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“I’ve got it,” I promise him. “I’ve got it.”
His smile flashes in the dark. “It’s okay.”
“Take—take it off. Take it.”
We’re past the point where the chute will do the job it’s supposed to, but there’s a chance. He still has a chance.
Ollie frowns, reaches up toward my shoulder, and yanks.
The parachute deploys like a punch to the chest. It’s like being hit with a bomb in reverse. Shakes us both, but it doesn’t—
It doesn’t slow down.
We don’t slow down.
Not enough. Because my parachute isn’t rated for two people. It’s rated for me, and I’m heavy enough to need all of its strength. Too much fucking muscle. I’m too strong for the parachute.
“Let go,” shouts Ollie.
“Not a fucking chance.”
Because the ground is coming up. There are lights down there, dotting the countryside. It’s slow, the world a vast shape below us, until it’s not.
Until it’s screaming up at us.
The parachute keeps trying to drag me up toward the sky, but I can’t let that happen. I have to getbelowhim. It takes all my strength to twist us. We’re not at the right angle for a safe landing, for either of us, but it’s the only land.
I feel Ollie hit the ground.
I’m on the ground, too, but the shattering, splintering pain in my shoulder is nothing compared to the limp set of his body. The impact knocked him out. That’s all it did. It knocked him out. My shoulder hurts so much that I can’t move him off me. I do it anyway through a haze of pain and the taste of blood in my mouth.
He doesn’t have a pulse.
I tear the glove off my left hand and turn my head to throw up from the pain. Don’t know how I’m still using the right one.
But he doesn’t have a pulse.
I know before I touch him, because his dark, laughing eyes are staring up at the sky, empty, empty, empty.
“Ollie, fuck. Ollie—no. No—”
A massive shape knocks into me. It’s so big that I end up on my back. A soldier. The enemy. I roll over onto my hands and knees, scramble up, because I’ll fight any motherfucker if it saves Ollie—
Daisy looks at me, her forehead creased with confusion. The sprawling countryside’s gone. It’s that stone room. The stone gates.
“You fell,” she says.
“Ollie—” I throw my hand behind me, wrenching my shoulder in the process.
He’s gone.
The night’s gone, and the ground, and everything else. There’s more stone tile, and—is that a door? The outline of a door. It’s not the gates. It’s the opposite of the gates, directly across from it, and if it’s a door, maybe it goes somewhere else. Maybe—
I don’t know, because a dog starts barking.
Howling.
There’s nothing but Conor barking and a feeling like a laugh in the dark. Like razor-sharp nails. Like a nightmare.
