The Karsan Valley opened beneath them like a wound in the earth—narrow, steep-walled, and choking with the kind of downdrafts that made pilots religious. Emma Miller pressed her spine against the seat as Captain Cooper wrestled the Mi-17 into the descent, the rotor blades chewing air that fought back.
"Wind's coming off the eastern ridge," she said, eyes flicking between the vertical speed indicator and the crumbling terraces below. "Gusting. You'll lose lift the second we drop below the rim."
"I can feel it," Cooper snapped, but his knuckles were white on the collective.
Below them, the village clung to the mountainside—stone houses shattered by the landslide, and among the rubble, people. Dozens of them, waving cloth, holding children, some kneeling beside bodies that didn't move. A landing zone the size of a tennis court, hemmed by boulders and a leaning water tower.
"There's no LZ," Cooper said. "We hover, or we don't get them."
"Then we hover." Emma keyed the radio. "Ground party, this is Rescue Two. We're bringing her to eight feet over the flat rock. Load fast."
The helicopter shuddered as Cooper brought her down into the bowl. Instantly the crosswind slammed the tail, yawing them toward the water tower. Emma called the corrections without thinking—left pedal, nose down two degrees, watch the drift. Cooper answered each one, and for a moment they were a single nervous system.
Then the doctor looked up.
He was a gray-haired man in a filthy field coat, herding villagers toward the door, and when the dust cleared and he saw Emma's face through the cockpit glass, he stopped moving entirely. His mouth formed a word. She read it on his lips before the intercom crackled with a medic relaying it up the chain.
Miller.
"The doctor's asking," the crew chief said over the intercom, voice thin, "if you're related to Daniel Miller. Says he flew with him. In the old program. Says you have his—"
Emma's hands went cold.
Her father's name, spoken here, in this valley, eight feet above people who would die if she flinched. The grief came up her throat like floodwater. She saw her father's notebook, his last hospital bed, the way his hands had shaken when he tried to teach her the very hover she was flying now. Her vision tunneled. The instruments blurred.
"Miller." Cooper's voice cut through. "Miller, I'm losing her. Talk to me. Talk to me."
The nose was swinging. They were drifting toward the tower.
She could freeze. She could let it swallow her whole.
Or she could do the thing her father spent his life doing.
"Right pedal," she said, and her voice didn't shake. "Half an inch. Now ease the collective—up, up, she's settling. Hold your reference on the leaning tower. Don't chase the wind, let it push you and correct late." She breathed. "You're flying, Cooper. You're doing it. Bring her back over the rock."
Cooper obeyed. The Mi-17 steadied, groaning, and the first villagers surged into the cabin—an old woman, two children, a man with a broken arm. The doctor lifted a girl through the door and looked up at Emma one more time, and there was something in his face that undid her more than grief: recognition, and gratitude, and the ghost of her father in the space between them.
"Six aboard!" the crew chief shouted. "Eight! We're at max, we're heavy!"
"Take us up," Emma said. "Gentle. She's carrying souls now."
Cooper pulled power. The helicopter clawed for the sky, laboring, the ridge line falling away beneath them. Emma let herself exhale. First load. Alive. She had chosen the mission over the wound, and the wound had not killed her.
Then the landslide answered.
A gust rolled a sheet of corrugated roofing off a ruined house and flung it upward into the rotor wash. It cartwheeled, caught the disc for a fraction of a second—a hard metallic bang that Emma felt in her teeth—and spun away in pieces.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then the airframe began to buzz. A high, ugly vibration, coming from behind them, coming from the tail.
Cooper's eyes met hers in the reflection of the windscreen.
"Tell me that's my imagination," he said.
Emma stared at the vibration meter as the needle crept off its peg and began, slowly, to climb.
"It's not," she said. "It's the tail rotor."
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