Black Box Cassette 9: SEA to TIL, TIL to ABQ

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## Black Box Cassette 9: SEA to TIL, TIL to ABQ

### Air Date

30/05/20

> *"Does that make sense? That two people can love each other so much, but want such different things, that they can't actually love each other at all?"*
>
>

This cassette is a recording of the Pilot's flight from Seattle to Little Rock, Little Rock to Albuquerque, done by the automatic black box recording system.

The Pilot starts by expressing his relief that he has found his passenger again and recounting the unsavoury presence of the cigarette-smoker and his dog the last time he took a passenger. He couldn't remember his face, suggesting the sunglasses as the reason. When they landed, he hopped into a black Sudan and drove away without a word, not even putting out his cigarette, which seemed to burn continuously but stay half-finished.

The Pilot isn't sure if it was the same man that had been following Hester, who he expresses his excitement at Paloma having found. They are on their way now to Albuquerque, where she is apparently hiding out. He remarks that the desert is a good place to be an outlaw, fugutive, or castoff. He questions briefly what Paloma was doing in Seattle, as she wasn't usually to be found in the Northwest, but disregards it as a nosy question. The Pilot tells Paloma that before Albuquerque, they need to stop in Little Rock because he is trying to find his wife Coleen in a sect of the Cradle in the Ouachita Mountains. He mentions that he can still smell cigarette smoke in the cockpit.

When they resumed their journey a day or two later, the Pilot told Paloma about his trip to the mountains, where he found the Cradle. He took his car up a long, winding dirt road and when the track was blocked by a log barricade, he continued along it on foot. After reaching a clearing, two Cradlers came up behind him armed with knives and a rifle, and when he told them Karen Roberts sent him and he was looking for his family, they agreed to blindfold him and lead him to the commune. On the walk, he broke two toes and got his face cut badly by a branch. One of the guards, a one-eyed woman named Helen, unblindfolded him and escorted him to a barn where Coleen was knitting. She didn't appear to feel strongly about his sudden appearance at the commune and felt no strong attachment to him after their separation. She told him where to find Samantha, his daughter, and he was escorted there.

Sam was a tall nine-year-old redhead with a ponytail in a green shirt who has her mother's hair, voice, height, walk, and the Pilot's chin. He watched her playing with the other children by the river, poking a long stick into the bank, for half an hour, but did not catch her attention, judging it to be unfair on her when he knew he couldn't stay in the Cradle. Eventually, he thanked Helen and she took him back to the clearing blindfolded, where he descended the mountain again. He found a magnetic tracker under the wheel casing of his car and smelled cigarette smoke outside his hotel room that night, and hoped he hadn't compromised the Cradle. He says again to Paloma that he's glad to have found her and glad that they're on their way to Hester.

## Additional info

* The airport code for Little Rock is actually "LIT" not "TIL". This is reflected in the next episode's title.