Chapter 8
Miriam was facing her aunt, so she saw what had made the “thump” sound behind Jojo.
Jojo couldn’t see much of her niece’s face because it was almost completely covered by the oversized ski goggles.
But she saw the little girl go rigid, open her mouth like a fish flopping on the dock, as if she couldn’t breathe, as if the air had suddenly turned solid.
She shook her head as she fought to suck air into her lungs.
When she finally did catch a breath, it instantly burst back out of her in a scream.
Miriam shrieked, a razor sound that sliced into Jojo’s soul.
Whirling around to see what the child was screaming at, Jojo couldn’t tell for a moment exactly what it was, only that Trident had run to it and was sitting beside the thing that appeared to have fallen out of the sky.
Then the scene morphed into focus, the way you look through a pair of binoculars and it’s blurry, and you adjust it until it’s suddenly crystal clear.
What snapped into focus for Jojo took her breath away, as it had done Miriam’s.
Lying face up in the snow was a body, a child, a little girl, her dark blue Amish skirts hanging out from under the black ski jacket and a helmet lying next to the child’s head where it had been knocked off.
It was possible to see the face of the child lying in the snow.
She was a little blonde girl, lying on her back.
The whole front of the black ski jacket was a huge gaping, bloody wound, stretching from just below her chin all the way down the jacket.
Jojo smelled it then, that all-too-familiar smell, the copper stench of large amounts of blood, and then her world went black.
Jojo is crouching beside an overturned truck, sweat streaming down her face from under her helmet, stinging her eyes.
A bullet rips a hole in the tarp on the back of the truck only a few inches from her face.
The smell of burning rubber and burning flesh, smoke and dust fill her nostrils, along with a copper smell like wet pennies, but those sights and smells fade into the background as she sees a little girl appear like a ghost out of the smoke.
The child walks slowly toward her, a look on her face that’s a mixture of horror and fear, somehow tinged with sadness.
It’s Yasmin. What is she doing here—? An explosion rips open the world. Soldiers are screaming, shrieking …
Screaming.
Shrieking.
Jojo heard the rumble of the snowmaking machine, felt the snow on her face, and saw the body of the dead little girl in the snow.
She understood that the sound slicing through the machine rumble was the voice of her niece screaming.
She frantically yanked her own goggles and helmet off and looked around desperately.
With an understanding born of dozens of firefights, hours of training, without even putting it into words in her own head, she saw the bloody gore of the wound in the child’s chest and was frantically trying to see where?—
Crack.
It wasn’t loud, but she could hear it above the rumble of the snow machine, above the shrieking of her niece.
It was a gunshot. Her eyes snapped in the direction of the sound and far above, up the slope, she could just make out a dark shadow falling out of a ski lift chair, a streak of black ski jacket gobbled up by the swirling whiteness in the air.
At the sight, Jojo’s frantic desperation was replaced by battlefield calm.
She was no longer helpless. Now, she knew what to do.