Breaking Sky(76)

“So you gave me Kale.”

“I gave you a life here. Don’t blow it.” Tourn stalked off, and Chase was so disoriented that she couldn’t make it through her preflight routine.

“It’s cool. I took care of checks,” Pippin said, coming around the right wing. “Hey. You don’t look so great.”

“I’ll be fine,” she lied. She climbed the roll-away stairs, ducked into the cockpit, and fastened her harness.

“What did he say to you?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“But you survived, Chase,” her RIO said through the link in their helmets. “Now we have to fly. Harness up those feelings and whatnot.”

Chase couldn’t stop herself from watching Tourn walk through the hangar to rejoin the government board. The other higher-ups didn’t talk to him. Didn’t look at him. It had been that way at his own base, everyone giving her father a wide berth. “They hate him.”

“What?”

“They look at him and they see dead Filipinos. They see all those media images of the radiation poisoning.” She felt sick. “It doesn’t matter that he was ordered to do it.”

“So?”

Things began to line up. Tourn lived as an outcast, seldom leaving his base. Never answering the criticisms on the bombing of the Philippines, which the media dug up whenever ratings were low. It was a wonder he even had that one-night stand eighteen years ago. And when he had finally met the product of that encounter, he’d been so obviously unhappy with her.

“Did he reject me because I’m too much like him?”


Pippin was quiet. She felt a change in his breathing through the amplified sound in their helmets. “Chase. Listen to me. You’re both pilots. That’s where the similarity ends.”

“I always thought I couldn’t cut it, but maybe he didn’t want a clone.” Chase had shown up at his base, ready to enlist. A ridiculous twelve-year-old who bragged she could do fifty push-ups. The way he’d looked at her…so startled. Taken aback even.

“Think of it this way, Chase. If there’s any kind of decent in that man, he would have kept you far away from him. Protected you from his reputation.”

“You mean like change my last name to Harcourt instead of Tourn?”

“Your last name was Tourn? Chase Tourn? That sounds like a comic book hero.”

“He paid Janice to change it—a week after he sent me back. My stitches were still bleeding,” she said.

“Your stitches? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chase.” Pippin’s voice was all nerves. “We shouldn’t fly right now. You’re really upset.”

“We have to.” She fired the engines and felt the roar envelop her. Phoenix and Pegasus were already on the runway. “Can we check in with Arrow…and Sylph?” she added, hoping to camouflage the fact that she just wanted to hear Tristan’s voice.

“There’s no shortwave radio connection allowed,” Pippin said. “We’re on our own up there. Archmen covered that in the rundown, remember?”

She directed Dragon out of the hangar and watched Phoenix screech into the sky. Tristan held his hand up. A cocky wave that brought her back to her wings ablaze and the blue silver of Dragon. “I can do this,” she told herself. “I have to.” She took a deep breath. Then another. “Ready, Pippin baby?”

“Always, Nyxy muffin.” Pippin’s tone didn’t have its usual zip.

Perhaps he knew better.





34


    REDLINE


   Breakneck Speed


Chase pulled it together enough to win the speed test by the length of the Green, hitting Mach 5. Tristan held on to Mach 4, while Sylph made herself comfortable at three.

Chase’s body thrummed with adrenaline by the time she reached the coordinates for the maneuverability test. Hundreds of old fighter jets hung in the air, creating a cloud of bogeys that reminded her of the swarm of drones she’d seen a few months back.

“Look at that, Pip.”

“They’re set up like a maze. You’ve got to maneuver through them like an obstacle course.”

A sour taste filled her mouth. Obstacle courses weren’t her thing. And if she made a false move, she’d smash into a jet with a poor pilot inside like a sitting duck. She settled herself between Phoenix and Pegasus on an imaginary line and waited for the go-ahead while her hands grasped the throttle and stick uneasily.

When the signal came, she took off with her heartbeats striking noticeably in her chest. Sylph sprung ahead, showing off her impressive maneuverability. She even looked like she was going to win for half of it, but Tristan picked up a rhythm and ended up beating her by a Streaker wing.

Pippin and Chase had a good view of Sylph’s swearing, slamming anger in her cockpit a few hundred yards away. “She’s going to make Riot’s ears bleed,” Pippin said.

Chase eyed Phoenix off and on, feeling flashes of the previous night’s engagements. She held on to the image of him kissing her, making her laugh. And then the conversation that stretched on and on until they were punchy with exhaustion. The memory almost managed to push away her stinging thoughts about Tourn.

And her thumping anxiety over the final test.