Page 22 of Into the Fire

The suspended harness hung from the beam where it always hung. Below it, Shep sat on an upturned bucket with the drill log on his knee, pen ready. Hollis leaned against a tower leg with his arms crossed. Nash had left the loft to watch. He stood at the edge of the pit with a mug of coffee.

I’d eaten eggs and toast because Boone told me to eat before I came. He said it before every hard day.

He rigged me into the harness, ran two fingers under each leg strap, and stepped back.

“Today you tell me what you see before you touch anything,” Boone said. “I want the problem first, then the fix. If you reach for a handle before you tell me what’s wrong, we start over.”

“Understood.”

“Look up.”

I looked up at an imaginary canopy against a real sky.

“Canopy’s open. Right rear lines are slack, and you’re starting a slow turn.”

My hands wanted to move. I made them wait, and I looked at the problem he’d given me. “Broken steering line. Canopy’s flying. I steer on the rears and take the landing I get.”

“Land it,” Boone said. I put my hands through the motions, steering on the rear risers and setting up for the landing.

“Good canopy, and there’s a man forty feet below you drifting into your air.”

“I turn. He’s lower, he has the right of way, and I go flat away from him and take the worse spot.”

“Line-over.”

“Cutaway.”

The drill continued. Boone changed the order, doubled back, and gave me the same malfunction dressed in different words to catch me pattern matching instead of listening. Twice, he started a scenario and changed it midway—canopy’s open, no, now it’s not. I threw away the first answer and called the second.

The webbing had started to bite into my legs. Twenty minutes of hanging does that. My feet were half asleep in my boots.

Shep’s pen slowed and then stopped. “He hasn’t missed one.”

“Write that down,” I said.

“There’s no box for it.”

“Draw a box.”

Hollis uncrossed his arms. “Give him mine. Canopy’s open, you’re over the black, and your left riser cover’s flapping. You can hear hardware.”

I turned my head as far as the harness allowed, and the beam creaked above me. “That’s sadistic.”

“Answer it.”

“Nothing’s failed yet. I fly it. I don’t touch the brakes harder than I have to, and I pick the closest survivable spot instead of the good one, because if that riser lets go, I want ten seconds of problem instead of forty.” I looked at him. “Who did that to you?”

“Nobody. I think about things.”

“You should see someone about that.”

Nash spoke from the edge of the pit. “All of you are standing around inventing ways my equipment fails. My equipment doesn’t fail. Rig him something that’s his fault.”

“Total,” Boone called.

I flubbed that in the first round of tower work.

“Total malfunction, nothing out,” I said. “Direct to reserve.”