Falling With Style

[Grand Moff Hissa]

((Hector Quayle continued from Chop Chop))

The slope must've been even steeper than Hector had realized, because for a long moment there he was in freefall.

He flailed and turned his head. Behind him, the faint pinpoint of light that was the torch vanished.

Ahead of him was nothing.

His limbs waved briefly for no particular reason. The thicker branch that he'd used as a walking stick, now bent and splintered at the middle from the crushing impact of the goat's skull, spiraled away.

A long time ago, Hector had heard that when you fell in dreams, you never hit the bottom. He'd heard that you couldn't die in dreams, either. You just woke up instead.

That wasn't true, though. Hector had dreamed of falling and of landing. It was just, in his dreams, he flattened out like a cartoon character. He had dreamed of dying, but when he died in his dreams he just kept going, sometimes a ghost, sometimes without even that pretense. It didn't matter, but it was another reason he thought people were pretty stupid. They talked about dreams as if everyone's were all the same.

There was this famous hijacker in the 70s called DB Cooper who jumped out of a plane with a parachute and a bag of cash. Nobody ever saw him again. Some people said he ran away and lived a life of luxury. Some people said he returned to the spotlight decades later as the director of a strange, improbable cult classic movie. Most people said he died. Some of the money turned up on the muddy banks of a river, and that was as close to evidence as there was.

It's hard to find bodies in the wilderness. Sometimes search and rescue operations pass by a place dozens of times, and then years later some hiker finds the corpse of the missing person right there. Everyone wonders, how was that missed? But even small parts of the world can be vast and hard to thoroughly comb through.

Eventually, someone would retrieve Hector, because he was wearing a tracking device. But it would probably take a good long while. For now, what remained was a campsite far above, a thief barely thwarted and three others not trusted, a boy who might as well have seen Sasquatch, and a number of lovingly buried and preserved caches of raw pork that would probably never be consumed by a human being.

The bent and splintered branch would land in a snowbank tip-first, like a javelin, and stand there crookedly.

But for now, Hector closed his eyes and took a deep cold breath of air that would only be forced from his lungs by the impact.