Hero (Gone 9)

To Shade the destruction of the helicopter was like watching a car crash on a slowed-down video. The rotors moved very fast, but she could see the individual blades making their individual contacts with trees and dirt. The helicopter had flipped onto its side so that Dekka was now above her and falling in toward the door.

Dekka, though, did not need Shade’s help: with feline speed she landed with feet and hands on the open hatch.

Cruz had buckled up, but blood was pouring from a gash in her leg—or at least the leg of whatever morph she was in. Francis lay in a heap, her neck at a precarious angle.

If Francis dies, we’re done.

Simone had been lucky enough to be thrown into Armo, who lay now on his back on the grass with Simone cradled in his arms.

Priorities: Francis.

Shade went to her, holding on with one hand and a leg pressed against the door to the cockpit. She knelt and saw a slow pulse throbbing in her throat. Her neck . . . her neck . . . it had to be broken!

But then Francis stirred and moved her hands in a wild, belated effort to protect herself. Shade caught her hands in midair, pushed them down, and looked up at Dekka, still stretched across the doorway. Dekka spit blood and yelled, “Smoke!”

Dekka jumped out of the way, and Shade blew past her, up and out through the sky-pointing door. She saw it: fire, spread out in a fan shape behind the helicopter, burning the wooden fence, burning random yard toys, burning the crumpled tail section and beginning to eat its way forward.

Shade dropped back inside and had to crawl to reach Malik, separated from him by a substantial tree branch. She pulled at the branch, but not even her morphed strength was enough.

“Bzt!” Shade yelled, then forced herself to slow down and yell, “Everyone off!”

“I’m trapped. Get out of here!” Malik said.

“The chopper’s on fire,” Shade said and tried to squeeze past the branch, but here speed was of no use. She needed a chain saw or the Jaws of Life.

The breeze caught the smoke and brought a dense cloud of choking, oily black smoke into the cockpit.

“I don’t want to burn again!” Malik cried. “I don’t want to burn again!”

“I’ve got you!” Shade said, but did she? Could she do . . . anything?

Now came the heat behind the smoke. A frantic glance showed orange flame licking its way along the fuselage as smoke filled the passenger compartment.

“Can you get out through the windshield?” Shade asked, but Malik, cool and calm Malik, was no longer able to comprehend. He was in full, flailing, screaming panic.

“Malik! Malik!” Shade cried as she saw the smoke being drawn into his nostrils.

“Don’t let me burn! Don’t let me burn!”

“Malik!”

The fire was so close now, so close, and Shade knew she would be able to escape, knew she could run through the flames before they could touch her and knew that if she did, Malik would burn and she would live to hear his desperate cries echoing in her mind forever and knew that she could never . . .

A hand reached through the broken windshield. The hand felt around, then found what it sought. Francis’s fingers closed around Malik’s knee, and all at once Shade was alone in the cockpit.

She crawled back to the passenger compartment and found Sam, groggy, fighting for consciousness, a gash down the side of his face. She pushed one arm beneath his back, her free hand grabbed a leg by the ankle, and she pushed him up, up and tipped him out of the sky-facing door.

Then Shade leaped clear, landing on a deep-green lawn that looked as if someone had attacked it with a massive hoe. A long piece of rotor stuck from the wood siding of a two-story house.

The Rockborn Gang was spread around a suburban lawn, standing or sitting back from the fire, upwind from the billowing smoke. And now Shade saw the damage done. Francis’s leg wasn’t just bleeding, white bone was protruding through the skin of her shin. Dekka had had to carry her to rescue Malik. Sam’s gash was easily six inches long, gushing blood, and would require stitches. Simone had a sprained wrist. Cruz had sustained a head wound that bled down her face in rivulets, blood pooling in the hollows of her eyes and spilling like red tears. Malik lay coughing up smoke and gasping for breath.

Only Armo seemed to have survived unscathed, but his white fur was gray from the oily smoke. He lay on his back with the nerve gas shell beside him.

“We need an ambulance,” Cruz said. She was out of morph and pressing her palm flat against the cut in her forehead.

Francis had caught the worst of it. She could not walk, and from the sheet-whiteness of her face and the sweat beads on her forehead, it was clear she was in great pain.

“We can’t lose the train!” Shade cried twice, once at speed, then again in slo-mo.