Wrong when Tourn had refused.
Chase’s fingers snagged on a hole in the jet. Several of them. She pushed back the tarp and looked over a spray of bullet holes across the metal. They were rusted and leaning in. Crumbling with age—a mark of the nationwide fear of war that spectacularly outdated her own. She had to do something.
Tears prickled, but she shoved them down, running for Pegasus instead. She waited until she could move unseen, climbed up the wing, and sunk into the cockpit. It smelled of Sylph, and the pilot’s chair was too far back. “Bird legs.” Chase used the lever she’d found while in Tristan’s cockpit to adjust the angle. “The girl has bird legs.” She rubbed her cheeks, trying to get past the sudden rush of remembering how she and Tristan had somehow fit in one seat.
That felt like years ago, but it was only six days. Six.
She’d kept her distance from Tristan since the accident, and he’d given her that much, not that he had much time because he was in the air half of the day. Her face burned on those thoughts as she imagined him exhausted and flying the d-line. She should be the one up there toiling away. Not him.
She had been the one to screw up in the face of that drone.
Chase flipped the switch to close the canopy, and a ground crew member saw. “Hey!” the woman yelled. “Get out of there!”
Chaos erupted around her as people yelled. She ignored them.
“I can do this.”
Getting skyward would fix everything. Just a hop up and back again. Nothing dangerous. It would prove to Kale and Ritz that she should be in action—and silence her scream of fear that she’d never get skyward again.
As she powered up the jet, the whirl and swirl of crashing against the lake came back. In the endless sessions Chase had been subjected to over the last few days, Crackers had said this would happen. She set her teeth and steered out of the hangar and onto the snowy runway.
But that was it.
The jet coasted to a stop.
Chase’s body was coated with sweat and her breath was a mess. I will get in the air, she told herself. Her body remembered how; she just had to get her mind onboard. She looked out at the blue runway lights lining her path.
She drove the throttle and tightened her hand on the stick.
The first time she’d taken off on this runway, Pippin had been arguing with her. She’d done three passes without getting Dragon’s nose off the ground, and her RIO had started to mock her. It had worked. The next pass, she had been so busy swearing at him that her nerves had stayed in check. And they had flown…
Now all Chase could remember was a very different sort of argument. Fighting with Pippin over whether or not he was dying. She remembered his strange smile and bulging eyes. She started to shake as she recalled the empty trust circle she’d doodled in the sand with fingers stained in his blood.
Chase pushed herself harder, faster, and the jet rose off the runway a few inches before her mind overflowed with painful images. Pippin was dead, and that meant Chase had no one. She was utterly alone in ways that finding a boy to kiss would never, ever fix.
Pegasus slammed down. Skidded out.
Chase was shaking so hard that she couldn’t even steer back to the hangar. She opened the canopy, and a slapping wind filled the cockpit with shocking cold.
Everything hurt. Her joints, her legs, her head. But the worst pain was the gravity bearing down on her heart. She knew this pain beyond Pippin; it had always been with her. It was the loneliness that lived in her bones. It whispered that she was no good at loving. No good at being a friend or a daughter or a person. She was no good.
The sort of person who broke hearts because she didn’t know what do with her own.
Snow touched down on her cheek, clung to her lashes, and melted into her tears.
“Harcourt.” Kale’s voice came over the shortwave like a whip crack.
Chase was finished now…expulsion for sure. She waited for it.
“Come home.” His words hiccupped through her aching. She closed the canopy, turned the jet around, and followed orders.
37
WINGMEN
Those Who Stay with You
Listening to Kale had felt right. A little. So when he told her to go to her room and get some rest, she walked back through the barracks to the room she had shared with Pippin.
Chase couldn’t keep her mind from rewinding. This time she went back to before the trials, to the conversation she and Pippin had about love. About each other. She hit pause there, letting Pippin stay alive in her mind.
She was so good at this that she’d nearly convinced herself that her RIO wasn’t dead by the time she opened the door. After all, Pippin’s headphones were still on his desk and his sheets were tucked in with tight corners, per regulation. His family pictures were on the bottom of the bunk overhead and his oily hair smell was on his pillow.
The bathroom door was closed, and the ugly fluorescent light reached beneath it. Pippin could be in there. She almost heard the toilet flush.
Wait a minute. She had heard it.
The sink was running—someone was in there. Chase jumped up and pushed the door open, suddenly flooded with happiness that felt equal parts desperate and dreamlike.
Sylph was rinsing her hands. “You always bust in on someone when they’re in the can?”
Chase’s hope evaporated. She slumped against the doorjamb. “What are you doing here?”
“Your door was unlocked.” She held up a small plastic pterodactyl. “Why is there a dinosaur in your soap dish?”
Chase stole it from Sylph and held it tightly between both hands. “It’s a pterosaur. Dinosaurs didn’t have wings.” Her heart felt strangled by the words.