Page 79 of Into the Fire

Dante fell.

He was dropping, arms in, legs together. I couldn’t breathe.

His hand was on his chest. The reserve swept off him in a spray of white. The canopy caught air and bloomed, round and small and taut, and the fall stopped being a fall.

“Fuck,” Hollis said.

Nobody else made a sound. The ground crew at the meadow’s edge stood in a row with their faces up.

I checked the reserve from the ground. Full canopy. Clear lines. Nothing was caught or twisted.

It was flying.

Dante looked up and checked it too. Only then did he look at the ground.

Seven hundred feet.

A reserve is a smaller canopy. It brings you down faster and gives you less to steer with. He was south of the streamers and still sliding south, toward the end of the meadow where the grass gave out.

Five hundred.

He had a canopy over his head and half a minute of sky left, no more, and everything he’d survived in the last ninety seconds had only bought him the next problem.

The malfunction was over. The jump wasn’t.

The reserve carried him south with the air behind it, and the good grass went by underneath him at four hundred feet, out of reach. Past the end of the meadow the ground turned into last month’s hay stubble and rock, sloping toward a dry irrigation ditch with a line of runt pines along it.

He turned into the wind.

Facing the wind slowed him down. He would land in the stubble but short of the ditch. I watched him set up for the worst landing of his life with textbook body position: feet and knees together, hands on the risers, eyes on the horizon. I was already running.

The truck started behind me. Hollis passed me in the truck. I heard the trauma kit sliding on the bench seat. I kept running.

Dante hit.

He rolled over hard, hip and shoulder, through the stubble, and the canopy stayed full long enough to drag him a body length across it before it folded down over the rocks. Then everything was quiet. The canopy lay on the ground, lifting with the wind, and under the edge of it Dante wasn’t moving.

I barked into the radio at a dead run. “Jump ops are suspended. Everybody stays on the plane.”

Fellhauer clicked twice, and the Otter widened its path.

The canopy moved. Dante was pulling lines off himself, and by the time I got there he’d fought one arm free and was flat on his back in the stubble with his helmet still on.

He coughed and swore on the exhale, which was the best language I’d heard all season.

I was on my knees beside him. “Don’t move yet. Don’t sit up. Look at me. Just your eyes.”

He stared up into my face. His pupils were even and tracking. There was a scrape along his jaw, full of dirt and chaff.

“Neck,” I said.

“Nothing.”

“Back.”

“Nothing.” He breathed again, testing it, and winced. “Everything else, plenty.”

“Squeeze.” I put my hands in his hands, and he crushed them evenly. Hollis came around the truck with the kit and knelt on the other side. Between us we worked down him slowly—neck, ribs, pelvis, arms, legs. There were bruises and scrapes, but nothing moved wrong.