Page 16 of Boiling Point
“Weather’s perfect today,” Gabrielle went on. “Smooth air up here.”
The sky stretched, flawless and blue in every direction. Wisps of clouds lingered far below—delicate streaks painted on a vast canvas.
I risked another glance at the ground. What I assumed to be Lake Texoma emerged like a splash of spilled ink against paper, its shimmering surface reflecting fragments of sky.
“This your first time in a small plane?”
I nodded, trying to outrun the churn of disbelief and adrenaline. “And possibly my last.”
“Don’t worry,” she teased, voice warm. “I haven’t crashed a plane yet, and I don’t want a black mark on my record.”
My laugh sputtered, too thin to cover the chaos of fear and exhilaration exploding in my chest.
Gabrielle banked right, and I felt the shift before I saw it. The sky stretched vast and endless, an indifferent expanse that cared nothing for the fact that I was entirely out of my element. Far below, Lake Texoma shimmered like a forgotten world—distant and unreachable, the last solid thing before gravity ceased to matter.
Gabrielle leveled us off, and her voice crackled through my headset. “So,” she said casually, as if we were merely out for a Sunday drive, “are you ready to have some fun?”
“Gabrielle,” I said slowly, “I struggle to define what we’re currently doing as ‘fun.’”
She laughed, easy and warm. “Come on, Dr. Hawthorne—sorry, Cal. You’re a physicist. You understand the principles of flight better than most.”
“Yes, and I also understand the physics of crashing, which terrifies me infinitely more.”
“You should be fascinated, scientifically speaking.”
“Oh, I’m utterly fascinated,” I assured her. “That humans, in all their wisdom, looked at the ground—a perfectly good, solid place to exist—and thought, ‘No, let’s strap ourselves into a tin can and see what happens if we defy nature.’”
She smirked. “You’re going to love this next part, then.”
Dread coiled in my already twisted stomach.
She keyed the mic again. “Grayson Traffic, Cessna 150 Aerobat maneuvering over Lake Texoma, aerobatics in progress, four thousand five hundred.”
I inhaled sharply. “Did you just warn the public? Should I be concerned?”
Gabrielle’s grin was entirely too satisfied. “Just good etiquette. Let’s start with something easy.”
Easy, she said.
The plane tilted sharply, banking into a tight, steep turn. The horizon slanted at an unnatural angle, and the G-force pressed me into my seat. My pulse tripped over itself as I watched the world spin sideways, the lake rising unnervingly toward the cockpit window.
“Nice, right?” Gabrielle asked, holding the bank effortlessly.
I managed a breath. “That was very…turn-like.”
She rolled us back level, the horizon righting itself as if nothing had happened. My vital organs, however, remained unconvinced.
She shot me a look. “Not bad, actually. You didn’t scream.”
“I’m British,” I muttered. “We internalize our suffering.”
She chuckled, then reached for the throttle. “Okay, you ready for a roll?”
“A what?”
The plane pitched up, and before I could object, she turned the yoke smoothly to the left.
The world tilted—no, flipped—entirely over.
