Pacific Fire (10 page)

“That's far.” Sofía pressed her lips together.

Fernando nodded. “What's the cargo?”

“Us,” Sam said, indicating himself and Em.

Sofía gave them an appraising look, as if she were estimating their weight and value. “So this isn't for-profit. What kind of trouble are you kids in?”

Sam gave her an honest answer. “I don't want to say too specifically, but it could be a lot of trouble.”

“If Sofía's going up, you will have to be very specific,” Fernando said. “That's the way it works. You make a proposal, you tell us everything, and then we decide if it's worth it.” There was a bit of gentle admonishment in his tone, as if Sam were one of his kids and was getting a lecture on the importance of brushing his teeth. Sam didn't mind. He found it oddly comforting.

“The Emmas trust the Bautistas,” Em said to Sam. “Daniel did, too. He would have told them everything.”

Sam didn't know if that was true, but then, how much choice did he have? They needed a flight to the island, and the Bautistas had a plane.

So Sam told them things. But not everything. He told them why he needed to get to Catalina, and what Daniel had intended to do once he got there. He told them he was an osteomancer, but not how rare he was. No need for them to know how much money they could get by selling him to a rich Angelino.

When Sam was done talking, Fernando stroked his mustache and looked over the map. “That explains what you need us for. Hounds aren't much of a threat when you're a couple thousand feet up. And we can get you from the desert to the island without ever having to touch ground. You'll need a pickup, too?”

“Once we're on the beach, you'll take off again,” Em said. “When we're done, we'll signal you.”

Nobody needed to say that this arrangement doubled the risk. One undetected landing was optimistic enough. Two would be pushing it. And while Sam and Em were running around the facility, Sofía would be circling in enemy airspace.

Sam looked up at the drawings on the refrigerator. They were nonsense scribbles, nothing recognizable in them, but they moved him all the same. He'd never drawn a picture that ended up on a refrigerator.

Fernando brought up the subject of money.

Sam opened the diplomatic pouch and placed all their remaining cash on the table. “This is 24,400. It's all we have.”

Em gave him a look, but he ignored it. He wasn't just paying for a round-trip flight. He was paying for the chance to orphan three kids.

*   *   *

The tire swing swayed from the oak branch, the ropes creaking softly against the sounds of crickets and frogs in the irrigation ditches. Alone in the yard, Sam sat on the swing and looked up beyond the sharp edge of the roofline. The black sky was punctured with stars. He wanted to go back in the house and tell the Bautistas he'd changed his mind. Better yet, just grab Em and drive away, be miles distant before anyone noticed they'd left.

The screen door banged, and Fernando came over and joined him at the tree.

“How can you be okay with your wife doing this?”

Fernando looked tired, and the smile he gave Sam was one he probably never revealed to his children.

“Sofía is a good woman. She's a good wife and a great mother. I love her very much. But if Los Angeles ever decides they need our water for something else, the farm's done, and so are we. Flying brings in twice as much as farming, and we won't see our children impoverished and sold off seven times a week as day slaves. We won't see them digging a rich man's ditch, or doing unspeakable things for some pornographer.”

“If you lose your wife, it'll turn out a bad bet.” It sounded cold, but math was cold, and life was measured on balance sheets. What didn't show up on the bottom line was the pain of living with those calculations.

“Did they ever tell you in school that you could be anything you wanted to be?”

“I didn't go to school,” Sam said.

“Well, that's what I learned. From school, from my parents, from the air. All I had to do was set my mind on a goal, work very hard, and I could be anything at all.”

“And what did you want to be?”

“For me it wasn't a what. It was a where. I wanted to be anywhere outside the Southern realm. Somewhere without the Ministry of Justice Dispensation. Somewhere without cartels. Somewhere without a Hierarch.”

“Everywhere has a Hierarch,” Sam said. “They may call it something else, and it may not be one man or one woman, but wherever you go, there's always someone who gets to eat more magic than everyone else, or pile up more money than everyone else.”

Fernando nodded. “I figured that out. I worked for many of those people, the little Hierarchs. I couldn't get away from them. But Sofía and I could build this.” He waved his hand at his house and fields. “It's a tiny fortress. Or an island. We're not untouchable here. We track our shoes through the kingdom's dirt all the time. But a flimsy fence is better than none at all.”

And that's what Daniel wanted for Sam. Escaping to Tahoe, or Mexico, or to the shaded creases between the Sierra mountains … It would never be more than a flimsy barrier between Sam and some kind of Hierarch. But Daniel considered it worth striving for. And to risk dying for.

“Come back inside,” Fernando said. “Get a few hours of sleep. We'll want to be in the air before dawn.”

*   *   *

The stars were still out when Sam and Em helped Sofía push her four-seat prop plane out of a corrugated metal barn. It was an awkward contraption, with a pair of amphibious floats below the wings and three-wheeled landing gear attached to each float.

“Isn't this a little big for crop dusting?” Em asked.

Sofía stroked the fuselage like a cowboy in love with his horse. “She's more than just a crop duster. This is an AM-Garuda 1015. She belonged to the Ministry of Fire, back when they still operated this far from the capital. I can skim across a lake and fill the floats with water, or use them to store contraband. I've even smuggled people in there. Fernando swapped in engine and cockpit armor, put in self-sealing fuel tanks and a bulletproof windshield. He's a crack mechanic, and I'm a crack pilot, and she's the best bird in the Mojave. She'll get you to Catalina.”

Sam couldn't help but grin at her pride.

Fernando came over from the house, where he'd been watching the kids. He handed Sofía a shotgun and box of shells and kissed her passionately enough that Sam felt it proper to look away.

While Sofía walked around the plane for a preflight inspection, Fernando came up close to Sam.

“You're a powerful osteomancer?” he asked.

Daniel had prepared Sam to answer this question, whether asked by a stranger, a friend, or a cop, whether asked out of idle curiosity or from someone making a business proposal or interrogating him or beating him or begging him for magic to heal a wound. The answer was always supposed to be the same: No.

He glanced toward the house. The children were standing on the back steps in their pajamas.

“I'm more of an ingredient than a proper osteomancer.”

“How powerful?”

“Very,” Sam said. “A high-value ingredient for any soup.”

Fernando nodded. “If there's a problem, if there's trouble, if you can help my wife but you decide not to, because it'll compromise your own safety, because it'll cost you something … if my wife comes to harm and you didn't do everything you could to help her, osteomancer or not…”

He didn't finish the sentence, nor did he need to.

“I will,” Sam said.

Fernando gave Sofía a final look, even more intimate than the kiss, and he returned to the house to stand with the children.

Sam took the front passenger seat while Em buckled herself into the back. When Sofía was done with her preflight routine, she waved toward the house, at Fernando and her children. They all waved back, as though she were just heading off for work. The engine coughed into life and the five-bladed propeller became a blur.

Sofía taxied onto a strip of flattened dirt between rows of alfalfa, and without ceremony she commenced a rumbling sprint. Sam hadn't anticipated things would be so loud. Every creak and squeak from the plane no doubt signaled a vital screw coming loose or a spar cracking. He'd seen planes in flight, of course, but he'd never actually been in one. Clearly, the whole enterprise was a hoax.

Sam didn't imagine Sofía would run them into the irrigation ditch at the end of the air strip, at least not for the first several seconds of takeoff. Then he began to suspect it was a possibility. And then it became a certainty. Only his unwillingness to humiliate himself in front of Em kept him from emitting a panicked little squeal.

When the ride smoothed out and Sam looked down to find they were several feet off the ground, he let out a quiet breath of relief. All was forgiven.

Minutes later, they were in deep sky. The stars twinkled above, and lights from water projects and lonely desert settlements twinkled below.

Sofía motioned for Sam to put on the bulky headphones dangling in front of him. Em already had her set on.

“You kids ever fly before?”

“Yeah,” Em said, without elaborating. No doubt she'd participated in some kind of avian black ops, probably involving parachuting and maybe some wing walking.

“Not me,” said Sam.

“Well, make yourself comfortable. Sick bags are under your seats. We'll be heading south a while, and then a right turn over the San Andreas Abyss. Most pilots hate flying over it, so I don't expect company. But if you see a moving light out there, anything that looks like it could, might, maybe be a plane, don't assume I see it, too. Tell me.”

The Abyss had about the same reputation as the Bermuda Triangle, but Sofía sounded chipper. She liked flying her plane. And once Sam got used to the noises and jolts and vibrations, he was surprised to find he liked it, too. Loved it, actually. If he closed his eyes, he was no longer inside a flying machine with a fuel-combustion engine. It was him flying, not the airplane. He wanted to open his door and step out and spread his arms and race beside the airplane. He wanted to soar up beyond the thin gauze of clouds. The Hierarch had eaten garuda raptor and other flying creatures. Maybe flight was in Sam's bones.

A little while later, the plane banked a sharp right turn. Sam looked over the dials arrayed before Sofía and found the compass. They were going west now, toward Los Angeles and Catalina. Since leaving the capital, Daniel had dragged Sam up and down the desert and along winding paths in sequoia forests and through mountain passes. But never into Los Angeles. The weight of their undertaking settled in his gut, and at the same time, he experienced a thrill of liberation.

“I wish it was daylight so you guys could see,” Sofía said over the intercom. “We're coming up on the Abyss. It's beautiful from this high up.”

Perfect black spread out below, the lights of human settlement and engineering long behind them. No canals or roads came near here.

Sam was about to say he was sad over missing the splendor when the windshield shattered. Glass and deafening wind roared through the cockpit and cabin, cutting Sam's cheeks. Papers whipped through the air—maps and Gabriel Argent's Catalina intel. There was a harsh beep that must be the stall alarm, and also an unsettling absence of engine noise. The plane flexed under stress with horrific groans and creaks, and the left wing dipped. They were falling.

Sam hunched in the crash position, icy air rushing through his ears. Bits of bulletproof glass struck his scalp as more pieces cracked loose from the windshield.

He lifted his head. Blood drizzled down Sofía's chin. She yanked on the stick with both hands, and her wail of effort penetrated through the rest of the noise, but she couldn't budge it. She was screaming something, Sam couldn't hear what. His headphones had come off and jiggled at the end of their coiled cord.

He was not frightened. He felt remorse for getting Em and Sofía entangled in his problems. He felt bad for never getting to know Valerie in Bombay Beach, and he was sorry Faith the café owner would never get her pickup truck back. He was sorry he'd never see Daniel again.

Lowering himself back into the crash position, he was struck by an impression, or an essence, of gliding. Even with his arms wrapped around his knees, he felt as if they were spread wide. Membranes broad as yacht sales stretched out, rippling in the wind. The air was cold, but inside, he burned, hot as lava. He saw the plane from outside, contours and edges bright and clear and sharp. The plane plummeted toward a deep earthen scar below.

He was hallucinating. Stress. Fear. Maybe a concussion. Yet he knew it was none of these things.

Flames wavered outside, a bright halo streaming past the windows like water, and Sam knew the engine hadn't caught fire, just as he knew the sense of personal flight and subterranean heat was no illusion. It was osteomancy, and he was doing it.

There was a sense of slowing, of lifting, right before the plane struck the ground with a tooth-loosening impact and chewed through dirt and rock, fine dust swirling in clouds, pebbles striking the metal skin as if being shot from a machine gun. The landing gear fractured and crumpled and the propeller blades chopped into the earth.

Then, silence.

Sam twisted around in his seat. Bits of glass glittered in Em's hair. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were freckled with blood. A deep red line about half an inch long over her left eyebrow streamed blood, soaking her eyelashes and falling in droplets down her face, but she seemed to move fine as she unbuckled her harness. She wrestled with her door and managed to kick it open. After slinging Sofía's rifle over her shoulder, she tossed out their bags and climbed down bent wing struts and crumpled float tanks to the ground.

Sofía still gripped the stick with white fingers. Blood streamed from a red splash on her forehead.