She's not even screaming." He snapped, grabbing her arm and pulling her closer to the edge. Zuri fought back, bracing her foot against the metal floor. "Stop. You don't know what you're doing."
"Oh, I know exactly what I'm doing." Chase hissed. "Miles, get this angle." Miles repositioned himself, leaning dangerously close to the open door. "Yeah.
Yeah. Hold her right there. Perfect lighting." Beau hollered. "Jump already.
Or what? You scared the sky's going to swallow you?" But it wasn't fear tightening Zuri's grip. It was restraint. She could read the recklessness in Chase's eyes.
He wasn't bluffing. He wasn't performing. He wanted to see what happened if he pushed too far. And then, it happened. Chase shoved her.
Hard. Harder than even he intended. Zuri's fingers slipped from the seat. Her nails scraped metal. Her body lurched forward.
And suddenly, she was no longer inside the helicopter. She was falling. The wind devoured the scream they expected her to release, whipping her hair upward as her body plummeted toward the earth. Miles let out a shriek, not of excitement, but terror. Chase, what did you do?
Chase froze, hands still extended toward where Zuri had been. His face drained of color. Beau stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a seat. Oh my god. Oh my god.
She's dead. Beau shouted, voice cracking. Miles spun his camera frantically toward the open sky. No. No.
This wasn't part of the plan. Chase, you idiot. The helicopter rocked violently. The sudden shift in weight making the aircraft tilt dangerously to one side. The live stream continued broadcasting everything.
Hundreds of viewers. Thousands of comments. Panic exploding across screens. Down below, Zuri kept falling, arms tight to her sides, body stable, breathing controlled. Her face did not show terror, only focus.
As if falling through the sky wasn't a death sentence, but a familiar rhythm. Inside the helicopter, chaos erupted. B Squad screaming. The pilot losing control. The live stream capturing their unraveling in real time.
And the nightmare had only just begun. The world stretched wide beneath Zuri, endless and open. A canvas of blue sky and drifting clouds swallowing her whole. The roar of the helicopter faded into the distance until all she could hear was the violent rush of wind tearing past her ears. Her body plummeted through the air, spinning at first, momentum pulling her downward in a spiral of chaos.
But Zuri was not chaos. She was precision. With a sharp inhale, steady, controlled, she shifted her weight, angling her shoulders, straightening her spine. The spin slowed, stabilized, then stopped entirely. Her body aligned with the sky, slicing through the air like she had rehearsed this very moment thousands of times, because she had.
The wind roared against her suit, but she cut through it with practiced ease. Her legs tightened into position. Her arms adjusted minutely, the smallest corrections making the greatest difference. The violent tumble transformed into a graceful descent, elegant, fluid, almost unreal. From the helicopter above, she must have looked like a figure carved out of the sky itself.
Zuri Hale was falling, but she was not falling apart. Where anyone else would have panicked, screamed, thrashed, Zuri moved with an athlete's instinct, a skydiver's memory, a survivor's calm. She kept her eyes open. She kept her breathing measured. She kept her mind razor clear.
A gust of wind slapped against her side, but instead of fighting it, she adapted, letting the air flow carry her slightly before reclaiming control with a practiced roll of her shoulder. To the untrained eye, she looked like a leaf dancing on the wind. To a trained eye, she looked like a professional. Far above, in the helicopter, three boys were losing their minds, scrambling, shouting, pounding on the metal floor in panic. They expected to see Zuri flailing, crying, praying for her life.
Instead, they saw something else, something they couldn't comprehend. Zuri was calm. Her face showed no terror, no regret, no fear, only focus pure, undiluted focus. And then it happened. Zuri Hale falling from a helicopter 300 meters above the earth smiled, a small smile, controlled, subtle.
The smile of someone who belonged up here, the smile of someone who had done this before, the smile of a skydiver. The wind whipped her braids behind her like streaming ribbons. Sunlight brushed her face in golden streaks. For a moment, she looked weightless, an angel carved from air. Her body shifted again, smooth and deliberate.
She reached across her torso, placing one hand near her chest, the other slightly below her hip. Anyone who understood skydiving even a little would instantly recognize the position, the pre-deployment stance, the signal that she was seconds away from activating a controlled maneuver. It wasn't desperation. It wasn't survival instinct kicking in at the last second. It was routine, muscle memory, technique.
Before sinking deeper toward the earth, she took one last breath, steady and warm in the freezing air, and settled fully into the professional skydiving posture she had mastered years before. Just before the clouds swallowed her, Zuri's fingers curved into the exact position used by national skydiving athletes when preparing for a clean, flawless chute deployment. She wasn't falling to her death, she was performing. High above, inside the helicopter, the boys who had pushed her were finally understanding the truth. They hadn't tossed a helpless victim out of the sky, they had thrown a trained skydiver.
And the consequences of that mistake were about to crash down on them harder than gravity ever could. Inside the helicopter, panic detonated like a bomb. The moment Zuri disappeared beneath the chopper, the aircraft lurched sideways, tilting violently to the right. The sudden loss of weight on one side sent the cabin rocking, metal groaning under the imbalance. "What the hell did you kids do?
"the pilot shouted, gripping the controls with white knuckles as he fought to stabilize the aircraft. His voice cracked with fury and fear. "You can't move around like that up here. You're throwing off the center of gravity." But Chase wasn't listening.