In retrospect, it wasn't one of his better plans.

Ra's escaping with the sole parachute Oliver had surreptitiously left on board for Nyssa quickly dismantled his self-sacrificing aspirations, and he was forced to crash land a cargo plane with only two out of the four engines in working condition.

When he regained his senses, smoke was filling the cockpit, and an orange glow was swelling outside the viewports. He felt a wetness roll down his forehead and nose, and when he absently wiped at it, his fingers came away smeared red. In the copilot seat beside him, Nyssa was slumped forward against her seatbelt. Blood similarly dripped off her chin from an unidentified wound. Reaching across the throttle console, Oliver pulled her upright and pressed his fingers against her neck, finding a strong pulse under his touch.

Sparks popped from the control panel while larger eruptions in the sabotaged engines rocked the plane. He wasted no further time in working himself free of his restraints and proceeded to crawl behind Nyssa. Unbuckling her straps, he hauled her out of the copilot's seat and into his arms, sending shards of glass clattering to the floor. As he carried his wife across the cargo hold and down the loading ramp, the two remaining engines ignited with a violent blast, nearly knocking Oliver off his feet.

Moving swiftly away from the combusting wreckage, he gently set Nyssa down against a large piece of fuselage that had torn free during their landing. Her bleeding had already begun to slow, the majority of it coming from somewhere above her right temple. A smaller laceration ran across her jaw bone on the same side.

Confident she would be all right as long as she didn't have a concussion, Oliver directed his attention to their surroundings. They had landed in a dry field of the rural outskirts miles outside Starling. A line of trees obscured his view, but he assumed they were southeast of the city boundaries. It would be a long walk back to civilization and any mode of transportation.

He exhaled in frustration. That was time they didn't have.

Turning back, he found Nyssa watching him quietly. "We're still alive," she noted blandly.

He had a feeling she wasn't referring to the crash. "Looks like it."

Deeming her alert and lucid, Oliver was once again left to guess at her thoughts. His wife's face had been unreadable when the plane's engines began to fail, continuing as she stared at him over the edge of her father's sword. He had searched her eyes for confirmation that she still stood with him but was confronted with only an impenetrable hardness. Then came the moment he declared his true name, causing that stoic mask to falter. Nyssa's eyes had flickered from his own to her father and finally to the blade at her throat. It was the point of no return, and it wasn't until he tossed his sword to his wife that she seemed to commit to her decision.

"For a minute, I thought you might have changed your mind back there," Oliver recalled.

She shrugged a shoulder in casual admission. "I considered it. It would have been a simple thing," she mused, "to wait you out, remain obedient in the background while you turned against my father."

"Why didn't you?"

Nyssa broke from his gaze, instead looking towards the tree line and the city beyond. "He would have unleashed the virus anyway just to make you watch. To allow thousands of innocents to die in vain hope that he might once again treat me as his heir, or even just his daughter…" She shook her head. "I could not." She gave a grunt of self-deprecating despair. "It seems they will die anyway."

"Not tonight. We can still stop this."

"With what? Father sent the main task force ahead of us. They were already here awaiting our arrival. He will have more than enough men to overwhelm our efforts."

"Then let's hope we still have a few friends of our own." Climbing to his feet, Oliver offered her his hand. "Are you with me?"

The woman hesitated while she assessed both his query and his gesture of aid. "I don't see that I have a choice."

"There's always a choice, Nyssa, even if we don't like the options."

After one final deliberation, the assassin nodded her assent and accepted his hand while she stood. By that point, the fires of the plane's engines had dwindled to a low smolder, and Oliver took the opportunity to reenter the cargo hold. He emerged a few moments later with his recurve bow in one hand, Nyssa's compound bow in the other, and a green canvas pack marked by a red cross tucked under his arm.

"We should head for Palmer Tech," he said, handing the compound bow to his wife. "If all went according to plan, the others should be back in Starling within the next few hours."

Nyssa regarded the wreckage of the plane with a dubious expression. "If this is any indication of how your plans usually turn out, I fear for all of us." She was silent for a minute as he rummage through the first aid kit for something they could use to clean the blood from themselves. Then, "Oliver, all of this has left me with one question."

"Shoot."

"Where did you learn to fly a cargo plane?"

Oliver looked up at her in surprise, then snorted. It wasn't the question he was expecting. Not by far. "That's…a long story."