Chapter Twenty
“We’re going down,” Nero growls as we zigzag through the sky.
I look at the spinning world and the ever-nearing water below and try to swallow my heart back into my chest.
Nero unbuckles his safety harness.
The roar of the propellers turns unhealthy—the main or the tail rotor must be damaged.
Nero rips off my headset and unstraps me as though I were a doll.
“Are you planning to jump?” I shout over the roar. “Won’t we be in danger of hitting the tail rotor?”
He doesn’t reply. He must not have heard me over the nightmarish cacophony.
I pray to the helicopter gods that the tail rotor is the source of that horrible noise—or that I have my jumping-out-of-the-helicopter facts wrong.
Nero opens the door.
The harbor below us seems to be approaching so fast, you’d think we
