Page 15 of Badd B*tch

"Me either."

She just snorted again. “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up." She shot me a look. "You ever fly in a helo?"

I nodded. "Oh yeah. My uncle Brock is a pilot. Used to be a professional stunt pilot, actually, but now he's a bush pilot. Sort of. Mostly. And other stuff. He's rated for rotary aircraft but mostly flies seaplanes."

"Stunt pilot, huh? He ever take you up and do tricks?"

I grinned. "If you beg hard enough, he will. But if you puke, he’ll never take you up again so you gotta be sure you can handle it."

She nodded. "That smell never comes out. Blood's a hell of a lot easier to clean than puke."

That statement knocked my train of thought off the rails; those eleven words held a world of unspoken context.

By then, Tea was communicating with the tower in short, coded back-and-forths, getting permission and whatever else. Having been on a helicopter a few times, I kept waiting for the deafening din as she engaged her rotors. It never came. I felt the craft beginning to hum and vibrate with leashed power, and I heard a soft, dull, muffled roar—less than the howling of a summer thunderstorm's wind. I barely realized we were moving, the takeoff was so smooth and the interior so quiet.

As we canted forward and banked around to our northward heading, Tea glanced my way. "Kinda freaky how quiet this thing is. Don't even need the headset, except for the radio."

"It's fucking weird, is what it is," I said. "Your analogy to an EV is dead on. First time I rode in Uncle Xave's Rivian, it was a similar feeling."

For a while, we flew in the relative silence, neither of us speaking as the Alaskan countryside scudded beneath us; the view from the cockpit was kind of freaky also, to be honest, as the windscreen was a pair of angular bug-eye bubbles extending overhead and underfoot and around to behind your shoulder as you sat in the cockpit, so you had a clear view in every direction as far as you could crane your neck. The funny thing was you couldn't tell the entire front third of the helicopter was glass, since it was tinted in some sort of wildly futuristic electrochromatic tech. From the inside, the glass was perfectly clear, yet there was no glare, and the UV was likely filtered out as well; from the outside, it looked almost matte from nose to tail.

All this meant that as I sat, it felt like I was flying a few thousand feet above the earth in a clear bubble like Glinda's, except we were going 285mph. I could see the cloud above and the green blanket of pines beneath at the same time.

Ever been to that tower in Chicago or New York or wherever it is where you can stand in a glass box a hundred-some stories up? It was like that, except in motion at angles three.

My stomach was in my throat for a while, although I tried like hell to act casual and unaffected.

And then Tea started playing with buttons.

"Watch this," she said. "If I can find the…ah, here it is. Clench that tight li’l ass of yours, Jax."

Before I could respond, she did something and the view…jumped. Somehow, Tea managed to keep her composure and the helo flying straight and level. Me? I did indeed clench my ass cheeks when the blurry green carpet of trees below abruptly snapped into crystal-clear focus under my feet, the view zooming in until I could see individual pine needles and the ground further down yet—I even caught a there-and-gone-in-an-eyeblink glimpse of a bear on its hind legs looking up at us.

"Whoa—the fuck was that?" I say, involuntarily gripping the straps of the restraints against my chest.

"I guess they call it Parallax Mode. It's a function Roth developed for the military, for SAR birds." She pronounced the acronym SAHR.

"How do you know all this shit?" I asked. "Isn't it all like super top secret?"

She grinned at me. "Guess who has—or had, at least—top secret clearance for certain aviation-related files and projects? Before I took my walking papers, my superiors wanted me to be a test pilot. There's no particular reason you should know this, but my father is the most legendary test pilot since Chuck Yeager. I guess they figured that an apple didn't fall far from the tree."

"You didn't do it, obviously," I said. "Why not, if you don't mind me asking?"

She didn't answer right away. "Personal reasons." Her answer eventually emerged in a clipped, tight, sharp tone that invited zero follow-up questions.

"I see." God, she's mercurial and prickly.

She puffed a small sigh. "It wasn't an easy decision, and there are a fucking lot of reasons why," she said in a quiet grumble. "And I'm still not sure it was the right decision, even though I didn't feel like I had much of a choice at the time."

I considered my options for conversational gambits and came up with very little that wouldn't be guaranteed to make her clam back up. "I mean, it seems to me like you landed on your feet pretty damn well."

The glance she leveled at me was complicated: surprised, grateful, confused, angry. "I suppose."

"You're the personal pilot for Linus Magnus Thorvaldsen. You've got to be pulling in serious bank for this gig, and while I know flying is always dangerous, this has to be a safe, cushy job as far as such things go."

"True on both counts," she said, "but there's a fuckuva lot more to it than money and safety. For me, at least.”

This response only left me with more questions, but I kept them to myself.