“You sure they’re gonna be okay?” she asked, finally returning to her seat and settling in beside Jacques. “They’re not exactly the best with heights.”
He let out a chuckled. “Won’t have to deal with heights for long. They’ll be fine. Them two are tough boys. You know that. But what did you tell them? Whatever you promised them must’a been scorching hot. It’d take quite an offer to get me to do what they just did.”
“Oh,” Jill said, smirking. “It wasn’t much. I just promised them a couple of hamburgers.”
Jacques cocked an eyebrow.
“Bears are simple, you know. They’ll do anything for a burger.”
“Ah ha! You know what makes me like you so much, Miss Jilly?”
She shook her head, still looking out the window to see if she could catch a glimpse of her bears. It was no good, but on the heat sensor mounted underneath the fuselage, she was able to see that both of them had landed, and since neither started going cold, she figured they were in one piece. “What?”
“That you are, without a doubt, the worst liar I have ever come across.”
Both of them laughed for a moment, though Jacques’s was more boisterous than Jill’s. She chewed her bottom lip, fairly confident that if anyone could do what needed to be done, Rogue and King could manage. But she didn’t like the idea that for several hours – five or six, likely – they’d be completely alone, surrounded by unfamiliar forest only a hundred miles or so from GlasCorp HQ.
Then again, I wasn’t lying. There’s nothing else to be done. Unless we leave these three to their own devices while Draven comes up with something? No options. I don’t like not having options.
“They gonna be fine, Jill,” Jacques said in his smooth, Cajun accent. He used to throw in some French to make a curious patois, but she was thankful he’d stopped doing that quite so much. “Them two?”
She looked at him, light from the instrument panel illuminating the soft lines on his face. There was a reason they’d dated, after all.
“They been through worse than any damn thing I can imagine. A little jaunt through ‘da woods? Grabbing a couple of their kinfolk? Worst part for them’s already over wit’.”
She smiled, somehow soothed by what he’d said.
One thing was for sure though, she knew that much. The next four, six, however many hours it was, those were going to be some of the longest of her life. But she nodded and patted the pilot on the back of the hand with which he was grabbing the plane’s control stick.
They sat for a few moments in silence, she in thought and him paying attention to his instrument panel. He broke the silence with a drawled-out humming sound.
“What’s up?”
Jacques squinted into the sun and pulled on a pair of sunglasses. “I was just gettin’ to think. You ever fly one of these?”
Jill laughed. “Oh no no no, not doing that. No sir, no how.”
“I sure am tired,” Jacques said, feigning a yawn. “Gonna fall asleep any second.”
He closed his eyes, lay back in the chair and cracked one lid to look at her. “Oh boy, I’m dead asleep! This plane gon’ crash!”
With a snappy “you son of a bitch!” Jill laughed and grabbed the stick. “Take this thing!”
He let a smile crawl across his face. “You gonna do fine. Let’s consider this a day for doing new things, huh? Them two fell out of a plane, you’re gonna fly it. I ain’t gonna always be around. Never hurts to know what you’re doing, huh?”
By the time her heart stopped pounding, Jill realized that she was keeping the plane straight.
And then she realized that Jacques the snoring to her left wasn’t faked. Her pilot was sawing logs, and she was, apparently, flying a plane.
-9-
“This is going to get real confusing, real fast.”
-Claire
“Well, about the best thing I can say about that is that my ass is completely tree-free,” Rogue said, unclipping the parachute and picking a stick out of his hair.
King looked over at him, completely unscathed. “I didn’t have any problem,” he monotoned.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rogue laughed softly. “That’s the way it goes isn’t it? I ram into a tree, you gracefully skitter along the ground to a happy stop?” He shrugged. “That’s why I’ve got more character built than you.”
King frowned and eyed his sworn brother sideways. “Meaning?”
“Don’t worry about it. We got some bears to find. It’s two of them, and a girl, but I’ve already told you that.”
The two began to tromp through the woods toward the coordinates at which they found the trio when they were still circling. They couldn’t have gone very far since then, and once they were anywhere in the vicinity, finding them shouldn’t be a problem. But convincing them to come along? That... might be a different story.