Terminal Velocity

The jump light bled from red to green, and Devi Ranjan surrendered herself to the roar of nothing. For a heartbeat there was only the slipstream tearing at her jaw and the obscene beauty of a wildfire seen from above. Sixty acres of the Cascade backcountry were incandescent, a lesion of orange spreading through the dark like something alive and gorging. She was a smokejumper, one of four hundred souls in the country trained to fall out of the sky toward the very thing that everyone else runs from. The canopy cracked open above her with a jolt that snapped her teeth together, and the world decelerated into something survivable. Protocol was gospel: jumpers were dropped upwind, into the black, onto ground the fire had already devoured and abandoned. That was the covenant that kept them alive, and Hollis, her spotter, had recited it to her a hundred times. So it took Devi four full seconds of falling to comprehend that the wind was wrong, that the heat was rising to meet her rather than falling away. They had dropped her downwind, on the flank, straight into the throat of the advancing head. The realization arrived not as panic but as a cold, forensic clarity: this was not an error a veteran pilot could make by accident. She hauled on the toggles, spilling air, fighting for every metre of westing she could steal from the updraft. The radio in her helmet crackled, and Hollis's voice came through it thin and unhurried, almost apologetic. "Wind shifted after we committed, Ranjan. Nothing we could do. Ride it down and dig in." It was a lie so smooth it had clearly been rehearsed, and the certainty of that turned her stomach to ice. The ground came up in a smear of ash and glowing stumps, and she flared late, striking the slope hard enough to drive the breath from her ribs. She rolled, gathered the collapsing nylon, and for one merciful instant lay still on scorched earth that pulsed with residual heat. Then she saw it, half-buried in the cinders three metres away: not a tree, not a rock, but the blackened aluminium tail of a light aircraft that no manifest had ever mentioned. Somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure this wreck burned, and Devi had just been posted, unwitting, as its final witness.