feet, at least by the look of the earth below.
Over the headsets, Jumpmaster Steve kept on. “I repeat: I own the rear of the plane. Every thousand feet is six seconds. You’re gonna pull at three thousand feet when you start to see ground rush.” A condescending wink at Candy, Call Me Maddy, and Sister McKenzie. “Don’t worry, ladies, if you pass out, an automatic activation device will make the chute deploy anyway.”
One of the guys pried his gaze off Candy’s superior tits to look at Jumpmaster Steve. “At what altitude is that?”
“Don’t be a nervous Nellie,” the jumpmaster said.
Dude-bro’s friend shouldered his bud, keyed to talk over the channel. “Just remember, man. Fat chicks and fags do this all the time.”
Candy set her jaw, stared out the window. Ever since she’d left the Orphan Program, she spent her time trying to find a charge. Anything to make her feel something besides the discomfort of her back, an itch that went beneath the skin all the way to the bone. At times it felt like she was composed of discomfort.
As Orphan V she’d been arguably the finest black-ops assassin at the DoD’s disposal, worthy of being mentioned in a breath with Orphan X. She and X had a colorful and complex history, taking opposite paths to wind up in a version of the same place.
Out in the cold.
She’d briefly hooked up with an old associate in Frankfurt who was running skin-care products in spas that surreptitiously extracted DNA from potential targets, but an Interpol raid had netted the associate, leaving Candy with too much time on her hands and little to do.
So she was here, chasing some kind of thrill, anything to throw a spark back into the dry tinder of her life.
“And make sure you’re cautious jumping out,” Jumpmaster Steve continued. “Fall flat, dumb, and happy, careful feet control, no backsliding. Got it, ladies? We don’t want any midair tinkling.”
The guys laughed, and Call Me Maddy and Sister McKenzie obliged with a titter, but Candy could see in their eyes that they felt demeaned.
Her phone hummed in her pocket. She pulled it out.
A text from 1-855-2-NOWHERE.
It read, WANNA COME PLAY?
For the first time in a long time, she smiled. She unhooked her harness seat belt, flung the vinyl straps aside.
“Whoa, whoa, little lady,” Jumpmaster Steve said, leaping up. “I haven’t cleared us to—”
Candy flipped off her headset, strode over, and struck the red control button embedded in the skin of the craft. The side door started to open.
Wind whipped at them. Jumpmaster Steve was screaming at her, but mercifully his voice couldn’t be heard. He moved to grab her, and she caught his arm, pronated the elbow, turned him around, and dumped him face-first back into his seat.
She stepped past the guys and young women ensconced in their designer jumpsuits and walked out the door, giving a little hop to launch her into a front flip. She corkscrewed twice for good measure and then caught the wind, rotating into a head-to-earth body position to speed her descent, arms at her sides, a rocket launched at the rising ground.
What a delightful feeling to have someplace to be.
58
A Whole Other Kind of Loneliness
After Evan knocked, he heard no noise inside the rented room at the top of the stairs and worried that Andre had split. Or worse. Evan had left Joey to coordinate with Orphan V for the time being while he locked down this side of the mission.
He knocked again, and then there was a shuffling noise within, the sound of a limb banging into something, a muffled expletive, and then Andre’s wan face at the door, leached of human color. Charcoal-hued bags under his eyes, puffy with toxicity. His hair hangover-ruffled. His stubble had seemingly gained another full day’s growth in the few hours since Evan had left him.
He had a potato chip stuck to his cheek, which he now groped for, peeled off, regarded, and then flicked away. He stank of rum and body odor, and Evan felt a vestigial flutter of repulsion, an old familiar urge to back away down the stairs and leave him to his lair.
But he ignored it.
And held steady, staring into the face of his half brother. He searched for any sign of himself in Andre’s features, any hint of their shared blood, but Andre looked no more like Evan than any other boy from the Pride House Group Home. What a surreal twist of fate that bound them together in their DNA.