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“Natalie. ” Marguerite reached out then, caught the child’s hands before her father could stop her. In the same movement she went to one knee, a non-threatening posture incapable of taking the child from his grasp. “Natalie, honey. Look at me. ” Glancing at her father, she carefully reached forward, removed the gag, easing it out of the small mouth, the saliva wetting her knuckles. “I’m going to help, Dad. Breathe, sweetheart.
Just breathe. Deep breaths. Watch my eyes. ”
She held both her hands, watched the little girl try hard to follow her direction, fighting the natural flight instinct of a young defenseless creature that could easily become fatal panic.
“M-Miss M…I…I’m s-so sc-scared. I wanna go h-home. ”
“We’re going to go home, sweetheart. I promise. ” She cupped her hand over the side of her head, the small ear, fingering the new piercing, drawing Natalie’s attention to something other than the man at her side.
“She’s not going home. We’re not going home. ”
“Yes, we are. ” Marguerite looked toward him. “Don’t you think so? Isn’t that what this is about? Bringing an end to it? Peace to it? Let me tell her, Dad. Let me tell you both what Mom said to David and me that day. And it will all be clear. Do you want to know what Mom said? Her very last words?”
He blinked several times, his mouth forming a tight line. His eyes glistened. “She didn’t understand the evil. The danger. ”
“It will all be clear to her shortly. Because you’ll see her and tell her. But first, I want to tell you both this. ”
Marguerite pulled her gaze back to Natalie, saw she had successfully acquired the attention of both of them.
“Did you know that I was once up here with my mother? And she told me and my brother something very special, something that made us not afraid of anything. Not even of being up so high, or the possibility of falling. I want to tell you what she said, but I need you to stop crying and be a very, very brave girl. Look just at me, honey. Just at me. ” She squeezed the girl’s hands, rubbed her cold fingers, willing her to be calm.
The child began to hiccup. Trying for Miss M, making Marguerite’s throat hurt with burning tears. “Remember how I told you I’d always love you, no matter what? And that I’d always tell you the truth. Remember?”
She could feel her father’s growing tension enveloping her and Natalie like a suffocating stench. She concentrated on locking Natalie’s attention in the cool blue of her gaze, visualized drawing her into peace, tranquility.
“Would you like to know w
hat my mother said?”
Natalie shook her head. “I want to g-go home. ”
“I know, sweetie. ” Marguerite stood up, let go of her hand and stepped onto the ledge in one motion, again arresting her father in mid-lunge as she proved to him that she was trying to move herself closer to the ledge, not take Natalie farther from it. He held on to Natalie’s shirt as Marguerite turned, faced him over her head.
“Are you ready?” She gestured at the ledge on the opposite side of Natalie, inviting him to join them. The child was staring up at her, quieted to strangled sobs of breath.
Marguerite did not know if it was her words that had brought the sudden stillness or if the little girl was retreating into the blissful numbness of shock. Her capacity for terror had to be long past overload despite the continuing dangerous menace of the man holding her.
A man who looked baffled, even deceptively docile as at last he put one foot up on the ledge, then the other, lifting himself up to stand across from her. Marguerite realized age and the hard life of prison had warped his bones to match his soul so that they were almost eye to eye. She was perhaps even a little taller.
His expression was uncertain, the aggressiveness broken for the moment as he sought the trick, not knowing where to look for it. Marguerite dared to glance down at Natalie for one precious moment, met the brown eyes.
“My mother said, ‘Don’t worry. The angels will catch us. And then we’ll learn to fly with them. ’”
Ripping open the neckline of the cape, she sent the garment into open space. “You didn’t know everything about me, Daddy. ”
His gaze jerked away from the fluttering cape to her, but that second of distraction was the only one she’d counted on.
Darting down, she seized Natalie under the arms, breaking his grip. As he howled and snatched at them, she shoved off the ledge. He latched on to Marguerite’s left hand and she tumbled all three of them over the edge.
Skydiving off most manmade structures was illegal, for valid reasons. The proximity of buildings changed the expected air patterns, made them fluky, hard to predict the right heading for the chute gear when it opened. She’d had only a couple opportunities to practice it, and both times it was off bridges, one in India, one in Malaysia. Never in close quarters with other buildings like this. And never with less than fifteen minutes in her car to repack one chute for the type of jump that typically demanded a careful half hour of gear preparation.
Her father’s weight on her arm flipped Marguerite forward, ruined the twisting dive that would have set her up better.
When she practiced Atmonauti maneuvers, she focused on the number of flips and turns and calculated their speed so she could release the chute at the right moment.
Jumping from a plane at ten thousand feet, she would deploy her chute around three thousand feet to handle any unexpected incidents. From the top of this building, she had eight hundred feet, which meant she needed to deploy her chute immediately.
With one of her arms wrapped hard around Natalie’s back, her other hand captured by the person doing his best to kill both of them, she had no hands free.
