Chapter 6: Four Years

My flight suit was still in the locker with my name taped to the door.

Hank had kept it for four years.

It had gone stiff in the folds, and it smelled of dust and old rotor wash.

I pulled it on over the black dress with my teeth, because my fingers would not work the zipper.

Bruce came in, saw me struggling, and turned his back without a word.

When I was done I took the dented helmet out of my bag and put it on.

RAVEN faced the room from the back of it.

"Thin gloves," Hank said, and handed me a pair of nitrile ones to wear under the leather.

"The medic says your hands can't take this."

"They'll take it," I said.

"They'll bleed."

"Then I'll bleed in the air."

He looked at me for one second, and he nodded.

The Bell 407 was already on the pad with its blades turning.

Bruce climbed into the back and clipped the hoist harness to his chest.

I took the left seat.

My hands closed over the controls and the pain went all the way up my arms.

I did not make a sound.

For four years I had sat in a penthouse and let a man tell me flying was something I used to do.

My body knew every switch anyway.

"Dolan Rescue Two, lifting," I said into the radio, and my voice was steady.

We went up fast and level over the Ojai valley, with the sun going orange behind the hills.

It was twenty minutes to Sycamore Ridge.

The smoke began ten miles out.

It rose from the canyon in a brown wall, and the wind pushed it sideways across the ridge road.

I took us down under it, low and tight, with the rotor noise hammering off the rock.

"Raven," Bruce said in my headset. "Eleven o'clock. Tile roof."

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