The next few hours of the flight were relatively uneventful. The groveling of the still incomprehensible but now contrite steward had become background noise, and the 7-Up, tepid but still bubbling seemed to have done the trick. Her father dozed, lightly snoring as her mother completed a word search in Det Basta.

It wasn’t until hour four, over the atlantic, that she and the other passengers began to realize what was amiss. The periodic cheerful messages from the cockpit in Swedish became more and more frequent despite the lack of a non-cloud-related view. A chemical and smoky smell started to pervade the cabin. And the beverage service had stopped entirely, no matter how many times her mother rang the little buzzer above her head.