The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Propeller

I didn't think.

I ran.

He took a second step toward the gray disc.

I hit him at the back of the knees with my whole body.

He went down.

He was twice my size, and he went down because he wasn't watching his feet, he was watching the propeller.

We landed in the snow so close to the nose that the blast threw ice in my face.

He started to get up.

I got on top of him.

I put my knee in the middle of his back and both hands on his shoulders and every pound I had behind them.

He rose under me.

"Warrick! Stop!"

He didn't hear me.

He couldn't. It wasn't his ears that were listening.

He crawled, dragging me, one arm reaching out ahead of him through the snow.

His fingers were four feet from the blade.

I let go of his shoulders.

I wrapped both arms around his reaching arm and threw myself backward, and pulled it in against my chest, and hung on.

He kept crawling with the other one.

Three feet.

"Gussie!" I screamed. "Cut it! Cut it!"

Through the windshield I saw her face.

She'd seen.

She yanked the mixture to cutoff with both hands.

The engine coughed and died.

The propeller didn't stop. It kept turning, slower, slower, the blades coming apart from the blur one at a time.

Warrick kept crawling toward them.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and leaned back with everything.

The last blade swung past his fingers and stopped.

Warrick stopped too.

All at once.

He lay face down in the snow under me, and he made a sound I'd never heard a man make.

Behind us, a polite cough.

"Goodness," Elden said. "He tripped."

I got up off Warrick's back.

I stood between them, in the snow, with ice in my hair.

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