" Jonas asked.

Mara looked at him then. His face was gray with fatigue, but his eyes were steady enough to deserve a true answer.

"Yes," Mara said.

He seemed relieved and embarrassed by the relief.

Mara took out her phone. Elise's name waited on the screen with its ordinary tenderness. Lise. Four letters, used on grocery lists and in irritated messages about keys, now too intimate to touch.

She called before she could rehearse.

Elise answered at once. "Mara?"

"It's me," Mara said. She closed her eyes. "I'm in Hanover. Jonas is here. We landed."

Elise did not speak immediately. Mara heard the kitchen clock in Leipzig, the one Elise claimed did not tick too loudly even though both of them knew it did.

"Are you hurt?" Elise asked.

"I don't think so," Mara said. "I can't say more yet."

"That is enough for this minute," Elise said.

It was such an Elise sentence, practical and merciful without decoration, that Mara had to press two fingers against her forehead.

"The plane collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport," Mara said. "We made an emergency landing in Hanover following the collision. That's what I know."

"I won't ask you to guess," Elise said.

Mara had expected questions sharpened by fear. Elise giving her restraint instead felt like being handed a chair after standing too long.

"Are you alone?" Mara asked.

"In the kitchen," Elise said. "Your mug is on the table."

"Good."

"It isn't doing anything useful."

"Neither am I, at this exact second."

Elise made a small sound. Not quite laughter, but near enough that Jonas glanced over and then politely away.

"Jonas is with you?" Elise asked.

"Yes," Mara said.

"Tell him Lise says to drink water."

Mara looked at Jonas. "Elise says to drink water."

Jonas reached for his untouched bottle and raised it slightly. "Tell Lise I am obedient in all medical matters."

"He says he's obedient," Mara said.

"That seems unlikely," Elise said, and this time Mara did laugh, though softly.

The call could not last. There were procedures, questions, more waiting in rooms where the lights were too hard and the chairs too low. Mara told Elise she would call again when she could. Elise said she would be there, and neither of them pointed out the strangeness of there meaning Leipzig for one of them and Hanover for the other.

After Mara hung up, Jonas drank half his bottle at once.

"Satisfied?" Jonas asked.

"Lise will be," Mara said.

At the kitchen table in Leipzig, Elise put the phone down and stood with both hands braced on the wood. The table needed wiping. A crescent of tea had dried near the sugar jar. She wiped it, rinsed her mug, then rinsed Mara's though it was already clean. She dried Mara's mug and set it back in the same place.

Then she took up the coat.

The missing button had come from the front, not an essential one, Mara had said. Elise threaded the needle with black thread that did not perfectly match. Under the lamp, the difference was obvious. Mara would notice. Mara noticed crooked seams, loose screws, the drawer that stuck if pulled from the left. Mara noticed what could interrupt movement. Elise noticed what stayed behind.

She sewed the button on anyway. The thread knotted twice. She picked it loose once and left it the second time. Perfection belonged to afternoons with music on and errands completed. This was not that.

At Hanover, Tomasz passed the waiting room carrying papers he did not need to carry that minute. He was not proud of the excuse. Curiosity had mixed with concern until he could not separate them. Through the open door he saw Mara with her phone in her hand and Jonas leaning forward, elbows on knees, water bottle dangling between his fingers.

Tomasz kept walking. Witnessing had limits. He knew that, even if he did not always obey it.

On his break, he stood outside near a service door where the air smelled damp and faintly metallic. Hanover was not quiet. Airports never were, even when they seemed emptied. A vehicle reversed somewhere out of sight. A door closed. Farther off, machinery continued its indifferent work.

Jonas came out a few minutes later. He had no jacket, though the air was cool enough to make him fold his arms.

"You were in operations," Jonas said.

"Tomasz Keller," Tomasz said. "Ground operations."

"Jonas Rehm," Jonas said, though Tomasz knew. "I needed air."

"There is some," Tomasz said, and immediately regretted the dullness of it.

Jonas's mouth moved toward a smile. "So far."

They stood side by side without pretending to know each other. Tomasz liked that about some working nights: people did not demand quick intimacy. They could share a wall, a bad coffee, a fact.

"People will want more," Jonas said.

"More air?" Tomasz asked.

"More story."

Tomasz looked toward the lights. "Maybe there isn't more yet."

"There will be more talk before there is more knowing."

"Usually," Tomasz said.

Jonas rubbed his hands over his face, then dropped them. "I keep thinking if I say unknown, they'll hear withheld."

"Say unknown anyway," Tomasz said.

Jonas glanced at him. "You make it sound simple."

"No," Tomasz said. "Only short."

That earned a real, brief smile. It disappeared quickly, but not as if it had been a mistake.

Inside, Mara was called again. She answered questions with what she knew and did not pad the empty places. Each repetition made the facts feel both stronger and thinner. A DHL cargo plane had collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport. The DHL cargo plane had made an emergency landing in Hanover following the collision.

The sentences were plain. The night was not.

When there was another pause, Mara found a vending machine at the end of a corridor and stood before it as if hunger required evidence. Biscuits, nuts, chocolate, all arranged behind scratched glass. Her stomach felt hollow and resistant.

Tomasz came down the corridor with an empty folder under one arm. He saw her studying the machine.

"The biscuits are bad," Tomasz said. "The nuts are also bad, but less sweet."

Mara turned, and for a second her face went official. Then she placed him. "Tomasz Keller. Ground operations."

"Yes," Tomasz said. "I have strong views about this machine."

"Mara Linden," she said, because naming herself seemed like courtesy, though he clearly knew who she was.

"I know," Tomasz said, then winced. "Sorry."

Mara looked back at the rows. "If I buy something, I admit I need something."

"That can be delayed," Tomasz said. "Not forever."

She considered this. "The nuts, then."

The machine took her money and rotated its coil. The packet shifted, leaned, and stopped behind the glass without falling.

Mara stared at it. Her face did not change much, but Tomasz saw the wetness gather in her eyes.

"No," Mara said quietly. "Not this too."

Tomasz stepped forward and struck the side of the machine with the heel of his hand. Not hard enough to damage it. Hard enough to convince it. The packet dropped.

Mara bent to retrieve it. When she straightened, she held the nuts as if they were official property.

"Thank you," Mara said.

"I do not usually negotiate with vending machines," Tomasz said.

"For the record, I didn't see anything," Mara said.

Jonas appeared at the far end of the corridor, jacket over one arm. "They're ready again," Jonas said to Mara. Then he noticed the packet. "Are those the terrible nuts?"

"Apparently," Mara said.

Jonas looked at Tomasz. "Did you warn her?"

"Fully," Tomasz said.

"Then it's on her," Jonas said.

Mara opened the packet and ate one nut. Her expression was controlled and damning.

"Less sweet," Mara said.

"That was the promise," Tomasz said.

Jonas took two when she offered the packet. He chewed, grimaced, and nodded as if a point had been proven. "Some things are exactly as described."

The three of them stood there in the corridor, sharing bad food and a thin warmth that asked nothing dramatic of them. It lasted less than a minute. Then Jonas and Mara went where they were called, and Tomasz returned to the operations room with his empty folder and the feeling that he had witnessed something private without trespassing too badly.

In Leipzig, morning arrived without changing the courtyard. The bicycles were still locked crookedly to the rail. The opposite windows held the same pale reflections. Elise opened the curtains and disliked the ordinary light for not knowing what had happened.

She made coffee and burned toast. The smoke alarm remained silent, which irritated her more than if it had shrieked. She scraped the blackened edge into the sink and ate what was left standing up.

Mara's coat hung in the hallway. The repaired button was wrong if you knew where to look. Elise stood before it with her coffee cooling in one hand and decided not to redo it. Let it be wrong. Let something show the night had passed through the house too.

Her phone buzzed on the table.

Mara's message was brief: Still in Hanover. Still no more to say. Jonas here. Will call when I can.

Elise read it twice. On another morning the spareness might have angered her. On this morning it steadied her. Still was not nothing. Here was not nothing. Jonas here was not nothing.

She typed: Your coat button is ugly but secure.

Then she added: Come home when they let you.

She hesitated before the last line because the words could be heavy between them, arriving at inconvenient angles. Then she wrote them anyway: I love you.

In Hanover, Mara read the message while Jonas answered another careful question in another careful room. The line about the button reached her first. The last line reached her more slowly, as if it had traveled farther than the rest.

No one asked why her face changed. Jonas was speaking. Tomasz was elsewhere, finally drinking a full cup of lukewarm coffee. Elise was in Leipzig with two mugs on the table and a coat repaired imperfectly by hand.

The facts remained spare. A DHL cargo plane had collided with an unknown object while climbing away from Leipzig airport. Following the collision, the plane had made an emergency landing in Hanover. Around those facts, the four of them moved through calls, questions, coffee, bad nuts, wrong thread, and the discipline of not filling a blank simply because it frightened them.

Mara put the phone away before she was addressed again. When she answered, she kept to what was known. Her voice was tired now, but clear. Unknown remained unknown. Hanover remained where they had landed. Leipzig remained where Elise waited. The morning did not resolve the night. It only gave them light enough to continue in it.