Chapter 31
The Cessna rattled through turbulence, and my shoulder lit up white-hot from wrist to collarbone.
I gripped the yoke with both hands. The fuel was running low, and the altitude was shit.
Every time I moved the yoke, the wound cracked open a little more and fresh warmth ran down my bicep.
I'd flown worse. Probably. The details escaped me, but I was sure I had, because the alternative was admitting this was the most dangerous flight of my life, and I didn't have room for that right now.
Behind me, Jasper breathed.
That was all he'd done for twenty minutes.
I'd twisted around twice to check on him, and both times he'd been staring at the ceiling with that blank, unfocused look that meant his brain was still rattling around inside his skull.
The gash on his temple had stopped bleeding, but the skin around it had gone purple and swollen. The concussion was a bad one.
Mila sat beside him, not across, not by the door where she always put herself. She pressed her shoulder against his arm and rested her hand on his knee.
The third time I looked back, something had changed.
Jasper had curved his arm around her shoulders, fingers slack against her upper arm. She'd tucked herself into his side, her whole weight tipped against his ribs, chin down, eyes closed.
He rested his chin on top of her head.
I turned back to the instruments and swallowed hard.
The comms had been dead since Vihaan's last transmission. I tried the primary frequency and got static. I tried the backup and got static. I cycled through every channel we had and got nothing but white noise and the kind of silence that means nobody's on the other end.
I pushed the thought down and checked the fuel gauge. We had enough to make it if the headwinds got no worse, if the engine held, if my shoulder held, and my vision stayed clear and I stayed conscious.
A lot of ifs sat between us and the ground. I'd built my whole life on ifs: the border guard skipping the second compartment, the tide coming in before dawn, the buyer's money clearing before his patience ran out. One more flight on one more if, and I could do this.
"Papa."
The word came from behind me, quiet and sharp, and I locked my grip on the yoke.
"Papa, you're bleeding again."
"I know." Jasper's voice was rough and slow, the words fighting through fog to reach air. "It's okay."
"It's not okay. You need a bandage."
"Mila..."
"I can do it. I know how. Diego showed me at the farmhouse."
The cabin went quiet. Then the sound of Jasper shifting, a small hiss of pain, and the rustle of fabric as Mila moved.
"Hold still," she said, and she sounded so much like me when I'd stitched Lorenzo back together that my throat closed.
"I'm holding still."
"No, you're not. You keep moving your head."
"Because you keep pulling the bandage too tight."
"It's supposed to be tight. That's how it works."
I kept my eyes on the horizon and let the tears run down my face without wiping them away. She'd called Zeus Patéras in Greek because that was the language he'd raised her in, the word he'd taught her. Papa was different. Papa was a word she'd chosen herself, in a language Zeus hadn't given her.
"There," Mila said. "Better?"
"Better." A pause. "Thank you, dochenka."
"You're going to be okay, Papa."
Another pause followed, longer this time. He caught his breath. Then he steadied.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I am."
I wiped my face on my shoulder and let the tears dry on their own.
"Mila." I kept my voice easy, conversational, like we sat on the porch instead of bleeding in a Cessna. "Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"All those weeks at the farmhouse. You never said a word. Not to me, not to Jasper, not to anyone." I adjusted the yoke against a gust. "Why?"
The back seat went quiet. Then: "Patéras taught me not to talk to strangers."
The laugh that came out of me surprised us both.
"Fair enough," I said. "So, what changed?"
"You're not strangers anymore."
I glanced back. She said it the way she said everything now: direct and certain, like the conclusion was obvious and we were slow for not seeing it sooner. Jasper tightened his arm around her. He pressed his face into her hair and swallowed hard.
"No," I said. "We're not."
"You're family," she said. She tested the word like she was trying it on, turning it over in her mouth the way she'd turned over the puzzle boxes in her room. Then she nodded once, satisfied with the fit. "You're my family."
Jasper pressed his face harder into her hair. His shoulders shook once.
I turned back to the instruments because if I looked at them for one more second, I was going to lose it completely, and somebody had to fly this plane.
I checked the heading, and we pointed west, toward Morocco, toward home.
I hoped it was still standing.
We put down at a grass strip outside Debrecen to refuel.
A farmer with more sense than curiosity took cash and asked no questions.
I topped off the tank while Mila stretched her legs on the grass and Jasper sat on the wing step with his head in his hands, breathing through whatever the concussion did to his equilibrium.
I crouched to check the tire pressure, and Jasper's boot pressed against my knee. I looked up. He kept his head in his hands, eyes closed, but the pressure stayed. He meant it. I leaned into it for a second before I stood.
Rhadamanthys sat against the hangar wall with his hat tipped over his eyes and his revolvers across his lap. He hadn’t said much of anything, and I didn’t have enough energy to push.
Mila fell asleep ten minutes after we lifted off again. I glanced back, and she'd curled into Jasper's side with her face pressed against his ribs. He kept his arm around her. He looked clearer now.
"How's your head?" I asked.
"Loud." He shifted and winced. "How's your shoulder?"
"Attached. Mostly."
"That's reassuring."
"I'm a reassuring guy."
He almost smiled at me. Even concussed, even wrecked, he could still do that.
"Diego."
"Yeah."
"If Casablanca's gone..."
"It's not gone."
"If it is."
"Then we find somewhere else." I kept my eyes forward. "We've done it before. We'll do it again."
He went quiet. Mila shifted against him in her sleep, and he adjusted his arm around her.
The silence stretched. I let it.
"No naps, guapo. Concussion protocol."
"Yes, Dr. Reyes."
I grinned back at him. "Dr. Reyes. I like the sound of that." I let it sit for a second. "Want to play doctor when we get home?"
"I have a head wound, and you're propositioning me."
"Of course I am. I’m still me."
He closed his eyes. His breathing evened out. Mila curled her hand into his shirt, and the three of us crossed Europe in a rattling Cessna with no comms, no backup, no guarantee of what waited on the other end.
We refueled once more outside Málaga. I bought water and almonds from a vending machine, and that was the closest thing to a meal any of us had eaten in two days.
I flew. That was the job. That was always the job. Get the people you love from one place to another and keep them breathing in between.
Casablanca came into view at sunset, and everything in my chest seized tight.
The base stood. That was the first thing I grabbed onto. The walls held, but the runway had craters in it. Someone had filled them with gravel, packed it down enough to land on, but the patches stood out dark against the concrete.
"Jasper." I kept my voice steady. "We're here."
He opened his eyes and leaned forward to look through the windshield. He set his jaw.
"They held," he said.
"Yeah." I shook on the yoke. "They held."
I brought the Cessna down ugly. The landing gear hit the patched runway, and the whole airframe shuddered.
We bounced once, twice, and I muscled the yoke forward and kept us on the ground through sheer stubbornness and the knowledge that crashing this close to the hangar would be a stupid way to die.
The engine coughed and died when I cut it. The propeller wound down, and the silence rushed in, huge after hours of noise.
Mila woke up. She pressed her face against the window and looked out at the damaged base and the people moving toward us across the tarmac.
"Is this home?" she asked.
I looked at the scorch marks and the craters, and the figures running toward our plane. I looked at Jasper with blood on his face and his daughter in his arms.
"Not yet, pequena," I said. "But it's close."
I barely got the Cessna door open before my mother was there, crossing the tarmac at a speed that defied every law of physics and most of the ones she'd learned in church.
She grabbed my face in both hands, pulled me down, kissed my forehead, then slapped the side of my head hard enough to make my ears ring.
"Ow. Mamá..."
"No messages?" She grabbed my ear.
“The comms were dead, and Vihan’s last message said there was an attack.”
"I thought you were dead, Diego. Dead."
"I'm not dead."
"You look dead." She pulled back and took in the blood on my shirt, the bandage on my shoulder, the circles under my eyes.
She pressed her lips together and locked it down.
My mother did not cry in front of people.
My mother cried in the kitchen at two in the morning when she thought no one could hear, and I'd inherited that from her along with her jaw and her stubbornness.
She pulled me into her arms and held on. I buried my face in her hair, and the smell of her shampoo and wood smoke and something baking hit me all at once, and my knees almost buckled.
"I'm okay, Mamá," I said into her shoulder. "I'm okay."
"You are not okay. You are bleeding on my blouse." She tightened her grip. "But you are alive, and that is what matters, and we will discuss your definition of okay later when I have time to yell at you properly."
Jasper climbed down from the Cessna with Mila. My mother looked at them, looked at the blood on Jasper's face and the bruises on Mila's throat, and crossed herself.