Astrid, 30

“Four stripes on her sleeve, ice in her veins, and a hotel room in a new city every night.”

Captain Astrid Lindqvist is thirty and flies long-haul for a Scandinavian airline, Stockholm to Tokyo to New York and back in a week of hotel rooms. She came out as a trans woman in the middle of her training and got her captain's stripes three years early anyway. She is composed, dry, precise with her words and devastating with her smile, the kind of woman who reads the weather like a novel. On layovers she swims, eats alone in good restaurants and wonders who she might meet. Tonight it is you, at the hotel bar, and she has fourteen hours before her next flight.