He loaded the ampoule into the autoinjector. “Because I wasn’t sure she was going in alone until now, and if she had forced me to come along, I would have quietly injected myself and then saved my own skin.”
She made a disgusted sound. “You’re a disgrace, Cotton.”
“Ah, a wise coward is more valuable than a brave fool.” He injected Grady, and then, after another glare from her, he injected Alexa with the contents of the last ampoule. “I told you I would share everything. I just didn’t say when.”
They all exchanged looks.
Cotton broke the silence with a clap of his hands. “Well, good luck with the mission then. Off you go, and be in touch on the q-link.”
Grady stood on the roof wearing his gravis harness and the helmet Alexa had given him. She was thirty feet away—possibly for the last time. It was past midnight again, and as he glanced over at the Chicago skyline, he couldn’t help but remember their flight the night before. He looked over to her and smiled wanly.
She paused before putting her own helmet on and instead approached him. “Wait.”
Grady flipped up his visor. “What is it? Something wrong?”
Alexa came right up to him. “I’ve never really known anyone outside the organization. Not really. I realize that now. Be careful, Jon.” Her hand gripped his harness, and she leaned forward to give him a kiss on the cheek.
He smiled slightly and then leaned forward to kiss her on the lips. After a few moments he looked into her eyes. “Your skin feels warm.”
She nodded, looking somewhat surprised. “Yes.” She caught her breath, then put her helmet on. She walked back to her ready position.
Grady watched her and nodded. “You be careful, too.”
“Listen for my call.”
“I will.”
And with that she became weightless, pushed off the roof, and moments later fell into the starry sky like a rock tossed into a well.
Grady stared after her. After a few more moments, he realized just how much he wanted to survive the next twenty-four hours.
Alexa had charted Grady’s route with the nav unit in the scout helmet. It projected whatever maps he needed onto his visor—along with the standoff destination where he was to wait until she called.
He ascended to nearly two thousand feet above Cotton’s building before falling northward, across the city and out over the moonlit lake. It was a clear night, and though it was dark, he felt incredibly exposed. There were small plane navigation lights blinking in the distance, but he’d gotten pretty good at maneuvering and felt that as long as he kept his eyes open, he’d be able to avoid any air traffic.
With the helmet he was able to accelerate comfortably into a terminal velocity fall—roughly a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Judging by the map, that meant it would take him nearly two hours to reach his destination—a small island in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. He wouldn’t actually move to the island until he got Alexa’s signal, but his standby position was just a few miles away.
Grady fell across the dark sky, the light of a half-moon casting its glow on the water. It was beautiful, but he had no one else to marvel at it with. He wondered if the BTC harvester teams even noticed this beauty.
He saw the lights of a passing ship off in the distance, but nothing near him. Grady fell for scores of miles. His goal was to cross the lake on a northward diagonal and then track along the eastern coast. The islands were just off the mainland, and with the night vision setting of the helmet visor, he should have been able to find them even without a map.
After a little less than an hour he saw the dark, thinly populated coast, and he came over land above what looked like a power plant near a place named Pigeon Lake, at least according to the visor’s map. Much to his consternation there was a municipal airport close by, but it looked quiet at this late hour.
He changed his angle of descent and started falling due north, hugging the coast. Grady studied the lights passing beneath him—or, as it seemed, to the side of him—as he fell alongside the vast wall of landscape. He crossed the mouth of an inlet where a lighthouse stood, then headed where sandy dunes caught the moonlight.
Two thousand feet below he caught sight of a roaring bonfire on the beach, and he couldn’t resist slowing and finally gliding to a stop. He stared between his feet as he floated in equilibrium, a light breeze buffeting him. It was otherwise silent.
And then he heard laughter and voices far below. Rock music. Grady smiled. He was like an owl in the night.
With that he jammed his controller forward and fell again, northward at terminal velocity. He kept following the contours of the coastline as it curved away and then back again.
Eventually, after nearly two hours and hundreds of miles of rural coastline, he came close to his destination. Grady started scanning the map in his visor and aimed toward the little town of Empire, Michigan. He could see there were sizable bluffs here with dunes leading down to the water and lightly forested hills inland.
Grady frowned at his map as a U.S. Air Force air station came into view some miles away—he was definitely going to avoid that. He wondered what kind of radar signature he might have. No, best to get lower. Now that he was only ten miles or so from his standoff location, he had to find a place to land and await Alexa’s signal.
Ahead of him was the top of a hill overlooking the small town and the lands beyond, so he slowed and pointed his angle of descent downward, dialing down gravity to just a quarter of its normal pull.
As the moonlit, lightly wooded landscape came up to meet him, he scanned for anyone who might see, but he was far out in the countryside. He then pulled his gravity back to almost zero and coasted down onto the ground with his forward momentum.
Grady was pleased with himself when he alighted with only a slight misstep, stood, and finally turned off the gravis entirely. He now stood on a grassy hilltop in the dark, crickets thrumming around him.
Before him was a view of the little town of Empire, Michigan, in a shallow valley.
Were there bears in Michigan? He looked around in every direction. But then he remembered he could fly. As he stared up at the stars, he smiled to himself. The situation was terrible, of course. But the universe could still be so beautiful. He thought about Alexa and hoped his diversion would help her get into BTC headquarters safely. He would make sure of it. He just hoped Cotton’s mole was reliable, and that she could get close enough to BTC headquarters to enact their plan.
After falling the two hundred and thirty miles from Chicago to Detroit (the slow way since she didn’t have a pressurized suit), Alexa came in toward the nondescript BTC headquarters using the cover of the Penobscot Building downtown to shield her approach. It stood forty-seven stories—ten taller than the aboveground portion of the BTC, and once she alighted onto one of its art deco ledges, she found herself nearly six hundred feet above the pavement.
She glanced below and around her to make sure no one was nearby and that she’d triggered no security alarms. She also scanned for the presence of surveillance dust. It would have been too late not to trigger an alarm, but if they knew she was here, she’d rather know now so she could attempt escape.
But there were no advanced sensors on this far side of the Penobscot, whose roof was about seven hundred feet away from the BTC. She knew the surveillance system covered the BTC headquarters in every direction—and this building gave her the most advantageous cover to draw close unobserved. Given Hedrick’s quarrels with the government and the destruction he’d wrought with Kratos, the BTC was still no doubt on high alert.