She hit send.
Too badshedidn’t have the coordinates. She cast the old woman a dirty look. Nope. Around here, they flew by Visual Flight Rules—especially in the old aircraft. The old lady’s directions ran through her mind on a loop: fly up the river ’bout an hour, take the left fork. Not the little fork. The big one. Wait for the big one. When you get to the big kidney bean lake, you land.
Heading out in borrowed aircraft to grab target. Due east. Will report coordinates asap.
They’d hate that, but she didn’t have more to give them.
Anxious to leave, she stuffed the phone in her bag and nodded to Amka, who pulled on the propeller once, twice… Leo hit the starter and the engine coughed before catching. A flock of birds took off.
So much for stealth.
“Hang on!” Amka climbed over to the open door and poked her head inside. “Promise me, you’ll get my godson out, no matter what you…”
“What?”
“No matter what you find when you get there.”
No matter what I find?Leo’s insides did a little flip. She’d mistake it for another bout of nausea if she didn’t recognize it for what it was: foreboding. “What are you talking about, Amka? What haven’t you told me?”
“I should also mention: you can land on ice with floats, but you need real clean, flat ice. The lake up there’ll do…” Amka’s eyes shifted to the side. “Long as it hasn’t started breaking up yet.”
“And if it has?”
“We’re all screwed.” Without another word, Amka dropped off the float onto the dock and shoved the plane out into the water.
Chapter 2
“Let’s do this, baby,” Leo muttered, applying slow pressure to the stick in order to increase the speed and push the little plane straight into the headwind. Five hundred yards. Four.
While taking off this far east was the only option, it put Leo closer to the opposite shore than she’d like. “Come on, Dolores. Come on, old girl. You’ve got this.”
Her eyes shot up to the evergreen wall before her, then down to the controls and back up again. She’d seen aircraft eviscerated by just the tip of a pine tree. She had to get over them.Come on, Dolores!
Another dozen feet and she was airborne. Up, level, hanging just off the water, so low she could still jump without dying. She let the stick slide forward into neutral to get her flying speed up, eyeing that mass of death up ahead. Oh, comeon.
Man, was she bad at this patience business. The waiting and teasing and more waiting that an aircraft like this needed were totally out of her comfort zone. Especially now, when she wanted to yank at the stick andmakethis little lady rise.
Back to climbing position. And climbing. Gaining on the trees… Three hundred yards, two hundred.
Never make it.
The adrenaline was wild. A drug, coursing through her, turning everything bright, technicolor, alive—like there were three of her inside this one skin suit. Threethousandof her. As with every risk, every painful near miss she’d been through, she loved it, lived for it, ate it up. Shivers, heat, and the blood-pumping reality of being alive assailed her the way they did every time she dared the world to end her.
Bring it!she taunted, as if she hadn’t experienced the stench and pain of death, hadn’t soaked in its slow, inexorable ooze, hadn’t tried to stop it with her bare hands—stuffing guts back inside of friends as if their souls weren’t already gone.
“Okay, Dolores. We’ve got this, sweetheart. Come on.” The plane took on a touch more altitude. Not enough yet, but getting there. All she could do was hope that the Chronos team hadn’t caught wind of her departure.
But, oh man, did she love this. This daredevilry, this thirst for risk didn’t come from her; it came from out there—from the elements, maybe, the universe, or possibly even from death itself.
Ten yards, eight… Closer…closer…
“Come on, baby. Come on,” she muttered, firm in her belief that an aircraft had a soul.
A final pull on the stick and the left float grazed the very tip of a pine as she soared into the sky, tilting wildly before finally straightening out.
She turned, craning her neck to see if anybody was in pursuit.
Nothing but mountains and river and the quickly setting sun. Had she truly made it out unseen? The chances seemed pretty slim. How long would it take them to head out after her? With no intel on what they’d been doing back in Schink’s Station, she couldn’t say. Were they five minutes behind her? Thirty? She’d never flown this blind.
