Then Jake fell off to the east. He must be low on fuel, and for all Garry knew had taken some kind of damage from the volcanism as well. But he knew his wing man wouldn’t rest until Garry was picked up.

He reached to the front of his seat and found the toggle switch that activated his distress signal.

At fourteen thousand feet his seat fell away, as it was designed to do. He looked up. For the first time he could see his canopy, a broad ceiling of orange and white and green, as visible as all hell.

He started to think about where to come down.

Even if he avoided that volcano, and any little brothers and sisters it might have, he didn’t want to land in the Canyon itself. Certainly not in the Inner Gorge, waiting for the giant flood he’d initiated to come scouring away the walls. He needed to look for a place on the plateau, then, either to north or south.

The wind hit him again, harder, and he found himself drifting through a neck of fierce volcanic cloud. Suddenly he was immersed in darkness, and his mouth and nose was full of hot, gritty dust. The buffeting got worse. There was hot air all around him, roiling and turbulent. It was possible that even if he wasn’t burned or suffocated to death, the damn turbulence could tip him upside down.

He had to get out of this. Like, now.

He reached up to the four-line release, a set of red handles either side of his head. He tugged at them sharply, to open panels to the rear at the canopy. He could feel himself shoved forward, as the air gushed out of his canopy.

In a few seconds he had come out of the cloud, into relatively fresh air. He was coughing, eyes streaming, but he was intact.

The air was carrying him a little more to the east than he would have liked, but he was able to correct that with tugs on his harness lines, and keep his heading to the north.

A thousand feet, less. He could see a lot of detail now — too much — trees and sage everywhere, scattered over a landscape that didn’t look nearly so smooth and featureless as from the air.

He’d done his time at jump school. Keep your feet together or your legs might snap — head up, and land into a roll, with contact at the balls of your feet, legs, hips and back, to disperse the energy of impact…

The landscape opened out, the horizon receding around him, the trees foreshortening, as if reaching up towards him. There was a patch ahead of him, clear save for a little sage. He had his landing area.

He hauled on the harness lines and got a little more northerly push. He kept his feet and knees together, legs slightly bent.