Page 28 of Badd B*tch

She shrugged. "I happen to agree, but what do I know?" She handed the bottle back to me and scrambled up into the cockpit once more, rummaging in a compartment under the seat, then came back down with a thick atlas and some sort of plastic, twisty-slidey doohickey that looked part ruler, part geometry compass. "Okay, now we try to determine our location, and then we can pick a destination."

She spread the atlas on the nose of the helo and flipped through the maps until she found the one she was looking for.

"Okay, here we go. We traveled roughly north-northwest at an average airspeed of two-eighty-five…"

She muttered to herself, absently tugging an expensive-looking mechanical pencil from the breast pocket of the flight suit, doing some shockingly fast back-of-the-napkin math in the margins of the atlas, and then using the thing—a plotter, I wanted to call it?—to determine our path, marking the points where she knew we stopped.

"Our last stop was here," she said, swiping an X on the map with the pencil. "We continued our course at…” she dropped back into mumbling what sounded like numbers—course degrees, or however you say it; no navigator, am I.

She used the plotter along with more quick math, drawing a line away from our last stop, slowing, slowing…and then drawing another X, and this one she circled and redrew until it was dark and stark against the map.

"We're around here, near as I can figure," she said.

"I didn't know being a pilot came with so much math," I said.

She snorted. "Yeah, you need it for navigation, calculating fuel usage, descent air speed ratios, and things like that. It's not complicated math, just standard arithmetic: basic high school algebra, geometry, trigonometry, ratios, and percentages, mostly. The hard part is being able to do the math in your head quickly and accurately."

I cackled. "Well then, I'll never be a pilot. I can do math; I’m not, like, bad at it. I'm just slow and can't do it in my head."

"Well, the thought of sitting and staring at a computer screen hunting for a single wrong keystroke in thousands of lines of code is my personal idea of hell, so we each have our own skill sets, I suppose, right?"

"To be fair, I don't think any coder likes doing that; it's just an unfortunate part of the gig."

She rolled a shoulder, scanning the map. "Fair. But I'm an active sort of gal. Hyperactive, you might say. I don't sit still well, never have."

"Um, isn't flying…I dunno…a lot of sitting?"

She looked up at me from the map. "Sure, but it's active sitting. Both hands are doing separate things, as are my feet, and I'm concentrating, focusing, thinking, assessing, scanning, watching my readouts, feeling the wind, paying attention to what my bird is telling me."

"I wasn't implying—" I started.

"Oh, I know what you meant," she interrupted, "I'm just clarifying."

"How do you feel the wind?"

She shrugged. "Same way you'd feel the road while driving, but more complex. Up there, the wind is…shit, almost alive?" Her tone made it a question, sort of. "It pulls and pushes, lifts you up and tugs you down. You have to have a feel for it, for how your aircraft will respond to it. And obviously, that feeling is totally different when you're piloting a fixed wing versus rotary."

"How'd you end up a helicopter pilot?" I asked.

She went back to the map, using the pencil tip, lead now pushed in, to trace routes and roads, looking for the best place for us to head for. "I mean, I can fly just about anything. I don't like the fighter jets. Too…I dunno. I dunno why. Those guys are the hotshots, obviously, right? Top Gun, all that? Cool. I could be that. But I like helos better. I started on fixed wing, obviously. Got my private pilot’s license the second I was old enough, and I’d been flying with Dad for forever before that. He let me take the controls all the time once I was big enough to see out the windscreen and reach the pedals."

"For real?"

"Oh yeah. I've never not flown. Flying is Dad's life, and it's mine. It's the one thing we share. He’s a hard, cold, unaffectionate man, and he expects absolute perfection in all things, but he’s one hell of a pilot, and he instilled that love of flying in me. He shared it with me. Taught me. But his deal has always been more—pushing the envelope. He always wants to go faster; he wants to fly higher. That's why he got into experimental piloting—the chance to fly stuff no one else has, new designs that can break speed and height records, things that can turn on a dime and give you eight cents change." A shrug, a sigh. "So I guess I maybe unconsciously gravitated towards helos as a way of choosing something for myself. I didn't want to follow in his footsteps, y'know? Who could? There is and only ever will be one Commander Tom Tiernan, and it ain't me. So…helos."

"Makes sense to me," I said. "Sounds like a hard man to grow up under."

She blew out a breath that was part laugh, part scoff. "You have no fucking clue, big guy."

I snickered. "Big guy? In my family, I'm on the smaller side."

She stared at me. "So you come from a family of giants? Because, Jax, you're not small. In any way." She blushed and turned her attention to the map, and I knew exactly what she was thinking about.

I had to bite back a dozen needling little jokes, because I didn't think Tea would respond well to being teased. So far, her sense of humor doesn't seem to run toward teasing banter.

She abruptly slapped the pencil down onto the map with a disgusted scoff. "Just fucking say whatever it is you’re thinking, Jax. I can feel you not saying things, and that’s worse than if you just made your stupid fucking joke."

I shook my head slowly. "No, ma'am. That sounds like a terrible idea."