They had been flying for about four hours when Miss Parker identified the smell in the air. She had caught the scent about an hour back but only now did it spark a neuron: meat. The chopper cockpit smelled like over-seasoned hamburger. She looked over across the controls at Jarod, wondering whether she'd bother to mention it. It took all of a half-second to take him in — jaw tight, listing slightly to one side off his bad leg, blinking a little too long. He was flagging again.
"Wake up!" she barked. Jarod jerked, a full-body wince.
"I'm awake," he said. He cast her a regretful look. "Thank you."
His voice came through tinny and distorted over the helicopter communication system. Against Jarod's recommendations, Miss Parker had moved her headphones partially off her ears two hours into the flight. Two hours with plastic clamped around her head was enough to give her a headache. She re-adjusted them so that they covered her ears fully.
"You know, the least you could do when you're keeling over while piloting a helicopter would be to inform your co-pilot," said Miss Parker, ignoring his thanks. "If you pass out, I have to take over. A warning would be nice."
"I was awake," Jarod insisted. He caught her eye. "I was just… focusing. Focusing on locating the airfield."
Airfield. 'Airfield' meant landing this contraption. 'Airfield' meant going their separate ways. The deadline rushed towards Miss Parker like a fall over a precipice. Her stomach roiled. On second thought, given the circumstances, maybe she was better off avoiding analogies to precipitous falls.
"We passed an airport when we rounded Michigan's southern shore," she pointed out. "Why this one?" It was true. They were going the long way around the Great Lakes, after mutually agreeing not to travel over open water; she'd seen an airport near the shore and had wondered about it at the time. In the end, she had stayed mute. She couldn't second-guess Jarod now, not while he dangled her life miles above sea level.
Jarod glanced over at her, a quick assessment. Miss Parker caught the look and scowled — she knew his body language by now, and this look meant he was deciding whether to divulge yet another secret. He was so fixated on hoarding every scrap of secrecy, every shred of a private life he could get his hands on, that having a conversation with him could be like pulling teeth.
"I have a cache at this airfield coming up," he said, with a trace of reluctance. Aha, thought Miss Parker. Passed the test.
"Cash?" she repeated. Even with the communication system, it was oppressively loud in the cockpit.
"A cache. IDs, an extra DSA machine, some clothes… other things," he said. "Including, yes, some cash. I have caches all over the country, and a couple in Canada and Mexico."
Another puzzle piece slotted into place.
"Huh," she said. "Always wondered how you managed to skip town on a moment's notice without stopping to pick up anything from your base-of-the-week. You didn't need to, did you? Your home base was —"
"The entirety of the North American continent," Jarod finished with a quick grin. Before it disappeared behind the pinch of pain and fatigue, the grin reminded Miss Parker of the early days post-escape, that smug look he'd get right before slipping through her fingers. He'd never claimed to be humble, and he'd never needed to be. That grin had always foreshadowed another win in his column. In a odd kind of way, it reassured her to see it now, now that she was… ostensibly on his side. Or at least, not actively against him.
No, don't think about that. Not right now.
Miss Parker scanned the skyline for an air traffic control tower. As an avoidance tactic, her mind twisted itself around banality: the harsh wind whipping through the cockpit, her chapped lips, the faint smell of burger seasoning, the incessant bumping of the metal control panel against her knees. It was easier than digesting the enormity of what she'd done. After years of chasing after Jarod, she'd made the explicit decision to set him free. Worse, she'd flown off into the sun set with him — almost literally, had it not been mid-afternoon at the time.
Had the sweepers seen her? Had Sydney? If he had, would he tell? She had no idea where she stood with the Centre, whether she was a fugitive now or simply missing in action. Was her life as she knew it over, or was this only a brief hiccup? She tried to re-focus on banality, but it was like trying to brick up a crumbling dam as the flood waters rise.
"Do you smell meat?" she said, to force the issue.
"Yes," said Jarod. He didn't expand on the point.
Miss Parker tried to turn around in her seat. It was difficult, as she was pretty thoroughly strapped in. She needed to be, with nothing more than a flimsy door between her and… a long drop with a sudden stop.
"Where's it coming from?"
"MREs," he said, monotonous and curt.
Single words only, Miss Parker noted. Either Jarod was fading fast or he was simply hyperfocusing, she couldn't divine the reason if she tried. She didn't have the mental energy to shrink that over-sized brain of his at the moment. Behind her, she spotted the case of Meals Ready to Eat. A second later, she spotted the reason for the smell. There was a long, gaping tear through the case, and food spilled out over the rest of the sweepers' supplies. She reached back and felt around at the extreme edge of the tear, and her fingers closed around a small piece of warped metal. She held it up to examine. A bullet.
In her mind's eye, she replayed their departure from the hospital in Philadelphia. An assortment of cops, sweepers and Centre employees had seen them off in style from the rooftop. Miss Parker's go-to sweeper, Sam, had shot at the helicopter as it rose. Miss Parker turned the bullet over to peer at its crumpled impact point. This must be where his shot had landed. She traced the path of the bullet backwards through the case of MREs to a conspicuous tear at a vulnerable meeting of window plexiglass and fuselage metal. The bullet seemed to have hit the body of the chopper at a weird angle, tearing up a ragged triangle-shaped hole just behind Jarod's seat. Well, if their worst problem was a ripped case of MREs, they had little to complain about.
Their worst problem was not a ripped case of MREs, as soon became apparent.
The first sign of trouble was Jarod's white-knuckled grip on the controls. Miss Parker opened her mouth to ask, but was interrupted by a nauseating tilt in her gut. The body of the helicopter twisted in the air, yawwing sharply to the left as if veering around an invisible obstacle. There was no obstacle, however, and the chopper continued its mid-air pirouette, slowly at first but gathering speed.
"Secure your door and double-check your harness," ordered Jarod through gritted teeth. "When this really gets spinning the centrifugal force could spin you out into the sky if you're not buckled down."
"What's happening?" she shouted, silently cursing him for that horrible mental image. Flung out into the clear blue, with nothing to embrace but the pull of gravity. Suddenly there seemed not nearly enough to hang onto; still, she patted around every surface in reach for further hand-holds, feeling impotent. Out through the front window of the canopy, the skyline see-sawed crazily, alternating rosy orange and dusky purple as they turned alternately forward and away from the setting sun. The ground seemed already far too close, far too soon.
"I think something's damaged the tail rotor. I'm trying to add rudder to counter the spin but it's not —" Jarod gasped from the effort. "— it's not responding. Or it's not enough. Either way, best I can do is try to bring us down gradually. But it's not —"
Jarod broke off to wrestle with the controls. But it's not… what?, Miss Parker was tempted to ask. But it's not easy, maybe. But it's not going to work, and we're plummeting to our deaths, this seemed more likely. The sunset-lit horizon whipped by her field of vision again, and her eye snagged on an irregularity — there, a tower splintering out of the endless horizontal. Air traffic control. She swallowed a laugh. Some help air traffic control was now.
The force of their spin pressed Miss Parker's frame insistently against the door. Only a fraction of an inch of plexiglass and lightweight metal between her and, and — it didn't bear thinking about.
"Parachute," she gasped. "Where —" She could kick herself for not thinking of it sooner. Where had she seen a parachute? She fished under her seat, hoping to feel fabric under her fingertips. Beside her, Jarod shook his head.
"Wouldn't work, we're not high enough for the chutes to deploy in time. And the chopper blades would shred them, anyway. We're safer in the helicopter than out of it. Hold on!" It was a pointless warning. Miss Parker was already holding on with every limb she had available to her.
There was a loud scraping sound — a tree branch, clawing to get in — and a comparatively innocuous-sounding clunk. Miss Parker's door sprang open and, true to Jarod's warning, she was torn from her seat. A deep, sharp pain speared down her arm and she collided shoulder-first with something knobbly and rough. Again, her instincts told her to hang on, so she reached out blindly and grabbed at whatever she could. Her fingers met rough, sticky bark and an inhospitable thicket of needles, nothing that offered purchase. Her instincts failed her, and she fell.
Falling through the branches of a tree was nothing like it was in the cartoons. It took a lot less time, for one, since the branches were not arranged carefully for maximal comedic effect, nor did they act as mini-trampolines to bounce down little by little to solid ground. Instead, she fell more-or-less straight down, while branches and bark tore at her clothes, hair and skin. She landed in a supine sprawl over a decaying mass of tangled branches and soggy wood, lower back bent around the trunk of a dead fall. Her lungs emptied all at once, a radical implosion of tissue and expulsion of air. She meant to comment something relevant, like 'ow', but she found she had nothing in her to power the word.
First, she was too shocked to move. Then, she was too scared to move — what if she'd broken her back? Would it sever a nerve if she moved wrong? But no, her fingers and toes were moving, albeit with the same all-encompassing ache and lethargy that seemed to have saturated her body. Too tired to move, too angry to move, too much in pain to move, she flicked through each of them one after another. Each of them said: don't you dare move. So she lay there, the warmth of her body seeping into the earth.
Early on, she caught the sound, at first mistaken for an echo of her own encounter with the tree, of the crunch of metal and the whine-snap of wood bending and breaking en masse. The helicopter must have hit a tree, too.
Fair's fair.
Lyle would laugh until he choked, if he could see her now. What did you expect? You ran off with Jarod. Sydney would laugh, though he'd try to hide it. Hell, Miss Parker would laugh too, if she were in the audience and not on stage. What did you expect?
She wasn't sure how much time had passed before she heard the voice. There was no orange glow on the horizon anymore. Night had fallen.
"Miss Parker!" said the voice, over and over. She might think it was a recording playing on a loop, but the voice degraded as it carried on, grew more panicked, more ragged with emotion.
Jarod. He'd survived. That was good. For one, Jarod dying in a helicopter crash after everything they'd lived through was unacceptable. For another, she'd get the opportunity to sock him in the jaw for this.
"Miss Parker, please. Where — please, don't be — Miss Parker!" An irregular pattern of footsteps crunching over peat and twigs, over in the direction of Miss Parker's splayed feet. She still hadn't moved. Shock, fear, fatigue, anger, pain. Any two would be enough to immobilize a person.
"Miss Parker!"
Louder than ever, the sound of his voice sent a lancing headache through her skull.
"What?" she groaned. The sound of footsteps stopped. After a long pause, she realized he had stopped to listen for her voice. She cleared her throat. "Over here, Jarod."
The crunch of footsteps restarted, growing closer and closer until, oh, thank God. Jarod's face dawned into her field of vision, dirt-streaked and worried. He didn't waste time with token questions like "Are you OK?".
"Don't move. I'm going to check you over," he said. It wasn't a question, but he looked into her face for permission anyway. She gave him a short, painful nod.
She'd seen Jarod bring out his medical skills before, like when Fenigor had been shot during that bank robbery a few years ago. This was the first time she'd been the subject of his medical attention, however. His fingers moved fast and confident over her ribs, her neck, her back, her limbs. Light, firm touches, no hesitancy. She showed off her champion finger- and toe-wiggling, which earned a tired smile from Jarod. He held out a hand.
"You're OK," he diagnosed. Miss Parker stared at the hand.
"You're sure?" She believed him — you couldn't not believe that level of professional confidence — but she also had little interest in standing.
"OK enough to get up and move, anyway," he said.
"How the hell did you survive?" she said finally, and took his hand. Jarod pulled her to her feet. The full-body ache persisted and her head briefly swam, but her legs kept her upright against all safe bets. Miss Parker looked around. There was a misshapen shadow off to her left which could be the crashed helicopter, crumpled around another tree. She'd assumed they were in a forest, but it was too small to be a real forest. Just a scrappy collection of evergreens along the boundary of an airfield. Yes, that airfield, the sought-after one. They'd crashed right into it.
That cache better be damn good, Miss Parker thought.
"The same way you did, probably. The chopper was cushioned by a tree," said Jarod. He was watching her every step, she noticed. Like he expected her to topple over any second.
"I wouldn't call that 'cushioning'," she griped. Her arm was screaming at her. She felt around in her jacket sleeve and prodded at the bit that hurt. She winced. There was a long cut down her bicep, staining her jacket and her fingers with dark, sticky blood. She glared at Jarod, who grimaced. "Something you missed? You're slipping, doc."
"I saw that, hoped it wasn't bleeding too much. The window must have sliced you up on the way out. It didn't hit anything vital, and it's shallow, but it'll ruin your suit jacket… and your day, if it gets infected."
"The chopper must have a first aid kit," she said. The Centre wasn't so incompetent that they wouldn't pack basic necessities, even if their Meals Ready to Eat offered twice the daily recommended dose of sodium in each meal portion.
"I'm sure it does," Jarod agreed. "But it's up a tree. We're not too far from the airport, we can get your arm cleaned and treated there."
Without waiting for an answer, he set off limping in the direction of the silhouetted buildings on the horizon. Miss Parker was tempted to argue, but she lacked that all-important ingredient: an argument. So, she clammed up and started walking.
At first, every joint protested with each step, but it wasn't too long before the ache started to slowly drain away. The recurring twinge in her arm never abated, however, even when she clamped her hand over it to keep everything as still as possible. Silence fell on the pair as they trudged towards civilization. Long grass gave way to manicured lawn, which in turn gave way to tarmac. The evening air smelled of sun-baked wheat and pine resin. The crickets were warming up for their nightly concert, though the gathering clouds overhead forecasted that the show would be rained out. At Miss Parker's elbow, a firefly's beacon blinked on and off so fast she wasn't sure if she'd imagined it.
"Where will you go?" she asked, for something to say. In a way, this airport was the perfect spot to branch off down their separate paths. Pick a city, pick a flight and go. "No, wait. Don't tell me, it's better if I don't know."
As she continued towards the geometric pattern on the horizon, she hugged her arm to herself, both for comfort and to keep the damn thing from jostling with every step. After a dozen paces she noticed she was walking alone. She looked back. Jarod had stopped to stare at her retreating back.
"Don't tell me you're going back to the Centre," he said, once she'd turned to look at him. "You can't. I thought we decided you weren't going back."
Miss Parker laughed; she broke off quickly when the skin around the cut on her arm pulled and stretched painfully.
"Jarod, we didn't decide anything. I decided I'd rather not be arrested, nor did I want to be caught red-handed allowing the Centre's most valuable asset to escape." A pre-storm gust of wind pushed her hair into her eyes. She pressed the dishevelled mop back behind her ears. "You thought you'd convinced me, just like that, to go on the run with you? What, because that's going so well so far? You crashed the damn getaway vehicle!"
Jarod gaped at her, then muttered something indistinct.
"What?" she snapped.
He raised his voice. "Sam crashed the helicopter."
"What?" she said again, thrown. The nerve of him, being so goddamn irrelevant when she was trying to hurl all the frustrations of the day at him.
"I was hanging from the helicopter for a while, I had some time to assess the damage. Sam's bullet tore off a piece of the fuselage, which hit the —"
"Of course he crashed the helicopter," she said, cutting him off. "He was doing his job. Do you think you're making a strong case for being on the run from the Centre? So many perks to look forward to! Helicopter crashes, being chased by sweepers with guns — God, Jarod, working at the Centre may be hellish, but at least there I'm the one doing the shooting."
Jarod sagged.
"So you're going back," he said. He had the nerve to sound angry. "After all this, all we talked about, all you said. I thought you were finally listening. But you're just going to go back to how it was."
"No," she said sharply. "Not to how it was. I said I wouldn't try to take you back to the Centre, and I meant it. If you're going to call me a liar, do me a favour and check my record first. I didn't say I'd run off with you, you heard what you wanted to hear. I didn't say I was going back to the Centre, either."
Jarod paused.
"… So you're not going back?"
It was far too easy to stoke Jarod's hope, and far too easy to dump a bucket of water on the embers.
"I haven't decided," she admitted. "I'd like to find out whether it's safe to contact the Centre, whether they've got me down as a traitor or — or what. Then, at least, I'd have a better idea of my options."
"Let me help," Jarod said. He closed the distance between them. On wordless agreement, they set off towards the airport once more. "If you want to clarify your options, there are more available to you than you know. You think it's either work for the Centre or run from them. For a long time, I thought those were my only options, too. Then I stopped running."
Miss Parker snorted.
"Stopped running? I must have missed that plot development. Last I checked, up until last Friday I was still chasing you. Was that some other Jarod? Another clone you've got running around?"
Jarod had started to smile, but at her last crack he sobered.
"No, that was me. And yes, we're still doing our old cat-and-mouse shtick. But these days, I run on my own terms."
Miss Parker looked over at him for an explanation. None followed. Typical Jarod obfuscation for the pure sake of obfuscation.
"I'll bite," she said. "You say there are other options. Name one. Give me something more concrete than Monty Hall metaphors for once."
For a yawning, cavernous moment Miss Parker assumed he wouldn't answer. He never had anything solid to offer, only platitudes and equivocation. Then he gave her that assessment scan, the same one he'd treated her to before he'd divulged the existence of his trans-national network of resource caches. This one was longer and more thorough than the first.
"I can't tell you the details," he said finally.
Apparently she'd failed the assessment.
"Oh, for fu—"
"Yet," Jarod interrupted. "Not when you're still considering returning to the Centre, I can't risk everything on your indecision, Miss Parker, please understand that."
Miss Parker deflated. She tucked her chin into her body and glared at the ground under her weary, drag-heeled feet. They'd almost reached the airport, and the harsh light from its windows threw long shadows out behind their two figures.
"Give me something," she said, and hated how much it sounded like a plea.
"I will," he promised, so quiet she barely heard him over the crickets. He reached out to touch her on the arm, but appeared to think better of it. Perhaps he remembered the arm was injured. "Before you make your decision, I'd like you to meet someone. You've said before you want to talk to her, and she wants to talk to you too."
She stopped short and looked at him, eyes wide.
"Who?" she asked.
There was an eager note in his voice. He could be alluding to yet another shadowy figure in the Centre's sordid past, but catching that light of excitement in Jarod's eye, she thought otherwise. Someone really, genuinely important in a way that transcended the noxious trash fire known as the Centre.
"Not… your mother?" she guessed. Jarod smiled, close-lipped at first. "You found her?"
Jarod's smile split into a toothy grin.
"I found her."
For one moment out of a thousand, lit by the radiance of a smile out of time, Miss Parker could only be happy for him. The Centre had torn both of their families apart, and while she'd never find her own mother again, Jarod deserved to find his.
Of course, Miss Parker's interest in the news of Margaret's whereabouts was not entirely selfless. Margaret posed a compelling figure in the larger web of intrigue surrounding the Jarod and the Centre. For one, there'd been that picture of her and Catherine Parker, an older version of Catherine Parker who her daughter had never met and never would meet. But Margaret had known that version of Catherine. And she might be persuaded to tell.
"You said she wants to meet me?"
Jarod nodded. "I've told her about you. We never made any real plans, not while you were still chasing me. If you're serious about refusing Centre orders, though, I could take you to meet her."
"Stop questioning my word, Jarod," said Miss Parker, but her rebuke was mild and her tone distracted. It would be risky, sticking by Jarod's side for any longer than she had to. The longer she did so, the greater the chance of them being spotted together and the news getting back to the Centre that she'd turned traitor. That was assuming the news hadn't got back already — things had been hectic up on the hospital roof, and she wasn't sure whether she'd been seen by any inconvenient witnesses. On the other hand, she'd risk almost anything to learn more about her mother.
Jarod watched her with unnerving patience.
"I do need to talk to Margaret," she mused. "Might as well visit now and sort out the logistics of returning to the Centre once that's dealt with. Then we can make a clean break. Where are we headed?"
Miss Parker caught the shadow of a triumphant smirk on Jarod's lips before he turned towards the airport's public entrance. No matter how many walls she built, she couldn't completely quash his hopes.
"West," he said.
She knew better than to ask for more detail than that.
"West it is."
