Page 95 of Into the Fire

“Marty’s burning it,” I said.

“I think so.”

I turned toward the plane.

“Dante.”

I stopped. Boone reached out and placed his hands on the sides of my head. “I was wrong,” he said.

He didn’t mean Marty. He was apologizing for taking me off the board.

I didn’t make him say more. He understood what he’d done wrong, and a man who understands a mistake doesn’t need to grovel over it. Dutch taught us both that.

“What do you want, Dante?” Boone asked.

I was scared. It wasn’t the jump. The jump was my job. It was the mountain on the other side of it—the crest where I’d stood, the fork where the fire ran wrong, and the blackness where a snag took my memory and Dutch’s last words with it. Somebody on the base had opened my bag forty-eight hours ago, and the man we thought did it might be up there now with a torch.

What lay under the fear was stronger.

I knew that fire. I was the only man on the base who’d seen what it did the first time, and if it were running the line again, I’d know.

“I want to jump.”

“Okay,” Boone said.

He’d already turned toward the ready room, and I fell in—not behind him, my shoulder level with his.

The ready room door stood propped open. The board hung where it always hung, eight names in block letters. Below the eighth was the inch of white space.

Boone picked up the marker and uncapped it. He wrote, the tip squeaking against the white, in the same block letters as every name he’d ever put up there:

VEGA

And he wrote it next to his own.

I looked at the two names. HATCHER. VEGA. Side by side, not above or below.

Then Shep shoved my gear bag into my chest, and the moment was over.

I suited up at the racks with the yard loud around me. Boone came down the line, checking all of us. Teller first. Then me—a tug at the leg straps, two fingers under the chest strap, and a look at the reserve pins.

“Reserve’s good,” he said, already moving toward Ramirez.

Fellhauer went past us on his way toward the plane, calling something to Kincaid about the cargo pass. Boone shouldered his own gear at the end of the line, and we walked out of the racks toward the ramp into the prop blast.

Nash was at the foot of the ramp with a cargo cart. He’d sent Fellhauer’s spotting gear up. He watched Teller’s rig go past him like a father watching his kid board a bus.

He stopped me with a hand on my chest.

Nash didn’t say anything. He turned me a quarter turn by the harness with his good hand and went over me as he had weeks ago in the loft—leg straps, chest strap, a look at the pins—one-handed, in about nine seconds, with the splint held out of the way. Boone had already checked me at the racks. Nash checked me anyway.

“Boone signed off on your chute this morning,” he said. “I watched him do it.” He took a step back. “The wind gets into that fork earlier than the forecast thinks. It did then, too.” He stepped back off the ramp line and set his hand flat on the cargo cart. “You had the crest that day. Nobody else on this plane had the crest.”

“I remember it.”

“I know you do,” Nash said. “Go.”

Hollis stood at the Otter’s door with the manifest on his clipboard, checking men aboard. Teller went up past him. Ramirez. Kincaid with the cargo rigging. Then me.