The Night Shift at Terminal Three

Rani had worked the midnight counter at Terminal Three for six years and could tell, before a passenger reached her, which ones had already missed their flight and which ones only thought they had. The first kind walked slowly. The second kind ran, and she had learned to lift one hand, palm out, the way her mother used to stop traffic in Ciputat, so they would slow down and hear her say: you have time.

Tonight the man in the grey jacket was neither. He stood at the far end of the queue with a boarding pass folded twice, and he did not look at the screens. He looked at the floor tiles, counting them, she thought, the way she counted the seconds between flights when the hall went quiet.

When he reached her he put the boarding pass on the counter and said, in a voice that had clearly been rehearsed on the taxi ride over, that he needed to change the name on the ticket. Not his name. The other one.

"Whose?" she asked, though she already knew the answer would be a story, and that the story would take longer than the four minutes she had before the Surabaya flight closed.