“What’s funny?”
“You. You’re so serious.” Arrow stepped closer, and his humor faded into a smirk. He was cocky; she had been right on that score. But Pippin was wrong to call them men just because they were big. Arrow didn’t have the manly swagger she’d been expecting. He seemed lighthearted and easygoing, like a guy standing before a particularly awesome arcade game. Like someone who’d never been hungry or scared or left to bleed beneath a patchwork of barbed wire. Chase had been expecting her equal. What she’d found was another boy.
She had plenty of those already.
He held his hand out to shake, but she didn’t take it.
Arrow registered his disappointment with a tilt of his head, reminding her of his slanted wings in flight.
“Why…” Chase felt the pressure to ask a real question before they were interrupted by what looked like half of the Royal Canadian Air Force. “Why do you have a Streaker?”
Arrow’s eyes sharpened, the laughter fading fast. She’d hit a nerve. Good.
“We shouldn’t be talking to them, Arrow,” his RIO said from behind him.
“Agreed,” Pippin added.
Arrow spoke without taking his eyes off Chase. “After what we did in the air, I think a little polite greeting is in order.” He was still holding his hand out, still daring her to take it, and his words hinted at the feelings she’d had when flying with him. The tease and flirt. The tangle and stamina. The mach charge.
Chase held his gaze and shook his hand.
His leather gloves gripped hers, tugging all the way to her backbone as he hauled her a step closer. His eyes reminded her of the sky at high altitudes. No. It was more like that glint of blue in the bottom of a flame.
“Nice to meet you, Chase Harcourt.” He said her name with authority, like he’d said it many times before.
Her shock came with a stomach plunge. “How do you know who I am?”
“You kidding me?” His smile returned. Brash and brilliant. “I’ve been dying to meet Nyx for years.”
What?
They were pushed apart before she could stutter a response. The crowd of Royal Canadian airmen had reached the two Streakers, and Chase was all but wrestled back to her jet.
The sky dimmed as the ground crew rolled out a huge camouflage canopy to cover up Dragon while they immediately changed her tires and pumped her full of fuel from a truck. Chase marveled at the crowd’s swiftness. By the time she looked back to Arrow, he was being escorted toward Phoenix.
He popped his helmet on and threw a smirk at her that made her want to flick him off.
So she did.
And he mock-saluted.
An officer with a white mustache got in her face, herding her toward ramp stairs that had been rolled up to Dragon’s cockpit. He spoke through the dense fug of coffee breath. “You are to fly back to the Star. Immediately.”
“You can’t give me orders,” Chase said, a little dazed by the speed with which everything was changing. Phoenix’s canopy was down, and Arrow was rolling toward the hangar at a solid clip. Would she ever see him again? She told herself she didn’t care.
The officer thrust a piece of paper into Chase’s hand. “These orders aren’t from me. They’re from Brigadier General Kale.”
She looked down at the note, and her whole body tensed.
Home now. You face expulsion.
9
TURBULENCE
Feel It; Don’t Fight It
Chase couldn’t sit down. She swept through Kale’s office, touching the waxy-leafed plants and fingering the bowl of old bullets.
Expulsion. The word was a vicious crosswind, tossing her from question to question. Why did the Canadians have a Streaker? Why did Arrow know her name? And more importantly, would Kale make her leave?
She had nowhere to go. He knew that; he’d met Janice.
Chase knew she was in the wrong. She’d broken orders, engaged Phoenix, and set down outside of the Star. All things she could rightly get expelled for, but everyone was acting like the situation was worse. Like war had been declared. When Dragon slid into its spot in the hangar, Kale and a number of senior officers had been waiting. Kale took Pippin by the elbow in one direction while an MP escorted Chase to the brigadier general’s office.
To wait forever, apparently.
She’d been there for over two hours with nothing to go on except her worst thoughts. The MP guarded the door the whole time, making sure she stayed put but otherwise refraining from giving her a single answer. She’d already nicknamed him Sergeant Pillar Face.
Chase tossed herself into her favorite leather chair and balled the small piece of paper with Kale’s message on it. That note, in and of itself, was a huge question. What was Kale doing in contact with the Royal Canadian Air Force? What huge secret had she stumbled upon?
Pippin had brought up the Declaration of No Assistance, but that felt more uncomfortable than ominous. Ri Xiong Di had hundreds of declarations, but most of them were empty threats. This one was about countries aiding the U.S.—Chase paid attention long enough in history class to know that much—but could Ri Xiong Di really be pissed about her landing in Canada for ten minutes? That did not constitute “aid.”
Chase remembered the story of a British cargo fleet that had tried to fly in medicine during an influenza outbreak years back. Those birds had been hacked and crashed kamikaze-style into the Atlantic by Ri Xiong Di. Now that was the Declaration of No Assistance. She shivered, her body near exhaustion from flying. Her face and neck were covered in dried sweat, and she itched all over. Something bigger was going on, and it had everything to do with Phoenix and that pilot.
Arrow. His call sign was too simple. Too straightforward. It was too good, that’s what it was. He had been so smug about saying her name. How in the blazes did he know her?
“Chase Harcourt?”
Oh no. Chase had been waiting for Kale. Not Crackers.