Page 26

"Diet? Flamin Hot Cheetos…and diet Dr. Pepper?"

"It tastes better to me. I dunno. Shut up. Stop yucking my yum, woman."

She rounded the tree, then, still shoving her arms through the sleeves of the flight suit and tugging the zipper up, I caught the briefest tantalizing glimpse of her bare belly and hips, and the bright red of her underwear before she pulled the zipper up.

"Don't ever call me woman again,” she growled. "I fucking hate it.”

“Noted," I said. "Anything else to avoid?"

"I'm sure I'll think of more." She handed me the wipes. "Thanks for that, by the way. More to the point, my vagina thanks you."

"Um, you and your vagina are welcome." I was blushing, my cheeks red and tingly, which wasn't embarrassing at all.

I was half-expecting her to pinch my cheeks and crack a joke about the blush, and I think she did see it—her eyes flicked over my face and then quickly away, and she headed back toward the helicopter… almost as if she was as, if not more, embarrassed by her own comment as I was.

Which seemed dumb—we were both grown-ass adults. Neither of us should be weird about the mere mention of the word vagina, yet here we were.

"So," I said, joining her beside the downed helo. "Now what?"

"Now," she answered, "We take stock of our supplies. Then try to determine at least a rough idea of where we are so we can decide which way to start hiking."

"We shouldn't stay near the crash site?" I said. "You did get out a mayday call before we went down. We'd have some kind of shelter until the rescue arrives."

"It could take a while for any rescue to find us, Jax. Days, perhaps, and we have no water and no food. At very least, we need to find a river or stream for water and see if we can catch a fish.” She leaned into the helicopter and brought out the first aid kit. "But mainly, I'm just not the sit-and-wait-to-be-rescued kind of gal." She scampered up onto the nose and in. “Grab the suitcase from me, yeah?"

"Okay." I stood at the side near what would be the A-pillar on a car, and when she dragged my hard-sided suitcase and manhandled—woman-handled?—it through to the cockpit, I leaned in and took it from her, dragging it out to thump to the forest floor. "Got it."

She spent a few more minutes rummaging through the interior, lifting seats and peeking in compartments. She crowed in triumph, tossing a small bag out the window frame. "Survival kit! Fuck yes." She followed the bag out, hopping down and carefully brushing off her hands, then crouched, opened, and examined the kit, naming items as she withdrew and replaced them. "Space blanket, flare gun, knife, water purification tablets, personal locator beacon, matches, tarp, fishing line, hooks, duct tape, and a tarp. This is a stellar kit. Valentine Roth doesn't fuck around, clearly."

“Yeah, he doesn't seem like the fuck-around type."

"But when you consider the cost of one of these things, a decent wilderness survival kit shouldn't be that much of a shock."

"What is the price tag for one of these?" I asked.

She spluttered. "Oh, fuck. I mean, you can pay upwards of twenty mil for a luxury twin-engine private bird. This is handcrafted by a team of highly trained specialists to exacting specifications and packed with top-secret, proprietary, space-age tech that even military-industrial contractors can't match. I'd be shocked if it went for anything less than a hundred million."

"Jeeeee-sus," I drawled. "And our guy has three?"

"Eh, what's a few hundred million when you've got buh-buh-buh-billions?" she answered, clearly being sarcastic. "I'm only guesstimating, though. I’ve never seen a price sheet, and it's probably kinda gauche to ask the boss I've worked for for less than seventy-two hours how much he paid for his Roth Helo."

"Yeah, super gauche," I muttered, unwilling to admit I didn't have a clue what the word meant.

The side-eyed smirk Tea shot me told me she at least suspected my ignorance and found it amusing.

"Lacking tact," she said, zipping the kit back up. "Anything in your bags you can’t leave behind?"

I pulled everything out of the backpack: laptop and charger, phone charger, toiletries, a couple of dog-eared paperback sci-fi novels, a knit cap, a compressed blanket in a bag which I wish I'd remembered I had last night, an unopened bottle of Mt. Dew, and an ounce of Alaskan Thunder Fuck with papers and a lighter.

Tea lifted the bag of cannabis and eyed me. "My dude. This is a lot of cannabis."

"It's just an ounce, number one, and number two, that's prime homegrown flower, straight from Uncle Lucian's private grow-house."

"Sweet, dude."

I narrowed my eyes at her. "You're mocking me, aren't you?"

"Yes. Yes, I am."