Chapter 5
“We have to get out of here,” Nora whispered.
“Okay,” said Charlie. “How?”
Nora opened the window and looked down. They were two stories up, the tail of the leaf-filled, T-shaped pool stretching to just beneath them, concrete surrounding it.
She looked up and to either side of the window, but the walls were flat and the fire escape was three rooms down. Charlie’s gaze followed hers.
“Jump?” he offered.
“Absolutely not,” said Nora. A twenty-foot drop wasn’t likely to kill them, but the injuries could be immense.
Compound fractures, wounds bad enough to require skin grafts, broken ribs that could pierce a lung.
She once sorted a fatal fall that involved more impaling than she’d come across since her college medieval history class.
“You got a better idea?” Charlie said.
Another knock, this one even harder than the last. Nora suddenly couldn’t move.
It felt like the questionable beige carpet had reached up its fibers and countless years of grime and was holding fast to the soles of her shoes.
She was trapped. By S.C.Y.T.H.E., by the drop beyond the window, by her own panic.
In a sudden whoosh of feathers, Jessica soared past Nora’s head and out the window.
Nora’s heart lurched, her rooted feet suddenly free enough to carry her into a backward stumble.
A floppy black item sailed after Jessica; Charlie’s duffel bag, flying by in a blur of nylon before landing with a crunch somewhere below.
Nora’s head whipped to the nearest bed, where Charlie hovered, his arms still outstretched from the throw.
She couldn’t process anything that was happening.
The world seemed as blurry as the duffel bag that had just whizzed through the window.
Charlie was looking straight ahead now, in the direction his things had flown.
Time stopped and then sped up as Charlie took off at a run, barreling towards Nora.
She tracked him in a trance as he raced around the bed and over the windowsill.
Before she had time to protest, time to think, he was over the ledge and in the air, gravity ushering him swiftly down with greedy hands.
Nora fell against the wall, dizzy, acutely aware of Death’s footsteps approaching as quickly as S.C.Y.T.H.E.
’s enforcement agents. As quickly as Charlie was approaching the ground.
The knocking grew louder, more urgent. Or was that Nora’s heartbeat?
In seconds that felt like years, Charlie landed in a heap on the accumulation of dry leaves that lined the bottom of the pool.
The leaves enveloped him, swallowed him for long enough that Nora was sure they would be his grave.
Then, like a whale cresting in the ocean, he emerged, swimming his way to the surface of the leaves and offering an enthusiastic thumbs-up back at Nora.
The knocking sound at the door morphed into something angrier.
Something blunter. As though someone was trying to kick it in.
Nora forced her eyes away from the door and back towards her brother, who had made his way to the pool ladder and was climbing up, Jessica waiting patiently for him on the nearby diving board.
Nora was trapped. The only way out was in the clutches of the already-mysterious S.C.Y.T.H.E.
’s most mysterious members and whatever mysterious horrors they had waiting for her.
Or down, down, into a bed of leaves if she was very lucky, or a puddle of viscera on concrete if she wasn’t.
She had spent her whole life avoiding risk, and now she had to actively choose between two.
A door hinge creaked and gave way, and so did Nora.
Without allowing her brain the time to think things through, she snatched Charlie’s file from her bed and clambered shakily onto the windowsill.
The ground seemed to retreat farther away with each fraction of a second she stared at it.
The pool shrank to a fishbowl, the concrete suddenly all she could see.
Charlie was a dot somewhere on that hard, bone-breaking ground.
She wouldn’t jump. She couldn’t jump. She knew this with everything that made her Nora June Bird.
As she shifted on the sill, bracing to climb down and face whatever would come next, her knee landed in the forgotten Moon Pie, its sugary frosting sliding beneath the fabric of her cargos.
Her balance wavered, then gave way all together, and all at once and without any say in the matter, Nora was airborne.
She thought she’d at least scream as she plummeted towards the earth, the ground rushing eagerly to meet her, but she didn’t have time.
Before she could rally her vocal cords for a shriek, she was engulfed in a bed of leaves.
The smell of decay rushed up her nostrils as she scrambled to her feet.
Charlie was at the top of the ladder with a hand extended as she emerged, still half in a daze.
She let him haul her up the rest of the way and sank to her chocolaty knees on the concrete.
Jessica hopped over to her and bit at the little finger of her right hand, the sensation forcing Nora back into her body.
Charlie grabbed his file from where it had landed poolside and helped Nora to her feet.
“Think we can get back in the car now?” he said.
Nora looked from Charlie to the file in his hand, head spinning.
“I’m not sure we have a choice.”