“Hey, what if we made it a contest like the good old days in the trials?” Wraith mutters as Damian comes back and sits down.
“No,” Thomas says, but quickly gets dismissed.
“I’m listening.” Gage sounds excited.
Damian grimaces. “Good old days?”
Wraith’s eyes fill with mischief. “Whoever deploys their parachute last, and lives, wins.”
30
EMERY
I’m notscared of heights, flying, or even skydiving. But HALO jumping is an entirely different beast. We’re over twenty thousand feet in the air and we’re not supposed to pull our chutes until at least thirty-one hundred feet in order to avoid detection.
And we are by no means professionals. Not even close.
“Ready?” Erik calls out through the headsets. A whirr of air thrashes us as he opens the drop door at the back of the plane.
We all give him a sharp nod and hold tightly to our safety lines attached to the drop line above.
“Three, two, one,” the lieutenant counts down and Thomas dives off the end. Gage does a backflip, while Wraith and Damian walk off the edge the way most soldiers would.
I keep to their heels, and once I’m at the ledge and about to jump, Cameron pushes me. A gasp tears from my throat, but it’s quickly replaced with laughter as my body descends at high acceleration.
Cameron is falling at my side in the next moment. I can’t seehis face past his oxygen mask and black air-tight goggles over his eyes. His lovely voice filters in through my headset. “I wouldn’t have pushed you if you hadn’t takensolong to jump.” His sarcasm is blatant and it tugs a grin from my lips.
“Just remember that I’ll get you back for it,” I reply airily. I hope he can hear the smile on my lips.
“For the love of God, can you two just get on your own channel already?” Gage complains, but he sounds like he finds it entertaining. He knows as well as we do that we can’t have our radios off of the group channel during this training. There’s too much at stake in case something goes wrong. We need open communication.
Cameron pointedly looks down below us and flips Gage off before holding three gloved fingers up to me, indicating that he wants me to go to channel three.
We still have a while to go so I entertain him and switch channels. Thomas is going to flip shit about it. I giggle to myself.
“You know we can’t do this,” I tease him.
Cameron laughs and the sound is rich and free of worry. We’ve been a little off the deep end lately, but how else are we supposed to cope with everything that’s been going on? If this is all the time we get, then I want to enjoy it. This adrenaline rush is certainly no different. I’ve never felt so alive.
“We can do whatever the fuck we want, Em. What are they going to do?Kill us?” he jokes, and it shouldn’t be funny at all because we both know the grim truth of it.
“Pfft!”I try to hold in the laugh to no avail. “You can’t say that! What if someone’s listening in?” He actually shrugs in the air, and it brings the giddiness right back to my heart.
“Don’t pull your parachute too low, okay?” His voice stiffens back up. I stare at his blacked-out mask.
“Yeah, I won’t,” I reassure him, though I’m not sure he buys it. “I’m changing back to the other channel.”
He only nods before doing the same.
“Four thousand feet. Get ready to deploy,” Thomas says the moment I switch to the main channel. I move into position, distancing myself from Cameron enough that our parachutes won’t tangle.
The rest of the squad does the same, moving into the formation we spent all morning practicing on the ground.
Adrenaline spikes in my bloodstream as I watch the ground inch closer and closer. It feels like oxygen is filling my lungs twice as fast up here.
My fingers fidget over the rip cord.
Thomas’s voice comes over the radio once more. “Thirty-one hundred feet. Deploy!” He pulls his cord first, sticking to the training as planned, but the rest of us hold out longer, seeing who’s going to be the last one falling.
