Page 14 of Into the Fire

He looked up. I kept my expression flat and professional. He hooked me to the beam and stepped back to do the shouting.

“Partial.”

I looked up, checked the imaginary canopy, and called it. “Streamer. No inflation.” My hands went through the response. Look red, pull red. Cutaway, reserve, count.

“Line-over.”

“Cutaway.” My hands were already moving. Reserve, count.

“You’re in trees.”

Feet and knees together, hands in, face protected before Boone finished the sentence.

“Wait for the problem before you solve it,” Boone called.

“I know what the problem is.”

“That’s not the drill.”

“Maybe rework the drill.”

Behind me, Shep began raking sawdust that didn’t need raking.

Boone gave me the next ones flat and fast, stacking them. I answered them all.

Then he said, “Total,” and my hand went to the cutaway. He’d been feeding me cutaways for ten minutes, and my hands answered the pattern instead of the problem.

On a total, there’s nothing out. Nothing to release. You go straight to the reserve, and every half-second spent on the red handle is altitude you don’t get back.

“Stop,” Boone said.

I stopped.

“You went to the cutaway before—”

“I know what I did.”

“From the top,” he said. “Full sequence.”

He ran me through all of it again. This time it was all clean.

Boone looked at me for a moment.

“Again,” he said.

I ran the sequence. Letdowns would be last. Any man can ride a cable into sawdust. It was different when you got hung up in a tree a hundred and fifty feet off the ground.

Boone hung me from the tower. The first three were fine. Each time, he made me climb and do it again.

The fourth was work. By the fifth, my forearms were complaining.

My hands started to slow down. I felt the tape running rougher through my grip than it had an hour ago. My breath sat higher in my chest, and on the descent my brake hand shook.

I landed and started for the tower to climb again.

“We’re done,” he said.

“I’m not.”