The back of the cargo plane opened, revealing flat land patched with varying greens. Farmlands in a Midwestern state Chase didn’t recognize. She glanced back at Pippin, but he was looking at whatever wasn’t her—and had been since yesterday.
Chase was weary from a midnight exercise fest. When she’d gone back to her room after talking to Kale, Pippin wasn’t even there. And as soon as she’d tried to lie down, her thoughts about the trials left her sleepless. She went to the weight room and took a treadmill at its highest speed. Her heart rate shot up while her body lapsed into training mode. Muscle and motion. Strain and sweat.
She had pushed the track elevation to its steepest setting, feeling the burn in her calves. She had made herself think about Tourn’s impending arrival instead of Pippin. It was a surprisingly easier subject. What would Tourn be like after five years? Would he try to talk to her? No. She knew that answer in her pulse. Tourn was all business. Cold and mechanical. A cog in the military machine. Careless.
She’d crashed. Literally. Tripped and shot backward off the treadmill, hitting the floor with a thud. The proof was a livid bruise on her knee this morning. She’d wanted to show Pippin, but he’d shown up late with Romeo, chatting in French.
But he couldn’t escape her now. They were strapped into a metal pod Adrien had built during the night. It looked like a Streaker cockpit, except for the fact that there was no jet around it. Just two seats in a metal-skinned frame.
A rush-swirl of crazed air filled the C-130 Hercules. The plane probably hadn’t seen atmosphere in a few decades, and yet she was about to parachute out its backside. The gusts tugged at her breath, and although Chase enjoyed the push of high winds during flight, she preferred a canopy. A glass shield.
Not this time.
Adrien fussed over the straps on Chase’s harness. The engineer was red-eyed and huffing, more exhausted than Chase.
“This will work, right?” she yelled.
“You will survive,” Adrien yelled over the engines. “We have two backup parachutes. You’ll be jettisoned from the frame in your chairs and connected to each other under one double parachute. Questions?”
Chase shook her head. She’d watched the other two Streaker teams drop out of that door first; she was fairly certain it would work a third time.
“I got one. Why aren’t we using dummies for this?” Pippin yelled.
“To test you as much as the ejection mechanism. So you’ll know what to expect and how to react if you have to punch out. Especially in the likely chance of a water crash.”
“Likely?” Pippin cried.
“We’ve skydived before, Pip,” Chase said, holding on to the X of the harness over her chest. “We’ll be fine.” Her courage might not mean anything to Pippin right now, but she gave it to him anyway.
Adrien and a handful of airmen rolled the whole pod toward the doorway and stopped at the lip of the drop. She glanced back at Pippin and saw that he was also not enjoying the torturous sensation of being half out the door.
“Okay,” Chase yelled over the racket, looking into the wisp of clouds. The air combed at her skin and hair, and she fought to breathe. “Okay, do it!”
The pod clanked as it dropped from the Hercules. The height of the fall was overshadowed by the click of things happening in the metal frame. They fell and fell and fell until Chase began to hyperventilate. Pippin shouted the all clear, and she yanked the ejection lever. They shot out of the metal frame, their chairs connected in a churning plunge before their parachute snapped open, caught the wind, and jerked them to a slow drop.
“Pippin? You all right?”
His answer was a string of curses.
“I’d say it works.” She watched the metal frame pop its own parachute far below. She felt the seat beneath her and the parachute above, ballooning and wafting. The ground became clearer, more detailed. A tiny house stood at the corner of one lot and a dirt road ran down the center of another. Cows spotted the field.
She twisted around and found Pippin looking pale. “You all right?”
“Glorious.” His voice was punchy.
“We’ll touch down and get picked up. No problem.” She tucked her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment, remembering Kale’s insistence that she talk to her RIO. Now.
She dragged the words out, kicking and screaming. “I don’t know what to say to you, Pippin. You keep looking at me like there’s something I can do to fix this, but I have no clue. I’m really bad at this,” she admitted.
“You are,” he said.
Something dawned. “But so are you.”
Pippin didn’t answer. Chase was so used to the roar of a Streaker engine drowning out the world that the wind sounded like a seashell held to her ear. She heard its whisper and pull, the resonance of silence. “Do you have a thing for Tristan? Is that what this is all about?”
Pippin laughed in a sad way. “Of course you’d think I’m after your boy.”
“Hey, he’s not my boy. I’m…I’m just trying to get through the trials.”
“You’re suffering a personality change,” he said. “Wanting to talk. Planning with Sylph.”
“What about your personality?” She kept twisting to get a better look at him. “You’re acting like being gay is a bombshell that should blow the top off my skull. News flash, Pip. I know. I’ve known for years.”
Now he looked like he’d been hit by an explosive. His eyebrows were high, and his mouth was in a small O. “How do you know?”
“Intuition. Or something. And I never said anything because I could tell you didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I thought you’d talk when you were ready.” She waited, but he was still too quiet. “I don’t think anyone else knows. Keep it to yourself for as long as you want.”
“Of course everyone knows, Chase. People tend to pay attention to that sort of thing. And everyone can tell I have a crush on him. It makes me nauseated.”
“Well, I can’t tell. Who are you talking about?”
“You can’t tell because you live in the Nyx Show.” His tone was more hurt than mean, but she still stung from it.
“Hey. I’m trying here.”
“Don’t get upset. Remember, I’m not allowed to ask about your dad. Or your childhood. Or your mom. Or why you act like you have to prove you’re the most unique, untouchable pilot at the Star every single hop.” The breeze picked up and blew them off course a little.
“You respect my privacy and I respect yours.” It had seemed so natural up until this moment. “That’s what best friends do.”
“That’s what walled-off people do. I swear that’s the only real thing you and I have in common,” he said.
“So what are you afraid of? Be gay. This isn’t some turn-of-the-century homophobic military. Kale wouldn’t even care.” She tried to face him, but her harness was too tight—she was breathing too hard.
“I’m not afraid. Or ashamed,” Pippin said. “I’m just not ready, and I was fine, dealing with it in my own way, until he showed up with his flirting and touching me all the time.”
Now that couldn’t be Tristan. He hadn’t flirted with Pippin. She was certain of that—which left only one other new person at the Star. “You have a crush on Romeo? But he’s so…”
“Straight?”
“I was going to say boob-happy, but yeah.” She tried to add it all up. “Well. Shit. Pippin, that’s the real problem.”
“Indeed.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because I’m embarrassed. I’m smarter than this.” They were quiet long enough for Chase to listen to the wind again. When Pippin spoke again, he sounded soft and yet sure of himself. “He’s from Quebec City. He speaks French without an English accent even though it’s not his first language. Do you know how rare that is?” He continued in a rush. “He’s a thoughtless flirt, but he’s a decent guy underneath, I swear. We’ve been spending a lot of time together. I know you think he’s an idiot.”
They were slowing down, the parachute breaking their fall.
“He’s a lot sweeter in French.” Pippin blew out a breath that was so much more than a sigh. “And while we’re airing things out, Tristan Router is in love with you. Bravo Zulu. You’re going to need a bigger basket for all those stolen hearts.”
Chase held her hand over the edge. The ground never seemed so distant as when she reached for it. “How can you tell…that?”
“You guys are like magnets whenever you come into the same room. You fly like you’re making out, which is really awkward for Romeo and me. Thanks for that. And when I thought you were brain-dead on the hangar floor after the drone incident, Tristan held on to me. Like he was as scared as I was, which was pretty damn scared.”
All of a sudden, love wasn’t so pointless. It was sharp when she pictured Tristan and Pippin…when she imagined frightening them. Sharp. It made her want to withdraw to her protected, unemotional place, but now she had no clue how to get there.
She was stranded in caring. Christ.
A few seconds later, they landed hard in a muddy patch of field. Chase unstrapped, offering Pippin a hand up. “You’re my best friend,” she said. “With everything that’s about to happen, I need you on my team.”
He looked at her hand. “I’m always on your team. Whether I like it or not.”
“Let me help you.”
He took her hand to get up, but his words were beaten down. “Help me do what? Fall out of love with a straight boy? How does one do that exactly?”
“According to you, moving on from people is my forte.”
They picked their way through the mud before Pippin spoke. “True. But, Chase, you don’t even care about them in the first place.” His words burned while his shoulder bumped hers in a forced friendly way.
She wanted to point out that he was wrong. She cared. She cared about everything so much that she often felt exposed. Falling. Grasping at the sky. That’s why she needed the speed. It made the very air something she could hold on to.
“I’m sorry,” he added, and she couldn’t tell if he meant for everything or this latest insult.
“Sure.” She swallowed it regardless. “I’m sorry too.”