You’re in shock, he told himself.

He could even recognize where he was. The western end of the Grand Canyon was laid out below him like a National Park tourist map. There was the skinny sheen of the Colorado, bright blue against the Mars-red of the high desert into which it had cut. He could see the tributary canyons, cut by their own rivers, Prospect and Mohawk to the south, Andrus and Parashant to the north. Even now, there was no sign of the flood water that was forcing its way along the Canyon from the east. The Canyon was long…

There was a fiercely black knot of cloud, right about where Lava Falls should be. He was, in fact, drifting over the Falls, and so looking down, right into the cloud.

He could see the glow of red, inside the cloud. He heard distant bangs, like cannon fire, disturbing his peace. He saw sparks fly out of that red scar.

Sparks?

If he could see them from here, then they had to be the size of houses. Rocks, then. Probably lava bombs, freshly birthed from the Earth, cooling even as they sailed up from the mouth of the ground.

He knew about lava bombs. After the Moonseed, everyone was a volcanologist.

So now he knew what had hit him. Maybe he and Jake had indeed made the Earth quake. But the Earth, or at any rate the Moonseed, had struck back.

It wouldn’t take another lava bomb to kill him, now he was out of the airplane. Just a fragment, an ember of red-hot rock, might be enough to torch his canopy. And if he fell through the cloud his lungs were going to be filled with searing hot ash and dust and steam.

And he was falling right into that spreading cloud of black, fiery shit.

Garry got hold of the manual override handle in the right side of his seat, and pulled it.

He heard a light pop as the drogue chute emerged. There was a jerk as the drogue filled up, and then a billowing, like huge wings over him. It was a wonderful noise, the sound of his main canopy opening up.

Now there was another jerk, much harder.

Suddenly he was falling much more slowly, now at an angle to the ground, still strapped to his seat.

It was going to be twenty-five minutes before he touched down.

He would have to lose the seat at some point. A seated landing would be hazardous. But for now, it made him feel secure. Hanging in the air like this, it was hard to let go of anything.

At twenty thousand feet he pulled off his oxygen mask and dropped it earthward. His cheeks and neck immediately felt better.

He heard the roar of a jet over his head. It was Jake. The gleaming F-16, stunningly artificial against this barren, inhuman landscape, waggled its wings.