Dangerous by Default

31. The fall

Mina's stomach dropped to her feet as her body tumbled away from the plane. The air was slamming up against her in a frenetic column. She fought against the turbulent wind to straighten her body into a tight box.

Breath breath breath.

Her stomach settled, and for a brief moment she was hit with a dose of pure bliss. The black air around her body was limitless. She was a shooting star, but it wasn't quite the same without Caine at her side.

Mina scanned the night sky for the pulsing light Caine had fastened to his belt loop. He was nowhere in sight.

The moon illuminated a dense gas of fog, hovering under her body like a vast sea. She could just barely make out the flickering red lights of the Bluebird over her shoulder. But not much else. Her altimeter read 12,000 feet now. She was falling fast, nearly 150 miles per hour.

Could he have fallen into the fog?

She couldn't be sure it didn't extend all the way to the ground. Finding him in there would be next to impossible. He'd be gone.

Think. Caine would be making the same calculations that were pouring through her mind. That's right! She couldn't approach this problem as she normally would. What would Caine do?

She twisted her body slightly right, dipping her shoulder in a move that sent her spinning in circles in the formless air. She felt as if she had been transported into space before the big bang. It was primordial. Just her, Caine, and the laws of gravity between them. And just like the Big Bang, her life was exploding. For better or worse, she would soon find out.

Mina scanned the horizon once more, straining her eyes to see an end to the fog, but still nothing. No contour, no outline. 11,000 feet. She had to pick a direction, straighten into a bullet, and hope to god that's where Caine was. Otherwise she'd end up miles away from him, leaving him hopeless. But she had no information. Which direction was the right way to go?

Given equal weight, the assumption with the least amount of steps is the right one. She wagered. Not exactly Occam's Razor, but it will do.

Mina pulled her shoulders back and straightened her legs, angling her helmet towards the ground. Her body accelerated ferociously, approaching 250 miles per hour. She was going straight down.The thick grey fog now surrounded her body completely like a weightless wilderness. She fingered the belt clasp in her hand. Time was running short.

This is so NOT like the tower jump. C'mon, Bubba. Where are you?

9,000 feet.

Once she found him, she'd only have a few seconds to secure the belt clasp around his waist. She practiced the motion in her mind. Again, her mind wandered to the last time she was in a situation like this. But she'd been the one freefalling.

Paris. The Eiffel Tower. The summer heat on her skin as she writhed in the air, looking back up towards Caine. His steel grey eyes fixed on her as he fell towards her, and in that moment she knew that she was safe. It was like they were falling towards each other. As if the center of gravity was between them, and them alone. Slowly his arms fixed around her waist. They slowed, then bounced. The police sirens that sound so lovely, so quaint in Europe. He put the ring on her finger. She suddenly realized that her life had been the path of a spiral on the edge of a nozzle. Gripping to its edge, the pressure of life behind it, forcing her through its small aperture. I'm spinning back here. If I'm back here, it means that I can control what will happen next.

6,000 feet.

The auto-release on her parachute was disabled otherwise it would have released by now. The ground was coming up on her. Mina dropped out of the fog onto a nightscape littered with sparkling lights stretching up and down the California coastline. She wanted to slow her descent to get her bearings so she flattened her body into a box again. Her eyes scanned a million lights a second, determined to pluck the incandescent white pulsar from among the constellation of light now glittering below her.