Hilo leapt Light to the top of a nearby van, landing in a crouch. When he stood and raised his arms, the large crowd fell silent and everyone turned toward him, pressing forward expectantly.
“Can you hear me?” Hilo bellowed. “Can you hear me?”
An answering tumult rose from the throng. Among the sea of upturned faces, Hilo saw Jirhuya, looking up at him with an uncertain expression but listening to every word along with the others.
“No matter which part of the country you’re from, which clan you swear allegiance to, whether you wear jade or not, we are all Kekonese. We defend and avenge our own. You wrong any of us, you wrong us all. You seek to war with us, and we will return it a hundredfold.” Hilo was not one for speeches—that had always been Ayt’s strength—but the words that came to him now sprang to mind fully formed. He couldn’t place where they’d come from, yet they felt strong and correct. The Pillar tilted his head back and roared even above the growing noise of the arriving helicopter. “No one will take from us what is ours!”
The helicopter came out of the sky, thundering toward the landing pad in the fenced compound. As the pilot slowed to a controlled hover, Hilo shouted a signal to his Fists. Gathering all of his jade energy like a tide sucking in the ocean, he bent his knees and launched himself Light into the air.
Gravity seemed to slip its hold on him as he hurled himself away from the ground and the people below. Lott, Vin, and Hami leapt Light alongside him, driving themselves upward by bounding off cars or springing from a Strength-fueled running start. They couldn’t reach the helicopter—it was too far away and they were only men after all, not birds. But they could get closer, close enough.
At the apex of his leap, for a dramatic heartbeat of time, Hilo hung in the air at the height of a second-story window. He could feel his momentum reversing. He needed to hold on to enough Lightness to control his descent or he would plummet to a bone-shattering landing. The pilot’s surprise sparked in his Perception like a pulse of light in the corner of his brain before he glimpsed the man’s face, leaning over, mouth open at the remarkable sight of four men leaping up as if to grab on to the helicopter’s landing skids.
Hilo maintained his grip on one discipline while reaching for another. His mind and body strained in painful protest as he flung his arm toward the cockpit of the helicopter with a snarl of exertion and a violent heaving of nearly all the remaining jade energy he possessed.
Four shafts of Channeling hit the pilot almost simultaneously. These were not the precise close-quarters strikes that would deliver a fatal blow to the heart or lungs of a combatant. From such an unwieldly distance away and in midair, the force of Channeling was blunt and badly dissipated. Any Green Bone could’ve easily Steeled against the ridiculous, unorthodox attack.
But the man in the helicopter was not a Green Bone. The combined buffeting of jade energy from all four assailants did not kill him, but the disruptive shock to his organs and nervous system knocked him unconscious. His body fell back against the seat, then slumped over the controls.
Hilo landed harder than he would’ve liked. After such a powerful burst of Channeling, he had barely enough jade energy left to let himself down Lightly and to Steel against the impact. Pain radiated up his shins and thighs into his hips as he hit the ground and tumbled forward onto hands and knees, all the breath knocked out of his lungs. Hami Yasu dropped down Lightly next to him, breathing only slightly harder than normal. “Kaul-jen, are you all right?”
Damn the young. Hilo nodded that he was fine as he got to his feet, wiping the sweat off his brow and brushing the dirt from his hands and knees. He looked up at the helicopter. Everyone else was staring at it transfixed as well, including the security guards surrounding the landing site, as if watching a train crash in slow motion. The uncontrolled machine listed in the air, still on course for a landing, but coming down far too fast now. It tilted and began to spin laterally, churning rotors kicking up a tremendous wind that tore at the clumps of grass and sent many people in the crowd running for the cover of their vehicles. Hilo heard the Finger, the young woman with orange hair, let out a shout of astonishment and elation. “Holy fucking sh—”
The pilot regained consciousness at the last minute, realized what was happening, and tried valiantly to right the helicopter. He was too late. With the horrifying sound of rending metal, the aircraft missed the landing pad and hit the ground barely inside the perimeter of the fence, bouncing sideways and back into the air off one landing skid and its tail rotor. Guards ran from the out-of-control machine as it spun in a circle, hitting the top of the chain-link barrier and ripping an entire section of the fence apart as it careened back into the ground with a concussive boom and explosive cloud of dirt. The helicopter’s rotor blades were torn apart by the impact and went flying in all directions.