Mirage(42)

Everyone but me is huddled in a pack near the open jump door. They need to go out in a group to be able to track to one another in the air and get into formation. Spatters of rain have made the doorway slippery with wetness. Yvon continues in slow flight, and Dom calls out a count. Our eyes meet, and I see the barest hint of a smile.

The plane does a sudden drop in the increasing wind from the storm. I was slowly moving toward the doorway, but that drop stops me. Lightning cracks outside the window. In its spectral glow, her face looks in on me.

“Go!” Dom yells to the team over the wind.

Bodies fly out the door, and my own body is pulsing with admiration and fear. With every beat of my heart, I hear her voice.

Death whispers, Go, go, go.

She’s challenging me.

I take another step, but as the last of the team hurls itself out of the opening, the plane lurches again. Dom is supposed to jump with them, but he’s still in the plane and staring at me with an anxious look on his face. I hear an incessant buzzing sound from the front of the aircraft as the tail dips lower. “Goddamn it!” Yvon yells. “Stall warning! Get out! Get out!”

Terror pushes me flat against the wall. Opposite me, rain coats the windows with rivulets, and another crack of lightning illuminates the sky outside the plane. In that eerie light, her face stares at me.

“Get out!” Yvon yells again.

I shake my head. I’ll stay in the plane. No way am I jumping into the rain and lightning, right into her arms.

Strong hands vise my biceps, and before I can protest, before I know what’s happened, Dom forcibly throws me out of the airplane into the rain.





Twenty-Two


MY BODY TRIES to curl in on itself. I remember being in freefall once and wondering if I wasn’t real. If I could be someone else’s dream. I want someone to wake up now, to make this nightmare end, but a lucid alarm within me trills and forces me to open my eyes. Needles of rain hit my lips and chin. I am falling so fast, it’s as though it’s raining up into my face. My right arm jerks, and I realize Dom has tracked to me and has hold of one of the grips on my jumpsuit. We are plummeting together toward the ground. He holds his free hand out and gives me a hand signal. His fingers are spread and his palm is in a flat position.

I don’t understand. Panic is a blindfold. Panic is mind bleach. Panic has frozen me.

But then my mind snaps back into what I know.

I uncurl my arms and legs and flatten my body, but I’m buffeting and rocking as if I’m on my stomach on a waterbed. Nothing is going as planned. I’m stiff with terror and, more than that, disbelief that I’m not in Death’s hands but in Dom’s.

This is all her doing. She’s after me. Maybe it wasn’t my own mind convincing me to jump but her evil whisperings. I glance at Dom’s intense face. Because of me she could get a two-for-one deal.

I need him to let go of me. I can’t be responsible for his death.

When I attempt to pull my arm free of his grasp, he grits his jaw into a rigid mask and grabs for my upper leg. His helmet crashes into my ribs. The world tilts and rotates violently. I feel like I’m rising up as Dom plummets below me. My upper body jerks upright, pulling my spine straight, knocking a grunt out of me. My legs sweep underneath me, swinging forward past my chest before gravity pulls them toward the ground.

Dom has pulled my chute.

The parachute snaps in the wind over my head. My goggles fog up, blinding me to the wet desert below. I can’t see him. The thought comes to me that I’ve never been so alone. But that’s not true. I’ve been the kind of alone that you think you’ll never come back from.

Yet I came back.

Turbulence throws me into a sudden drop and startles me into action. I have only one job right now, and that’s to land without killing myself. I reach up the risers and clasp the toggles, freeing them, and try to maneuver toward the large patch of green in the desert that must be the golf course the demo team jumped for. Soon I realize there’s no way I’m going to reach it. All I can do is stay stable and calm despite my racing heart, dry throat, and shaking limbs.

Sagebrush and cacti are splashed haphazardly all over the flat canvas of desert. This isn’t like landing at the DZ, where there’s an enormous circle wiped clean. It’s like landing in a minefield. Rain coats my goggles, making it difficult to see, and I’m too scared to let go of the toggles to wipe them. It wouldn’t matter anyway; they’d just be coated with water again within seconds.

The closer I get to the ground, the faster my descent feels, like the earth is pushing up to meet me hard and fast. The wind kicks me around, and I’m too afraid to turn or do anything but keep myself straight as possible as I drop. Brush catches my legs right before impact, and I hit face-down, rolling over and over. It’s like rolling on boulders of cut glass. My legs sting, my cheeks burn, and I’ve got scrapes under my chin.

Mercifully, I roll to a stop. I’m wound like a burrito in my parachute. Rain pelts down on it so that the nylon fabric clings to my face. I will be smothered. Fighting and clawing at the chute, I wiggle one hand free and unclasp the helmet, rip the goggles off my face, and gasp for air against the material. I’m so bound in the chute and lines that I’m hogtied on the desert floor.

There’s laughter in my head. Laughter. I want to cry through her amusement.

Crazy is starting to look more and more plausible.