Page 74 of A Wolf After My Own Heart
7. National Business Aviation Association.
8. Only one of those is made up. The others were actually served in restaurants. That’s the world we’re living in.
Chapter 27
It was the hot smell of plane fuel and the cold blast of wind. It was the dizzying euphoria of free fall and the surge of adrenaline that made her mouth taste like she’d been sucking on a roll of pennies. It was getting out of your seat so you could jump out of a plane while ignoring your brain’s panicked demands that you sit your ass back down. It was standing by an open plane door and intellectually knowing the static line was in place to help while your gut was positive it was a hindrance.
It was putting your trust in canvas and rope and nylon. It was feeling the greedy earth use terminal velocity to snatch you back, back, all the way down.
And then the shock in your knees when gravity reminds you: You belong to the earth again. It’s letting the big muscle groups soak up and spread out the impact, the way Kevlar soaked up bullets: you lived, but it still hurt. All that kinetic energy had to go somewhere.
She’d done her research. Over three million jumps every year, just in the US.
Millions of people hurtling toward Earth at terminal velocity. Every single year.
It was…too much. Too chaotic, too much free fall, too inherently unstable. That had struck her first thing during her research: “The deployment process is inherently chaotic.”
Nutshell.
So once was enough. Because she only had to jump once and she knew: you could go high and you could go far; you could jump three million times a year, but the earth always got you back, one way or the other.
Chapter 28
“No, Lila, I meant, what was the bet?”
“Oh. In that case, sorry about the flashback.”
“You’ve got an empty Subway bag in your purse.”
“That was an abrupt segue.” She picked up her purse, opened it, found the bag with her used napkins. She’d been in such a rush at the airport, she’d just stuffed it in her purse to be dealt with later. “Here you go. So no more jump stories?”
“If you’re brave enough—hurrrk!—to do it, I’m brave enough to listen.”
“Good to know.”
“Excuse me.”
“That’s a shame about your breakfast,” she said as he yarked into the bag. “Well, Macropi will fix you more bacon, I’m sure. I’ve also got some wet wipes in my purse, if you’re interested.”
“Thanks,” he said hollowly, which made the bag puff, which she swore to herself wouldn’t make her laugh (out loud). “You and the Boy Scouts.”
“Always prepared,” she agreed, then waited until he tied the bag off, and held his hand the rest of the way.
Chapter 29
“Well, there it is,” Lila observed. “This is definitely a field. Where a plane definitely crashed.”
Berne had landed on a gravel road that, from the air, looked miles long and deserted, and also walking distance to the crash. It was almost ridiculously convenient, but she wasn’t about to complain. She’d braced herself for gore, but the powers-that-be in charge of such things (IPA? A different agency? Local cops? Local Shifter cops?) had apparently scooped up all there remained of Sue and Sam Smalls and bore them away. Dr. Gulo had been right about that much, at least.
I’ll bet they were awake all the way down. And terrified and scared for Sally. Christ, what an end.
This time of year, the field was an acre of mud, and the wind brought the smell of dirt and scorched metal right to them. Ifshehad no trouble smelling it, the men must have found it almost unbearable. The debris was spread out and the crime scene tape (if itwasa crime) was doing a shit job of keeping the small stuff in place. But unless Shifters had perfected the science of creating protective domes over crime scenes, there was nothing to be done about it.
Despite the damage, it was instantly apparent that this was the graveyard for a small plane. Metal had been wrenched into impossible shapes, along with all sorts of other debris: blackened plastic, wiring, mangled seats, and a thousand shattered pieces of equipment she didn’t recognize. The nose of the plane looked like a giant had seized it and squeezed, and one of the wings had cracked into thirds; the other was almost completely untouched.
She was worried they hadn’t found all of Sue Smalls or missed pieces of Sam Smalls, but she couldn’t see or smell anything like a corpse, which was an immense relief.
“All right, this is sad and awful. But you didn’t need me along to tell you that. So why—”
