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For a moment, Soren just stood looking down at him, a black silhouette against a burning city.

Then he reached down and drew a hunting knife.

“Do you remember,” Soren said, “what you did to Samantha?”

The cable stretched taut ahead of her glider, the carbon fiber body racing down the tarmac, air whistling beneath the wings, that sense of yearning in it to take to the sky, bouncing less and less, and then the easy smoothness as wheels left runway, the cable still tugging. She’d blown past the drone, and there was the final yank and then release as the cable uncoupled, hurling her upward like a child throwing a paper airplane. As always, it felt like her stomach remained behind.

Normally, the thing to do would be to use the momentum of the launch to gain as much elevation as possible. Gliders loved the rocky desert, the howl of wind and the bounce of updraft, and with care and skill, could soar for hours. But this wasn’t a pleasure trip, and she didn’t have hours. Shannon grasped the stick with steady hands and pulled into a hard starboard roll, barely three hundred feet above the ground.

Still high enough for a marvelous view of hell.

Tesla wasn’t her home, but the Holdfast was, and watching the capital city under siege was like being a Chicagoan watching enemies overwhelm DC. The battle lines were easy to see from up here; it was a real-life view of the battle map on her d-pad, only instead of using colors to represent the action, she could see the flicker of gunfire, a constant back-and-forth crackle like grains of gunpowder strewn in a circle and lit ablaze. At this height the attackers and defenders looked the same, ants locked in battle, fighting with weapons and hand-to-hand in the streets, their bodies lit by a thousand fires, Molotov cocktails and burning barricades and, she saw, quite a few of the buildings. Countless columns of greasy black smoke rose and smeared the view with a blanket of ash. The city looked like a Bosch painting, all smoky black and bloody red and writhing agony.

Shannon tore her eyes from it, focused on the runway. Somewhere down there Nick was facing Soren, and she threw a prayer his direction and then forced herself to scan for the drone. They were built for stealth, so there were no running lights, no shining surfaces, but its motion gave it away; there it was, in the air now and climbing. The glider took to the sky faster because of the winch, but that was the only advantage she had and it was fading fast. Unlike her craft, the drone was powered, which meant both more maneuverability and, soon, greater speed. If she was going to catch it, she had to do it now.

Not to mention that it doesn’t have far to go.

She pitched downward in a hard spiral. The move built her speed at the cost of elevation, and while common enough as a soaring tactic, she didn’t have much altitude to waste. If this were a fighter jet with roaring engines and mounted cannons and a targeting system, she could lock onto the drone and wipe it from the sky. But it wasn’t. And besides, she didn’t know how to fly a fighter jet.

Shannon lined up on the drone below her, plotting the vector of its motion against her own as she dove, the distance between them narrowing fast. Wind roared over the thin body of the glider, the material humming with it as she dove.

She’d have one try. If she missed, she might have time to pull up and regain altitude, but by then the UAV would be out of range. Her hands moved fluidly, the glider an extension of her body; she maneuvered it with the same precision she moved her limbs, the drone growing rapidly. It banked steadily, and she matched the motion, aligning the trajectories to intersect neatly.

Ten seconds.

Soren had launched the drone; he must have a way to control it. Cooper would have figured that out, and would be trying to bring it down.

Shannon stared at the drone. Barely blinking. It loomed larger and larger. She could see details now, the vapor trail from the engines, the registration number on the tail, the seams of its wide wing. She imagined it sputtering, the engines dying. Willed it to pitch downward into a fatal dive. Pictured it simply exploding, the self-destruct triggering the fuel tanks.

Five seconds.

It did not sputter.

Four.

It did not dive.

Three.

It did not blow up.

Two.

Come on, Nick. Don’t make me do this.

One.