Apparently they timed it. Willem didn’t know. He’d slumped down until he was on the floor of the SUV. All he could see out the windows was the blue-black stratosphere, as yet unmarked by streaks of SO 2 but occasionally diced by the rotor of a helicopter. There was another helter-skelter transfer. Not at the official helipad—which frankly was nothing to write home about—but some alternate site. And then they were in the air. Were people shooting at them from the ground? One had to assume so. But you couldn’t see the bullets, so they’d have no way of knowing unless they got hit. To make that less probable the pilot was operating the chopper in a way that involved all the passengers getting slammed to one side of the cabin or other every couple of seconds. They hadn’t had time to buckle their safety belts; the chopper hadn’t even really landed, getting into it had been like diving through the window of a moving car. Willem ended up supine on the floor, gasping like a landed fish, vision desaturating until Amelia’s hand grew vast in his field of view, reaching toward his face with a hissing oxygen mask.