Cassandra Hart swallowed hard to keep down the chilimac she'd eaten earlier. Wishing it was only motion sickness, she tugged at her safety harness. There was no room to breathe, not enough air.Motion sickness she knew how to fix. Irrational claustrophobia was another story. A curse, a weakness she refused to reveal, forcing her to mask her panic.The view outside Cassie's window wasn't helping. The helicopter's blades tore into the low-hanging clouds, shredding them into tattered, ghostly remnants. Rain pelted the scarred Lexan windows, ricocheting like shrapnel. Typical of Pittsburgh, a city constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, few of the buildings they passed were lit. The ones that were, such as the Cathedral of Learning and PPG Place, stood like sentries in the dark, guarding against a pre-dawn invasion. She bit down against another wave of nausea, her pulse drumming through her ears in time with the rotor blades. Across from her, Eddie Marcone, her flight paramedic, lounged in his seat, playing a hand-held computer game, oblivious to her distress and their impending doom. A blast of wind catapulted the Sikorsky skyward. Cassie's restraints tightened against the sudden motion, squeezing against her chest. Gravity yanked them back down with a jolt strong enough to snap her jaws together. "Weather's moving in fast," Zack Allan, their pilot, said, his voice reverberating through her headset. "Might have to turn back, doc." Turn back? Cassie rubbed her clammy palms on the legs of her Nomex flight suit. Right now the landing pad at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Medical Center seemed like a distant Nirvana. A Nirvana that would have to wait. The patient they were flying to retrieve, a girl found in the frigid waters of the Ohio River, couldn't."Ten minutes," she told Zack, denying the fight or flight instinct raging through her, every muscle quivering with the desire to escape. "We'll scoop and run, just give me ten minutes." The Sikorsky bucked again.
