The NightinGale, part 2

Darren was still busy with lining up her patients. He was talking quietly, his head tilted to one side. She couldn't hear him. The chopper banked slightly as it changed direction and Emmie saw a glimpse of trees. The window was now facing in such a way that the tint was slightly easier to peer through. Trees, a stream and finally, a road unfurled beneath them.
Emmie focused on the road and was delighted when she saw a car traveling on it. Her sense of direction was skewed and she couldn’t tell if the vehicle was traveling to or from the tower. The car was dark, long and resembled the black cars that had taken Emmie on her few ground trips from the Tower. She didn’t know what kind of car it was, her knowledge didn’t include anything about ground vehicles except basic working knowledge.
Darren noticed her rapt attention at the window and glimpsed out. He sighed and reached over head to toggle his mic to the pilot. He murmured too low for Emmie to hear the words. Sadly and surely, the chopped sheared in a different direction and the tint on the window fully obscured her view. The window now only showed her own face, peering eagerly back at herself.
Darren cleared his throat and Emmie looked over at him. He gave her a small half smile. She sat back in the seat, the window no longer a view of the outside world. Her hands drifted slightly along the edges of the seat. Before she had entered the chopper, she had noted that it was one of the small sleek ones. The ones that seemed to skip through the air, fast and efficient. The last time she had ridden in it, she had used her finger nail to scrape a line on the hard plastic of the side of the seat. The other chopper type, larger, slower and bulky, had similar seating arrangements. She had managed to scratch lines in two different versions of that chopper. So she knew that there were at least two of those aircraft at the Tower.
Her fingers grazed over the edge of the seat where she made her usual scratches. This seat was clean, the plastic smooth along the edge. She took her thumb nail and made two straight parallel lines on the seat edge. Her fingers rubbed over them, making sure of their location.
Emmie wasn’t sure why she started marking the seats. Perhaps it was idle curiosity , perhaps as she matured, she instinctively wanted to know more. The Tower was hardly forthcoming and she had a blooming thirst for information that a stack of medical journals couldn’t quench. She had tried to make a note of the various pilots, but couldn’t tell the difference between them. She thought there were two, but they were non-descript and covered by their helmets, their visors obscuring their eyes.