“I hear something,” I say.
“The engine is riding a little rough,” Gideon says. “I think the magnetism is affecting the parts—”
“No.” I finger the seam along the leather seats.
“It’s probably just wind shear,” Nikki says.
“No,” I say. How can I explain that I shouldn’t hear it at all? I’m hearing it because Gabriel wants me to hear it.
The image of Gloria’s drawing flashes in my mind, clear and bright. I see the thick powdery lead on the unforgiving white page. It was a seat. The back of a seat.
I unsnap the buckle on my safety belt, and I drop to the floor.
On the ground, the sound is louder, that strange mechanical beep clear as a bell.
I stick my hand under the seat and feel around.
“What are you doing?” Nikki asks. Her amused expression hardens.
I wrap my fingers around the cold plastic and slide the box from under the seat. It’s a cardboard box with something heavy inside.
I peel back one cardboard flap. Then the other.
For a moment, I just stare at the black face inside and watch the red light blink on and off periodically.
“Is this…?” I begin. But I can’t even finish.
Nikki sees it. Her jaw clenches and she slams a fist into the dash covering the control panel.
“Oy! Easy there. Don’t damage the merchandise.” Gideon does a double-take at our faces and then cranes around in his seat.
“I think this is…” I try again, but get no further than I did the first time.
“That’s a bomb,” Gideon cries out. “That’s a bloody bomb! Let me see it.”
The plane dips suddenly as Nikki drops her controls and clambers over the seat.
I’m standing up, about to hand Gideon the box when Nikki starts screaming.
“No, no, no!” she says. “Stop! Don’t move!”
She forces the box back flat on the plane floor. After taking a breath and seemingly collecting herself, she slips her hands into the box and turns it gently up on one side to show me the wires running from the back of the plastic casing into the darkness beneath Gideon’s seat.
“It’s wired to the engine. It must’ve turned on when the engine turned on, and it will explode when the engine turns off. He knew we would have to land the plane rather than fly over because of the shield. He was counting on us landing the plane within range of her.”
“Fucking brilliant engineering,” Gideon hisses. Gideon pulls a gun and shoves one end against the side of Nikki’s head. “You don’t look nearly surprised enough by this. Did you know about the bomb?
Nikki looks down at her lap.
My heart kicks. “Nick?”
But before she even speaks, it all makes sense to me now. Jeremiah’s sudden offer to let me go to Antarctica. His suggestion that I shouldn’t tell Nikki because she didn’t want me to go. His insistence that I go in his plane, with his crew.
I voice my suspicions aloud. “Jeremiah believes I’m the only one she would lower her shield for. We fly in. She realizes it’s me and lowers her shield, and as soon as we park the plane and turn off the engine, the bomb would go off, and that would be the end of it.”
Nikki’s face is blood red with her fury. “I told him no a hundred times.”
“He didn’t listen,” I say simply. I think of their fights. Of Nikki’s cold response to him and the quiet fury. I think of his talk of bombs at the international meeting. If they found evidence of a bomb in Antarctica now, he already had a cover, didn’t he? He already had a person to pin the explosion on. Any device wouldn’t be blamed on Jeremiah now. It would be Jesse who takes the fall.
“How long has he been planning to use me to betray Jesse? Since we came to the base? Since Chicago?” I ask her.
Nikki doesn’t have an answer. Gideon shoves his gun against her forehead.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t blow your brains all over this seat,” he says, seething.
“Gideon!” I hiss.
“I think it’s awfully convenient that my plane was disabled and the only other one on the tarmac was this one. All loaded up and ready to go—with a bomb on board.”
“I didn’t know,” she says. She’s looking at me. “Al, you know I wouldn’t have let you get aboard this plane if I thought it had a bomb on it.”
“Did you really defy him? Did you really stage a coup at all?” Gideon chides.
“Just let me explain,” she begs.
Gideon thumbs off the safety instead.
I reach out and clamp down on his wrist. “Don’t! Give her a chance!”
For a second, no one moves or speaks. There is just a lot of heavy breathing and furious, wide-eyed stares.
Nikki breaks the silence with a flood of words. “Yes. Jeremiah proposed that we send you to Antarctica with a bomb on board to try to neutralize Jesse. He first brought this up right after the meeting with the ambassadors.”
“I remember the fight.”
“Yes, well, I thought he’d dropped it. But then I suspected he hadn’t when he cornered you in the medical ward and wanted to speak to you alone.”
And that seems true for me too. He’d offered up a plane while we sat in the dimly lit medical bay. So he had planned to send me to Jesse—but with a bomb that would kill us both.
“But then something happened,” Nikki says. “He had me running all over the base doing stupid shit. I got your page and confronted him, but he said you were fine, that you were still in the medical bay. He knew I’d go check and by the time I realized you weren’t there, he’d already have the base locked down.”
“So what happened?”
“I went to the medical bay. I checked Gloria’s room because Dr. Gray told me she was awake. But when I got to Gloria, she told me that you’d been taken into custody. Then your distress call made all the sense in the world.”
“I don’t believe for a moment he would simply let you go,” Gideon hisses.
“He didn’t. I had to get my soldiers to restrain him long enough for us to get out before the base was sealed. He ranted. He raved. He told me that if I took you off this base and got you to Antarctica, that we’d all be dead.”
I frown. “Then why did you do it?”
“Because of what Jackson said. Jackson said not to trust Jeremiah’s vision. That he was being manipulated by another angel, Michael, to do whatever it took to keep you on the base, but that keeping you on the base meant we’d all die.”
“And you believed her?” I ask.
She nods, the barrel of the gun sliding along her forehead.
“She didn’t tell you there was a problem with the plane?” I ask her.
Her lip trembles. “She did. I assumed she meant Gideon’s.”
Gideon laughs derisively. The gun trembles in his hand. “So it’s Jackson we can thank for this little surprise.”
“She must’ve had her reasons,” I say.
Gideon finally lowers the gun. “She always has her reasons. Damn her.”
All the tension goes out of the plane just like that.
No one speaks for a long time.
“We can’t land,” I say. “If we land, it will go off.”
“How many parachutes are on board?” Gideon asks, sparing a glance at the open sky and correcting course with his left hand
Nikki sucks in a deep breath. “One.”
“Again, bloody convenient. I bet it even comes in your size.”
Nikki turns the box over in her hand, looking at the wires.
“Can you disable the bomb?” I ask.
“No. If I try, it will explode.”
“But it’ll also explode when we land,” I say.
“Or we run out of gas,” she says. “Gideon?”
“I don’t need to tell you that we’ll be cutting it close, do I? Even if we turned back now, I don’t think we’d get farther than a hundred miles.”
And what would be the point of that? I think. Jeremiah knows we won’t parachute over
the Atlantic for no good reason, with no hope of rescue. Not with that.
I look at the purple light pulsing through the sky, and a horrible sense of foreboding overtakes me. That’s Jesse’s light. Some way, somehow, that is Jesse’s power, radiating in every direction as far as the eye can see.
Gideon’s and Nikki’s voices escalate until they’re shouting over one another.
“Stop it!” I scream. “Both of you stop it! Nikki didn’t plant the bomb on this plane. Jeremiah screwed her as much as he screwed us.”
“Don’t tell me you believe her story, just like that.”
“I do.”
“What about the parachute?” Gideon hisses. “The one parachute?”
It wouldn’t have been Jeremiah. Jeremiah knew Nikki too well. He knew she would have to fly the plane. He knew it would be on the ice when it landed. And he knew that even if she discovered the bomb in time, she wouldn’t jump without me.
They were told to take them all, Gabriel whispers. His voice is a rainy breeze through my mind. But one was loyal to her. One left it for her escape.
“It’s more likely that whoever was instructed to inspect the plane, put one here for her.” And it’s true enough. There isn’t a single person under Nick’s command that doesn’t respect her. She would die for any one of them, and they know it.
“Or Jeremiah himself,” Nikki says with a low growl. “That way if I refuse to save myself, it is my own fault, not his. That is how he would see it.”
“Charming man,” Gideon says. “I’m certainly going to put a bullet through his brain the next time I see him.”
Nikki gives him a stony look.
“Oh shut up,” Gideon says. “He put you on a plane with a bomb on it. If you still call him a friend, then you’re more deluded than I thought, Tamsin.”
She doesn’t make any retort to this. She only grips the controls harder.
“Just fly the plane,” Gideon grumbles. “I want to have a looksee at my executioner.”
Gideon clambers over the arm of the chair and crumples onto the floor with the bomb still nestled at my feet. He takes it in his hand as delicately as one might take the queen’s china. He tilts it one way, then the other, inspecting the wires that disappear under the seat and that flashing red light.
“Isn’t this a beautiful piece of bloody work?” he says with a huff. He sits it down and runs a hand through his hair. And we sit like that, hands on our knees, defeated as the minutes stretch by.
No one speaks for a long time.
We just sit there, each of us lost in our thoughts. Finally, Nikki says, “We’re ten minutes away.”
She says this gently as one might speak to a restless horse.
“I’m going to fly the plane, and you’re going to jump tandem with her,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“Al. This is happening.” A flat, but firm refusal. “And this is better anyway. Jesse might explode the moment she sees me. That’s usually how she reacts to seeing me.”
“No,” I say again, pushing aside her joke.
“I’ll call for help,” she says, accepting that she can’t laugh her way out of this. “Maybe someone will reach me in time.”
She’s saying this to calm me. She doesn’t believe it for a second. Her face is a mask of surrender.
“No. We still have eight minutes. We’ll think of a better plan.”
“The sooner you jump, the more fuel I’ll have,” she says, simply.
She punches some controls on the plane and it levels out. “At least the autopilot still works.”
Gideon picks up the parachute and begins inspecting it. “It’s packed well.”
The purple light in the sky intensifies suddenly. Nikki scrambles to lower the altitude so that we aren’t quite so blinded by its glow. When she does, I see the source of the light at last. It shoots straight up in a beam of light so intense that it is constantly shifting.
“How in god’s name are we going to get close enough?” Gideon says.
On foot, Gabriel whispers in my mind.
“On foot,” I repeat. “I’ll have to walk right up to her.”
“You should go now. You’ll have a mile,” Nikki says. She’s squeezing my hand. Gideon is already slipping on his jacket and winter gear. He’s throwing things at my feet. A heavy coat. A face mask. Something that looks like goggles. I can barely see them through the tears filling my eyes.
Nikki is forcing me into the coat.
“Nick,” I say. My voice breaks.
“I know this isn’t your preferred method of exiting an aircraft,” she says with a lopsided smile. “But please use the parachute.”
She’s trying to make a joke.
I catch Gideon’s eye, and he turns politely away, busying himself with the chute and the layers of protective clothing that he’s putting on his body.
Nikki puts her lips right against my ear and speaks, barely audible over the engine of the plane. “Before we made love the first time, I made you a promise.”
My throat tightens so hard, my breath catches.
“I promised I would help you protect Jesse. I promised I would do whatever I needed to do to make sure you didn’t lose her again.”
Tears spill down my cheeks.
“It looks like I’ll be keeping that promise, whether I want to or not.”
I pinch my eyes shut against fresh, hot tears. I pull back and search her face. “Make me a new promise. Promise that you’re going to call for help the second we jump.”
She gives me a sad smile. “As soon as you’re clear of the plane, I’m going to drive this as fast as I can make sure it doesn’t explode over your heads. Then I’ll make the call. I promise.”
Our heads. Oh god, she’s going to fly off with a bomb on a plane.
“If I fly east, I’ll end up back over the station, and there will be more casualties. And who knows what will happen if this plane goes off so close to her. The energy wafting off her might make it explode early, or worse, give it extra power.”
She says all of this while putting a harness on over my coat. I hear all the clicks and snaps, but I can’t stop looking at her. This is a dream. This is a horrible, terrible dream.
“Two minutes,” Gideon says.
Our eyes fall on the horizon.
Nikki nods, acknowledging Gideon. But she doesn’t look at him. Her eyes remain fixed on mine. She’s soaking me in, memorizing every line of my face.
“There’s so much I want to say,” she whispers. She laces her hands under my hair and clasps them at the back of my neck. “I had big dreams for us.”
She kisses me. Her mouth is hot and feverish on mine. I feel her quivering jaw against mine. She pulls back and stares into my eyes, running one thumb over my cheek and lower lip. All I can think is that the last kiss I’ll ever share with Nicole Tamsin must taste like vomit.
I hear the plane door open. Feel it’s freezing suction on my back. Gideon’s arms slip around my waist.
Nikki takes a deep breath, gives me another sweet, brief kiss. “I’ll be rooting for you.”
I open my mouth to say something. Tell her I love her. Tell her I appreciate every kindness. Tell her that there is no better soul than her in the world. But before I can speak, I’m pulled from the plane, into the wide, endless sky.
Chapter 22
Jesse
I feel the door open inside me. And it is the door. A door I’ve carried around since I died on the floor of a barn. A door that bridges my present and past and future. A door that connects the intangible of my mind to the tangible world where my heart beats. All I ever dreamed lies on one side of the door. And somehow, by the magic of time and will, it passes through and manifests on the living plane, where billions of souls live out their lives.
I understand that now, with a clarity that I never had before. It was my desire to matter. My desire to be more than someone’s play thing that had called Gabriel to me. And I had wanted someone to save me, an angel to swoop in a
nd take it all away. To make the absuse seem small and insignificant. Gabriel gave me all of that and more.
But it has never been his power. Sure, I used their gifts to defeat my father and become the apex. But there is a power that has always been mine, that ability to manifest anything, anything I can dream up, here on this plane.
The power of dreaming.
The power of creation.
And it is through this door—this gate—that Michael wants to bring something from the intangible world, from his when and where, into this time and place.
You can make this better, Michael whispers into my ear as the power pours from my mouth, my hands, my mind. I feel it surge up into the sky. All of me goes limp with it, yet Michael holds me up. It’s his arms I’m sagging in. Don’t you want to eliminate the darkness forever?
Darkness… Dead children. Murdered wives. Cruelty. Pain. Hopelessness. Degradation. Fear. Above all, fear. Like a stench in the air, putrefying.
The shift in his voice cools the flame coursing through me.
One minute, I’m looking through the gate. I’m feeling all the power run from that other side, washing me in that unquenchable euphoria. Then there’s his cold breath, like teeth in the back of my neck.
He’s manipulating you.
Michael’s grip tightens on my body, nearly crushing me against him.
He’s using your fear to make you believe this is the reality. But it isn’t. This is the lens of terror, and you’re letting him hold it over your eyes.
I know this voice. I know it from somewhere…
My eyes flutter open and see the monster holding me.
He wears a face I know all too well. Those round, soft cheeks. That smooth jaw. Bright brown eyes that sparkle in the purple light pulsing all around me. Like a tornado’s funnel, it shoots up into the sky, myself caught in the eye of its cyclone. We are a foot, maybe two off of the ground.
All that beautiful, blond hair floating in the breeze. That soft, hesitant smile—I’m not fooled. It’s the eyes. There is a cold fire in those eyes.
“You’re not her,” I say. “Show me your real face. Show me who you are.”
And it looks like the monster will refuse me. So I start to funnel some of that power into it—
power and my desire to know the truth, to see the world clearly for once. No more encryption. No more lies and manipulations.
Dying Day Page 22