CHAPTER TWO
Amanda Parker's first thought was that her head felt like someone had taken a hammer to it. The pain pulsed behind her eyes in waves that made her want to curl up and go back to sleep. She kept her eyes closed and tried to remember what she'd done the night before that would explain a hangover this bad. As far as she could recall, she hadn’t drunk a single thing. So maybe she was getting sick. God, the flu would be the absolute worst thing right now. She didn’t have time to be sick…
She'd gone to bed early because she had a jump scheduled for this morning. A corporate event in Santa Monica where she was supposed to do a tandem skydive with some tech executive who wanted the thrill without the training. There were far too many of those douchebags making appointments these days.
Then the cold hit her. She wasn’t just chilly, but freezing in a way that didn't make sense.
Her apartment had good heating and she always kept it warm.
This felt like winter air, sharp enough to make her lungs ache when she breathed.
And the air itself was wrong. Thin. Each breath required more effort than it should have, like she was trying to pull oxygen through cotton.
What the hell?...
Amanda forced her eyes open.
The first thing she saw was sky. Not a ceiling or the familiar view from her bedroom window, but open sky stretching in every direction. Pale 'blue-gray in the pre-dawn light with wisps of clouds drifting past at eye level.
Her brain struggled to process what she was seeing. This had to be a dream. One of those vivid ones that felt real until you woke up. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, willing herself to wake up in her bed where she belonged.
When she opened them again, the sky was still there. And she felt even colder now.
Amanda's confusion shifted into something sharper.
She tried to sit up and realized she couldn't move properly.
Something was holding her in place. She looked down at herself and saw that she was strapped into a harness, the kind used for climbing or industrial work rather than skydiving.
The straps crossed her chest and wrapped around her legs, securing her in a seated position.
And beneath her was nothing.
Los Angeles spread out so far below that the city looked like a map.
The lights were tiny pinpricks scattered across the dark landscape.
She could see the grids of streets, the clusters of downtown buildings, the snaking line of the freeway.
Everything was miniature and impossibly distant.
And oddly beautiful, despite the rising fear and panic in her chest.
The realization crashed over her with physical force.
She was in the air. Thousands of feet above the city.
She was somehow actually suspended in the sky with nothing beneath her but empty space and a fall that would kill her instantly. She did everything she could to convince herself that she was still asleep and this was only a very vivid dream. But she knew that wasn’t the case.
"No." The word came out as a whisper, then louder. "No, no, no."
This couldn't be real. People didn't just wake up floating in the air. This was impossible. She had to be dreaming or hallucinating or having some kind of psychotic break.
But the cold was too real. The thin air burning her lungs was too real. The harness cutting into her thighs was too real. Panic roared up within her like a lion, but she knew if she let it out, she’d lose all rational ability to think.
She looked up and saw what was holding her aloft.
A cluster of weather balloons floated above her, maybe eight or ten of them, each one massive and filled with something that made them strain upward against the harness lines.
They were a silvery-white in color, reflecting the pre-dawn light.
They held steady, swaying gently in the wind currents.
The wind. She could feel it now, pushing against her body and making the harness sway in slow arcs. The motion made her stomach lurch.
"Help!" Her voice came out hoarse and weak. "Somebody help me!"
But there was no one to hear and she knew it was useless as soon as she let the words out.
She was alone in the sky, suspended by balloons like some kind of sick joke.
Panic came closer to the surface, an unnamable monster that told her it was okay to scream, to lose her shit, to go a little crazy because really, what the fuck was going on?
Amanda's hands went to the harness buckles, her fingers fumbling with the clasps.
They were stiff from the cold and didn't want to cooperate.
She pulled at the straps, trying to find a release mechanism, but whoever had put her in this thing had made sure she couldn't get out easily.
Her fingers were going numb. She looked at them and saw they were pale and bloodless from the cold and the altitude.
How high was she? Eight thousand feet? Ten thousand?
High enough that the air was thin and the temperature had dropped to near freezing.
Amanda forced herself to stop struggling and think. She was a professional skydiver. She'd done hundreds of jumps. She knew how to handle emergency situations in the air and had handled a handful during her ten years with the job. She just needed to calm down and assess the problem logically.
Except this wasn't like any emergency she'd trained for. She had no parachute. No way to control her descent. She was trapped in a harness connected to balloons that were keeping her airborne through no action of her own.
How had this happened? The last thing she remembered was getting ready for bed. She'd brushed her teeth, set her alarm, climbed under the covers. Everything had been normal. And now she was here, floating above Los Angeles in the freezing dawn.
Someone had done this to her. Someone had broken into her apartment, drugged her, or somehow gotten her unconscious and brought her up here and left her to die.
That was the only explanation she could think of.
The thought made her start struggling again despite knowing it was useless.
She pulled at the harness straps and kicked her legs, searching for any weakness in the system that held her captive.
Her breath came in gasps that made white clouds in the cold air.
"Please." She didn't know who she was talking to. God maybe, or just the universe that had put her in this impossible situation. "Please, I don't want to die like this."
She looked down again at the city so far below. From this height she could see the curvature of the earth at the horizon. Could see the mountains in the distance catching the first light of dawn. It would have been beautiful if she wasn't about to fall to her death.
She tried to think of solutions. Could she climb up the harness lines to the balloons? Pop them in a controlled way that would let her descend gradually? Maybe…but she had nothing to climb with and no way to control a descent even if she could reach the balloons.
She was stuck. Completely and utterly stuck with no way down except gravity. She’d either fall to her death, freeze to death or, if she rose high enough, eventually suffocate.
Just as she started to hyperventilate, a sudden sound cut through her spiral of panic.
A loud pop from somewhere above her head, sharp as a gunshot in the thin air.
She looked up just in time to see one of the balloons burst. Shreds of white material fluttered away on the wind as the balloon collapsed in on itself and started drifting down toward her.
The harness lurched beneath her and Amanda felt herself start to drop.