Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

straps, no different than how people used to do it centuries ago, but since the technology existed, it was good practice to give the nanobots a few minutes to do their job. It also made for a smoother ride.

***

It was hard to tell anything just by looking at Eloise. In a way, she had somehow reverted back to how she had been ten days ago when Inspector Norah Bellefeuille brought her to the 4th. There was the same lack of expression on the outside and the same raging storm of anxiety inside. Thinking of real life as VR no longer worked. People didn’t die in the VRPs that Eloise Moretti played.

‘I’m slaving your parachute controls to mine,’ Gonzalez decided, watching the woman struggle to breathe. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I will guide you.’

Eloise looked back at him, her words stuck in her throat. Dammit, where was Jeff with his blue nano-relaxant patches when she needed him! Oh right, Jeff was gone, just like her home and everything she had ever known. Even the crazy life she had started to get used to lately was gone, with people dying one after another to save her.

‘You’ll be fine.’ He clapped a hand on her shoulder, and then, before she realised what was happening, he pushed her out.

Her head spun. Everything was happening too fast. With the armour’s protection there was no sensation of air whooshing past her falling body, but the visual input was enough. She was gaining speed. The ground was coming up to meet her. She was falling faster. And faster.

At some point her eyes shut, her mind refusing to deal with the reality, but it only made her feel worse and her stomach twisted, sick with nausea. And then her parachute opened and she felt her body being jerked up as the speed of falling dropped.

Her eyes snapped open. She was too close to the ground. Her panicked mind couldn’t think and analyse in real time, but somewhere in the back of her head her instincts were still working. They told her Gonzalez had pushed the parachute’s capabilities to their maximum, having it open too close to the ground. She wouldn’t lose enough speed. She—

Her legs slammed into the ground, her knees soft more out of instinct than conscious effort. The armour helped some, but she still lost her footing as gravity pulled her down and she fell forward, her body rolling and using up the momentum. The suspension lines began tangling around her body. Almost instantly, the nanobots sensed contact with the ground and released the locks. The canopy began folding, but the lines didn’t try to strangle her as the parachute began to retract. The mechanism was too clever and too foolproof to hurt an inexperienced user.

Out of nowhere, hands were working to free her body, deftly removing the lines from her limbs. Instinctively, she got up on one knee, giving the parachute the best access to fold itself properly back into the storage bag fused to the back of her armour.

She was alive, and breathing became a little easier, even if her body continued to shake madly. She tasted blood in her mouth, and her swollen tongue hurt. She couldn’t even remember when she had bitten it. But she was alive. Rivas wasn’t.

Rivas. Please no.

Stop it, you idiot, avoice in the back of her head scolded her.

It was touch and go whether she would reassert enough control over her grief, when strong hands pulled her up and she had no choice but to let go of any conscious thought. She was pulled forward at a neck-breaking run over the remnants of an old road and into the woods.

‘Where… where…’ She wanted to know where they were going but couldn’t catch her breath. Her helmet was providing her with a steady amount of filtered and artificially sterile air, but it still felt suffocating, and she reached clumsily to pull the visor up. She needed the real thing.

‘Where are—’ she tried again, but her attempt was cut short by a loose rock that slipped from underneath her foot. She fell hard, knees painfully bashing into the hard ground. The armour resisted, protecting her skin from being sliced off her kneecaps, but the moderate cushioning did little to stop the bruising pain from shooting up her legs.

She swallowed a curse as her body curled into a ball and her palms automatically clamped around her knees. And then the arms were there again, one set on each side yanking her back up. Someone slapped the med-panel on her armour, releasing a double dose of painkillers, and the sharp ache dulled into a distant throb as the nanobots soothed her pain receptors.

The hands yanked her forward again. It was all about breathing and lifting legs.

‘Behind those trees!’ Atkins gasped, pointing ahead and to his left. Gonzalez was holding on to Eloise firmly, pulling her forward and forcing her to maintain speed. Atkins wasn’t a small man, but Gonzalez’s bulk made it easier for him to manhandle the Elite woman in the right direction now that momentum was taking her forwards, so it was up to the sergeant to find the tunnel as quickly as possible.

There was no way to trace the enemy craft when on the ground. Their wrist-comps didn’t have the same sensitivity as the Hippogryph’s computers, but if the enemy continued at their best speed without worrying about stealth, they would be flying over their heads any second now.

‘There!’ Atkins pointed, lunging forward to clear dirt and vegetation from a hidden hatch. His energy was soaring as if he had spent the last few hours lounging on a sofa, not fighting to stay alive.

Gonzalez joined him, allowing Eloise to settle on the ground on all fours. The woman was panting heavily. The comedown from an adrenaline spike mid-jump was an absolute bitch, draining her energy as she tried to maintain her speed up the hill. But somewhere among that physical exhaustion her head had cleared enough. She