Author's Notes:

My thanks to Molly Webb for the editing and to TB's LMC for the gracious loan of her character Devrat Verma, John's best friend from her stories "Ascent" and "Business as Usual."

Any mistakes in the Hindi words/phrases are my own. Any corrections will be gratefully received. :)

Cold. So cold.

The skin on his face was weirdly tight and puffy – as though under some kind of pressure. Like… He knew the feeling, knew what it meant, somewhere in the depths of his mind. But the answer would not come.

His breathing seemed labored; it was harder than usual to get air into his lungs. His throat felt swollen and clogged, his eyes were gummed shut. He struggled to open them, figure out where he was.

Cold all over, deep down to the bone, the kind that was beyond shivering. The kind that killed.

A remote part of his brain trotted out the symptoms of hypothermia. Shallow breathing, weak pulse, clumsiness or lack of coordination, confusion or memory loss…

Something icy splatted gently on to his cheek, like a tiny wet feather. It felt like...

Snow?

It finally started coming back to him. That's why he was cold. He'd been climbing…hadn't he? He just couldn't remember where…

John Tracy managed to get his eyes open at last, and instantly wished he hadn't. Below him was nothing, nothing but empty air.

He was hanging upside down off the side of a mountain and the ground was a long, long way down.

Well, that would seem to confirm the climbing theory. John closed his eyes against the sudden dizziness. Forced them open again, this time directing his gaze upward. Look for a way out.

There seemed to be some kind of ledge about eight feet above him, which was promising. If he could just…

Something above him abruptly gave a little, and he jolted downward a couple of inches. A tiny rain of dirt and snow showered his face. John froze, bracing for the inevitable.

But it didn't come. Shaky with relief, he refused to look back down at the abyss below him. Moving very carefully now, a fraction of an inch at a time, he managed to look up enough that he could see that his legs were thoroughly tangled in a length of rope, which itself was entwined in the branches of a thick-trunked, stunted evergreen that seemed to grow almost horizontally out of the mountainside.

How the hell…?

Call for help.

His wristcom. John tried to move his left wrist closer to his face, but the arm would not cooperate. He was too frozen and numb to be able to tell right away what the problem was, but it definitely wasn't operating normally.

"You hurt your arm," a voice said, close by.

John jumped nearly out of his skin. The rope gave about six inches this time, and he swung to the left, his arm smacking hard into the rock face. Pain exploded all the way up to his shoulder and he was gasping for breath by the time the bits of ice and frozen earth stopped falling again.

"You probably shouldn't move too much," the voice said again. It sounded like a little girl, maybe seven, eight at the most.

No kidding. The arm was clearly broken, although he'd gotten lucky that there was no jagged edge of bone sticking out through the skin.

It won't matter. The fall's gonna kill you.

OK, the rational part of his brain said, let's look on the bright side. The child's impossible presence might mean that this whole thing was just a bad dream. Otherwise, how the hell was there a little girl…

"Where are you?" he breathed, pain robbing him of most of his voice.

"Up here," she said. John moved his head very carefully to the right. He managed to suppress the jolt of surprise when, unbelievably, he saw her. She was sitting on the ledge above him, kicking her legs. A very attractive blonde child in a long, white dress, silver sandals, and—

Wings.

He squeezed his eyes shut again. "Oh, God."

"Don't worry, I'm not a real angel," she said, with a high-pitched giggle. "It's just for Halloween. My mommy made it. Is it nice? Mommy says it makes me look pretty."

He looked again. Sure enough, she was still there. "It's lovely," he said to the hallucination.

"My name's Sylvie. What's yours?"

"John," he grunted. "Do you know what happened to me?"

"You fell when the earth shook," she said. "Your arm caught in the tree – I could tell it hurt you a lot. You had to take your watch off to get it free, but there was another shake and you lost your balance. I think that's when you hit your head as well."

The wristcom. It's in the tree. John stared up at it. "Can you get it for me? It's a special watch – I can call for help with it."

She shook her head solemnly. "I can't touch things," she said. "I'm not really here."

Of course not. John exhaled in frustration, making the mistake of looking down again at the endless nothingness below him. The dizziness made his stomach churn.

Don't do that again. You know better.

He asked, after a minute of deep breaths, "Are you a ghost?"

She laughed. "No, silly," she said, like it should have been the most obvious answer in the world. "I'm at home, sleeping."

She leaned over toward him, her voice conspiratorial. "Can I tell you a secret? I see people in my dreams that I'm going to meet. Mommy said not to tell people that, but you don't mind, do you?"

John started to shake his head, thought better of it. "No," he said. "I don't mind." He recognized the edge of hysteria in his voice, tried to get a hold of it. "I don't think you're going to be meeting me, though. Considering."

She nodded insistently. "But I will. I always do. You'll see."

A deep rumble began somewhere deep inside the rock face. Another earthquake. Oh, God. This is it. The cliff was sheer beside him; there was nothing he could do, nothing he could hold on to. He felt jolt after jolt as the stunted tree pulled out of the mountain, inch by tortured inch.

He was shaking with fear by the time it stopped.

It was a different kind of rumble that woke him again, what felt like a very long time later. The sound was familiar, somehow. To his complete surprise, he was warm, too, and no longer in pain. He searched his memory but he couldn't remember blacking out again. Couldn't remember the little girl leaving, either.

Was it over? Had he by some miracle missed the fall and gone straight to whatever came after?

"Hey, Johnny, are you with us?"

Gordon. How is that Gordon?

He managed to get his eyes open a tiny slit. His redheaded brother was indeed there, sitting beside him in what looked very much like the medical bay of Thunderbird Two. "You're…not real…you can't be…"

"Encouraging," Gordon said approvingly. "Although I usually get that response from women and they're usually happier when they say it."

John tried to laugh but it turned into a deep, hard cough. "Take it easy, bro," Gordon said, deftly propping his older brother up a bit with a pillow to ease his breathing. "You'd been hanging there for quite a few hours by the time we found you. Your left arm's broken in two places, your wrist is sprained, your lungs are a mess and you're going to have a headache for a while. No frostbite, though, so that's one good thing."

"How…?" John managed. "How did you...?

"Dev," Gordon said with a smile. "You two were supposed to connect and share whatever it is you people who like hanging off mountains like to share, remember? When you didn't check in on schedule and he couldn't raise you, he called us. We got nothing either." A sober edge crept into his tone. "Alan figured out your position and we got there as fast as we could. I'm sorry it took us so long."

"She was right," John said in a whisper, closing his eyes again as a wave of utter exhaustion flowed through him and the color leached away from the edges of his vision.

"Who?" Gordon's voice seemed to come from a long way away. "Who was right?"

Darkness claimed John before he could answer.

It had been, to put it mildly, a close thing. So close that his brothers, usually so loquacious, became almost stilted when the subject came up – as if none of them wanted to actually put into words what might have happened. He caught them looking at him out of the corner of their eyes sometimes, as if they were trying to figure out what it must have been like to hang there, suspended over certain doom, for ten and a half hours.

On the bright side, the worst injuries John had sustained were a mild concussion, the fractured forearm and a badly sprained wrist. Still, even with the most advanced therapies available, he would be off any kind of heavy rescue work for at least six weeks, and Thunderbird Five, with its reduced gravity, was off limits until the arm healed.

John's best friend and frequent partner in mountain climbing and other adventures, Devrat "Dev" Verma, had flown in the day after John's rescue, wanting to see for himself that John was in one piece. "I have said it before and I will say it again – you Tracys are made of sterner stuff than the rest of us regular humans," Dev declared, shaking his head, after hearing the rundown on his friend's projected recovery. "To escape with such minor injuries… Daal mein kuch kala hai."

John barely avoided snorting coffee all over his teeshirt. "'There is something black in the lentils.' That still makes me laugh. Remember the first time you said that to me?"

"How could I forget? You laughed for much too long, I asked you if you had never seen anything black in your lentils and you said you'd let me know when if and when you ever ate any." Dev shook his head. "I still think the English expression is much weirder. 'There is something fishy.'" He snorted. "Why would something act like a fish if it is not on the level? I do not think you see many fish swimming around looking guilty."

"Outside of Disney movies, anyway," said John, grinning.

Dev stayed on the island the rest of the week, watching over his best friend through his morning schedule of therapy and deftly distracting him from his guilt at being waited on hand and foot. In the afternoons they sat out by the pool and talked or played Pallankuzhi, a traditional Indian game, and Moksha Patam, otherwise known as Snakes and Ladders. John was very sorry to see him go when it was time for him to return to work.

"I will see you again before long, bhai. I guarantee it," Dev assured him.

"And how do you know that?"

Dev gave him a wise look, followed by a wink. "Because you and I, our specialty seems to be getting into trouble. Where there is a khichdi to be made, we can always be found in the middle of it."

John had to laugh, because he was so right. "Purane aadhath mushkil se marthi hai," he said in Hindi. Old habits die hard…

As the days turned into weeks, John's healing continued smoothly, aided and abetted by the millions of dollars worth of cutting edge medical technology that Brains had at his fingertips. But the nightmares…that was another problem entirely. He might have been rescued in reality, but every night in his dreams, the mountain let him go and he fell. And fell. He'd wake up shaking with fear, and so cold that it took him hours to feel warm again even in the balm of their tropical home. He thought often of the guide he had hired on the climb that had gone so terribly wrong. The man had fallen during the earthquake as well, only he hadn't been as lucky as John. His body had only been found after a protracted search. John had reached out to his family immediately, pledging support to help his wife and their three young sons.

He alternated between guilt at his own survival and regret over what had happened to his guide. It could so very nearly have been him.

"It was not for you to die at that time," Kyrano said to him at the side of the pool one day, as he delivered one of his herbal remedies that the Tracys had come to respect as extremely helpful in the healing process. As usual, he had intuited the question in John's mind in his mysterious way. "But you will have your own demons to defeat."

Well, that was encouraging. And he hadn't even told anyone – Dev included – about the little girl in the angel costume. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to do that, even if he was positive by now that she had only been a figment of a mind severely stressed by exposure.

Five weeks after the accident, things were almost back to normal. Alan had activated the communications relay and come back down from Thunderbird Five and John had been working his way back into action, handling distress calls in the afternoons from their secondary communications center in Launch Control. The mornings were for therapy, usually culminating with a session of therapeutic massage and a stint in the whirlpool bath.

He'd almost forgotten about Kyrano's obscure comments when he reached the lounge one morning and heard Tin-Tin exclaim, "Oh, Gordon, look, whales!"

She was hanging over the balcony rail, talking to Gordon, who John guessed must be down below at the swimming pool. John went out through the open doors to join her, looking out and down toward the ocean to see what he could spot.

The whole balcony shifted and spun out from under his feet.

John fell hard, smacking down with bruising force onto the polished concrete. Stunned, he lay there for a moment enduring waves of dizziness, head pounding, chest wrapped in a hot, tight band. He dimly heard Tin-Tin calling his name but couldn't respond, because by then he was too busy throwing up what was left of his breakfast.

What the hell..?

"It sounds like, ah, vertigo, John," Brains told him half an hour later as he sat perched on the edge of the exam table down in sickbay. International Rescue's chief scientist and medical officer had spent several minutes looking into both John's ear canals, taking his blood pressure and asking him questions about whether he felt lightheaded or had ringing in his ears. John had thankfully been able to answer them all to the negative. He was still a little shaky and clammy but felt more or less normal at this point.

"What causes that?"

"Could be a lot of, ah, reasons, John. Inflammation in the i-inner ear, Meniere's Disease, acoustic neuroma…"

"Lovely," John said. "So to save me from Wikipedia hell…what do you think it was?"

"I will have to, uh, run some tests. It could be just a-a side effect of your accident."

"Great." John kept the sarcasm in his voice as light as possible as he jumped down off the table. "I feel fine now. Is that normal?"

"Oh, yes. These things often strike without, ah, warning."

More good news. John left Brains to his tests and went back up to the villa. He needed to find Tin-Tin and apologize for scaring her.

The launch warning lights began to flash inside the elevator, and John exited on the pool level, his ears immediately assailed by the rescue alarms. He waited behind the safety of the reinforced glass doors, which locked automatically when a launch was in progress. He watched the swimming pool rumble aside and felt the ground shake as his eldest brother's silver Thunderbird rose from her launch silo and clawed her way into the sky on the raw power of her massive engines. When the coast was clear and the doors released again, he went out across the patio area, intending to look down over the Cliff House and watch Thunderbird Two take off. It wasn't a sight he got to see too often, since when he was down on dirtside rotation he was usually on board the green giant when she took off for the danger zone.

It would be good to be back in action for real. Soon.

Out of nowhere, as he approached the half wall that marked the edge of the cliff, cold chills shot down his back and sides. His heart began pounding.

Uh oh. This wasn't good. He'd started to sweat, that clammy feeling from the balcony taking hold again.

It wasn't that hot today, was it? Maybe he wasn't as recovered as he'd thought. Maybe he should sit down.

He moved to sit on the wall, but as soon as he looked down over the edge of the cliff the dizziness slammed into him and the world turned sideways. His vision tunneled and this time the panic hit, a screaming, irrational shredding of every nerve in his body. It was so far down and he was falling, falling…

With the last ounce of self-preservation he had left, he managed to throw himself backwards off the wall to the safety of the patio, instead of the way he was being inexorably pulled – forward, all the way down the cliff to the runway.

He lay there for a long time on the flagstones, sick, dizzy and shaking. When the symptoms had receded enough that he could move, he carefully did not look back toward the wall as he got to his feet and crept toward the safety of the house.

There was no question anymore. He knew what this was, now.

He just didn't know what the hell he was going to do about it.

He didn't tell anyone.

John had always been a very private person, much more so than any of his brothers. You didn't go in John's room without his knowledge, not unless you wanted to risk the full brunt of his not inconsiderable anger. He'd taken heck from his father and from Scott for not sharing things before, important things, things that were not necessarily best kept hidden. But it was how he was. He needed to stay in control, to figure things out first, get on top of the situation. Don't just come in with a problem, his father had always said. Come in with a solution.

He told himself that's what he was doing now. Finding a solution.

It was an excuse and he knew it. But he also had a very real fear growing inside him, that if his family found out his accident had left him with what he was ninety-nine percent sure now was severe acrophobia, it could jeopardize his entire existence in International Rescue.

Safely back in his suite after the…incident at the cliffside, he'd conducted an experiment – punched up a video he had taken last time up on Thunderbird Five, of the earth spinning far below him in all her blue and white beauty. It took all of three seconds before he had to bolt for the bathroom and retch his guts out.

Yep. This was bad.

Starve the imagination and feed the will. It was a well-known saying around the family – Scott had learned it from his survival instructor in USAF Officer Training School, and he'd passed it along to his brothers when they began preparing for International Rescue. Concentrate on what you can do, and not on what you can't control. Accordingly, when John had gotten himself back together after the disturbing results of his video experiment, he started formulating a plan. A fragment of memory was floating somewhere in the back of his mind, some news story about an actor who had sought the help of the leading specialist in this particular arena to get hold of his own acrophobia when the role of a lifetime had presented itself.

It only took a few minutes for his serious research skills to come up with the specialist's name: Dr. Irena Stanfield. The only snag was that she was in San Francisco, California.

He sat there for a long time, thinking. He had to get to San Francisco. But how on earth was going to make that trip without once looking down?

There was nothing else for it. He was going to need help.

"Dev," he said into the satellite phone. "I need a favor."

"Of course, bhai. But I will have to check to see if she is available on short notice."

John smiled despite the seriousness of his situation. "I need you to book me a flight from Auckland to San Francisco."

The was a pause on the line. He could hear the wheels spinning in Dev's brain as he tried to figure this out. "But why do you need me to…?" Dev's voice took on an "aha!" note. "You do not want your family to know where you are going!"

"No, I don't," John said reluctantly. "But I can't tell you why right now. Just trust me, please. I'll explain later."

"I see something black in the lentils again," Dev said.

"That so doesn't work in English, my friend."

"Still better than suspicious fish. All right, send me the details. But you owe me an explanation, ASAP."

"I promise."

John allowed himself to relax, just a little, as the second part of his plan came together.

Now he had to figure out the first part. Getting to New Zealand to catch that plane.

It proved to be easier than he thought.

John was extremely careful not to go anywhere near the balcony or any other place where the perception of height was involved, for the next week. Once he'd had his end of treatment physical and Brains had pronounced him physically healed and free from complications, John then announced that he wanted to take a couple of weeks and get away, so that he could come back refreshed and ready to go back to work. Some sightseeing in nearby New Zealand should prove relaxing, he said. Jeff granted the request without hesitation, and John lost no time in packing his bags.

He had spent some time chewing over how to accomplish the flight to Auckland. Obviously he wasn't going to be able to pilot one of the family aircraft himself…or tell his family why he couldn't. In the end, though, it turned out to be quite simple: Virgil was going in on a supply run, and John caught a ride with him in the Tracy Corp multi-seater executive jet. He came down into the hangar that morning complaining about a headache, told his older brother that he hadn't slept very well and would probably nap on the way to New Zealand. Virgil was sympathetic, as John knew he'd be, and didn't remark about the sleep mask John slipped over his face before pretending to sack out in the cabin.

He was glad the flight was relatively quick. But the experience taught him that he could do this, as long as he a) didn't look out of the windows and b) didn't allow himself to dwell on the idea of how high up they were. He was only sick once when he forgot b), and fortunately the bathroom was way in the rear. As far as he knew, Virgil was none the wiser – and in any case probably would have chalked up anything he saw or heard to the lingering effects of John's ordeal on that mountain.

Once they touched down at Auckland, John said his farewells to a concerned looking Virgil – who had, apparently, noticed his hasty inflight bolt to the bathroom. Assuring his brother that he was indeed all right, he made sure Virgil wasn't looking as he slipped across to the International Terminal. Once on board the plane, he planned on hunkering down in his first-class seat, activating the window shades, stuffing his earbuds into his ears and doing his best not to white-knuckle it the entire way.

All twelve hours.

The length of the flight had concerned him from the beginning, but he hadn't dared to ask Dev to book him on the Fireflash that would have gotten him there in less than half the time – he'd been in those first class lounges with their sweeping, spectacular views, and just the thought now made him want to vomit up what little breakfast his stomach had retained.

"Fear of flying?" a helpful fellow passenger said sympathetically from across the aisle as the Air New Zealand 787 Dreamliner taxied toward the runway.

John's heart lurched. He didn't want to think about what it would do to his future if this change inside him was permanent. No more IR, no more Thunderbird Five and sitting up top in his observation bubble with the Hydra, his beloved custom-built, multi-functional telescope array. No more–

He shut that train of thought down cold. He ordered a scotch, asked the flight attendant to make it a double, and slid the sleep mask back into place.

Dev called twice while John was in the air and once more while he was waiting at the baggage carousel at SFO. John switched off his phone a little guiltily and shoved it into his pocket. He wasn't ready yet to tell his best friend what he was going through – there were just too many variables at this point. If he was honest with himself, he was waiting until he had some sort of hope for a positive outcome.

Always supposing there was one.

Rather than put himself through the potential trauma of a high rise hotel in San Francisco proper, John had opted for another fixture of the Tracys' travels, the Cavallo Point Lodge, right across the Golden Gate bridge in the Marin Headlands park. Cavallo Point Lodge was a collection of white, red-roofed, meticulously restored turn-of-the-twentieth-century buildings that had once been officers' quarters for the original Fort Baker army post. They were beautiful, eco-friendly and had a killer art collection, something Virgil appreciated.

The biggest recommendation for John right now, though, was that he could get a suite on the first floor. Negotiating the Golden Gate was another concern, but he told the driver he was severely jet lagged and whipped out his trusty sleep mask for the journey.

Once at the Lodge and in the privacy of his suite, he threw his bag on to the bed and put in a call to Dr. Stanfield's office. Although it wasn't something he liked to do, he was prepared to use the Tracy name to get the first available appointment, but it turned out not to be necessary. The receptionist told him he was lucky, because a flu bug going around had felled a couple of the doctor's regular patients, and there was an opening the following afternoon.

John tried to take comfort from the way that fate seemed to be arranging things to help him out. He just hoped there wasn't a spectacular letdown lurking somewhere ahead.

Dr. Stanfield herself called him early the next morning and asked him a few searching questions. In what he took to be a sign that she was taking his plight seriously, she told him she would meet him in the ground level café in her building rather than have him come all the way up to her office on the fifty-second floor.

Glancing up at the towering glass wall of the high rise as he got out of the town car that afternoon, John was very grateful for her suggestion.

Dr. Stanfield was waiting for him at the café. She was a tiny, wrinkled woman who reminded John irresistibly of someone his grandmother had adored, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. He impressed her by pegging her accent correctly as Czech, and she explained that her last name had originally been Svoboda. The Stanfield was from her husband, a human rights lawyer she had met at a conference in London two decades previously.

After minimal small talk, she got down to business smoothly. To his relief, unlike Dr. Ruth, she didn't seem to think the root of his problems was in his sex life. She listened to the story of what had happened to him on the mountain, and was both patient and encouraging as he stumbled through a description of the attacks he had endured on the island. He only had to visit the bathroom once.

"Well," John said at last, acutely aware that he had done most of the talking for at least thirty minutes. "What do you think?"

"I think your diagnosis of severe acrophobia is probably quite accurate," she said. "Especially after a traumatic experience like the one you had."

"So…what do I do about it?"

"I can give you coping techniques, to get you through the worst exposure, for the times you will need it, and –"

"No," John interrupted. He realized abruptly that he was speaking too loudly, and forced himself to calm down. "I don't want coping techniques. I want to get rid of this… this thing. I want my life back."

Dr. Stanfield sat back in her chair, looking at him appraisingly. "I take it we are talking about more than just the occasional mountain climbing holiday…?"

John stared at her. At last he said, "To explain it to you, I'd have to invoke doctor-patient privilege."

She smiled. "You're not the first undercover agent I've treated, if that's what you mean. Although they usually complain more of claustrophobia."

John almost laughed. "It's a lot more unique than that, I promise you, doctor. In fact, I can probably guarantee you one thing – you've never met anyone else who works for the outfit I do."

John left Dr. Stanfield after making a follow-up appointment for the next day, when he promised to reveal just why he needed her help so badly as long as she promised him she'd have the blinds drawn in her office when he returned. She cautioned him that the process, which involved system desensitization and exposure therapy, could be rough on the patient and could take many months, and even then he might not see a full recovery. She patted his hand, then, and told him to have faith – if he was willing to work, so was she. John told her he was willing to do anything, anything at all.

Exhausted from all the soul baring he'd had to do and depressed at the idea of this possibly taking a long time, John had a killer tension headache coming on. Deciding he'd reached what Virgil often called his "people limit" for the day, he vetoed his original idea of having dinner in the city and called the limo company for a car to take him back to his hotel. That way he could relax in the back and put on his sleep mask and just pretend he was anywhere but here, dealing with what he was dealing with.

His phone began buzzing as he waited at the curb for the town car. He looked at the display and sighed. Dev.

John took a deep breath and decided he should answer. He'd been dodging his best friend's calls for almost two days, after all. "John Tracy, international man of mystery…" he said as he pressed the green button.

"You are getting into trouble without me," Dev said accusingly.

"Oh, you have no idea."

"A promise is a promise," Dev said. "Do not make me call your family."

John let his head drop, his forehead touching the phone for a moment. "OK," said at last. "Let me get into the car."

"Don't hang up," Dev warned. "Or we will never find you in this traffic."

"I won't," John promised, before the rest of Dev's sentence caught up with him. "Wait…what..?"

Dev chuckled but didn't answer. A minute later the black Lincoln pulled up in front of him. The rear window slid down and John stared as he recognized the bright smile of Devrat Verma.

"You are catching flies, my friend," Dev said. "Best get in the car before somebody thinks there is something wrong with you. And no, I am not going to open your door."

"I'm telling," John said petulantly, climbing into the rear seat.

"Go ahead. It will not do you any good. This company is owned by the family of my Great Uncle Aarav's second wife. I have always been his favorite nephew. Is that not right, Adi?"

The dark-suited driver nodded. "Yes, Uncle Devrat."

"Damn, you told me that once," John remembered. "I totally forgot. But how did you track me down?"

"You Tracys are creatures of habit, bhai. You always use the same car company in San Francisco. It occurs to me that perhaps you should be careful with that, in case the next person who uses that information does not possess my glowing reputation."

John sighed and sat back in the seat, pushing back the blond locks that stubbornly insisted on falling into his eyes. Dev's expression was a lot more concerned than his conversational tone had suggested. "I am worried about you, John. Will you please tell me what is going on?"

And so John did, aware of the tremendous relief of sharing his secret with someone he trusted implicitly. Dev listened in silence as Adi navigated the town car through the early afternoon traffic toward the bridge. When his friend was finished, Dev let out a low whistle. "You know, this was not what I had in mind when I said you were getting into trouble without me."

"No kidding."

"I thought perhaps a few nights on the town, a couple of blondes…"

John couldn't raise a smile. Dev said, "I do not understand why you did not tell your family, though."

"I'm afraid to. What if this is permanent? What if Dad takes me off active duty?"

"So as usual John Tracy goes off by himself and tries to solve his own problems. Without, I might add, the extremely valuable input of his loyal and handsome best friend."

"I'm sorry," John said. "I was in panic mode."

They were approaching the Golden Gate now, he could see the towers with their international orange paint, colorful against the gray clouds that hugged the hilltops on the Sausalito side. As they passed the southbound toll booths on their left, John shrank back into his seat, slipping on the sleep mask. "Let me know when we're off the bridge again, will you?"

"So, shall we have fish and chips at Murray Circle, my friend?" Dev asked. "I think perhaps you could use a beer or three right now."

"Wouldn't be a bad idea," John said. "If we can get reservations." He wasn't sure he was up to dinner in public. But Dev was hard to dissuade.

"A Tracy can always get reservations," his friend chuckled. "You were the one who told me that."

The sudden screech of brakes shattered the air, followed by a tremendous booming crash that shook the roadway under them. John heard Adi's gasp of surprise as he ripped off his sleep mask, to be faced with the terrifying sight of two massive, fully loaded semis, tangled with each other in a nightmare embrace, sliding diagonally across the bridge right at them. The sheer combined weight of the juggernauts ripped the yellow median poles right out of the concrete as they passed, scattering them like toothpicks.

"Oh my God, we are going to die!" Adi shouted, hauling over the wheel in the other direction. Behind them cars were burning rubber as their drivers threw them into reverse, trying not to get swept off into the bay. More smacking sounds of metal colliding made John wince…the traffic was thick on the bridge and there was nowhere for anyone to go.

Their town car struck a vehicle behind it and jerked to a halt. John drew back involuntarily as the unholy metal behemoth filled the windshield. There was a hard jolt as the left fender of the second cab caught the Lincoln's front bumper and began to drag them with it towards the edge of the bridge. Never say it can't get worse…

"Get out of the car!" John barked. "Move!"

He yanked on the handle beside him but the door wouldn't open. Dev was doing the same on his side. It dawned on John that the automatic locks must be engaged. "Adi! Open the doors!"

Adi sat there frozen, unable to take his eyes off their terrifying slide towards the bridge railings. Dev pounded on his passenger window with zero effect. Bulletproof glass, John remembered. He boosted himself forward, leaning over the front seats to try to shake the rigid Adi out of his hypnotized state.

They were out of time. John could only watch helplessly as the lead semi, pushed inexorably by the one behind it, smashed through the barrier between the road and the pedestrian walkway and kept right on going, the enormous weight and momentum forcing it through the railings at the edge of the bridge. The two massive vehicles ground to an ear-splitting, screaming halt of metal on metal, the cab and half the trailer of the leading truck now hanging over the bridge like a gargoyle, pointing down at the water, two hundred twenty feet below.

John stared at the edge of the bridge, only ten feet in front of the town car. A sudden clicking sound from beside him brought him back to reality and he realized he was soaked with sweat.

Adi gave him a weak smile in the rearview mirror. "Doors are open, sir," he managed, in a much higher, squeakier voice than John had heard earlier.

John's rescue training kicked in, shoved the fear of a moment ago to the background. There was a job to do. "Call 911!" he said to Adi. "Dev, let's go!" He was out of the back of the town car and running toward the wreck before he had time for a conscious thought.

Reality came crashing through and he skidded to a stop, the bile rising in his throat as he realizing there was no way he could get anywhere near the edge of the bridge. Just the thought of how far down the water was, and his heart began to beat faster in his chest.

Think, John, think… People were out of their cars, swarming everywhere, the accident effectively closing off the roadway in both directions. Dev ran up behind him, talking on his phone. "Adi says they are on the way," he said as he hung up.

John glanced back at the solid mass of traffic, the length of the backup building as he watched. He had no idea how help was going to get through, but worrying about that wasn't his job. He pointed at the cab of the second tangled semi. "See if the driver is hurt."

Dev ran to the cab and jumped on the running board, peeing through the window. John turned his attention to the first truck, the one hanging over the edge. He spotted a kid of maybe sixteen in a scruffy, stained hoodie and jeans at the edge of the bridge, staring over the side open-mouthed. "Hey, kid, what's your name?"

The kid whipped his head around. "Sean," he said, after a moment.

John said, "My name is John. I'm a rescue professional. I'm going to try to help these people. I need you to tell me what's going on in that cab down there. Do you see any movement?"

The kid gave him a very strange look but did as he asked. "I think the driver's moving around. I see his arm, out of the window." He paused, looked closer. "Oh, God."

"What?" John tensed.

"There's a little girl in there. A little blonde girl."

A deep chill ran through John. Later, he would not be able to explain how he knew with such absolute certainty who it was. He just knew.

A long, tearing screech came from behind him. He knew what that was, too, and the knowledge settled cold into the pit of his stomach. The weight of the first truck was pulling the two vehicles apart, and once they had completely separated…

"Driver is OK," Dev panted, running up beside him. "What do we do now?"

"We have to stop these two trucks from separating. Get these people to help. Chains, rope, bungee cords, jumper cables…whatever they've got. Tie the trucks together."

Dev raced to the nearest clump of bystanders, started relaying John's message. They looked at each other, uncertain. "Now!" Dev shouted. "People are going to die here!"

The crowd broke, running for their vehicles. He saw trunks opening, equipment being grabbed. Dev turned back to John, gave him the thumbs up. John returned it, smiling despite himself.

He turned back to the kid in the hoodie. "What's happening down there?"

Another deeply disturbing sound of ripping metal from behind him. Sean glanced at it nervously, then looked back down over the edge. "The little girl's waving out of the back window."

John's eyes closed briefly. For a stark few moments, he realized he had no idea what to do, how to get her out.

"I can go down there," the kid blurted out. "On a rope, or something. We can't just let her…"

John stared at him. "I can't let you do that."

"I can do it," the boy said. "I don't care if I fall. I was going to jump anyway."

John opened his mouth but no sound would come out. The kid, embarrassed, looked away. "OK, then you do it," he said. You're the freaking professional."

"I can't," John whispered. "You don't understand."

The boy made a disgusted sound and ran toward the crowd that was milling around the two trucks, trying to prevent them from separating. "I need a rope! Anybody got a rope?"

John scrubbed his fingers down over his face. Behind him there were shrieks as more metal tore away and the front semi, the one hanging over the edge, swung in a sickening arc before settling back again. In the far distance he thought he could hear sirens, but he knew with deep, unerring certainty that they wouldn't make it in time.

He thought about the water again, how far down it was. Fought down the instant, shaky, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Looked up and around himself again, at the people, the chaos. Felt it all recede, slow down, leaving him alone and isolated at the center – the sounds distant and muffled now, only his own heartbeat thundering in his ears.

He had to do this. There was no choice. She was down there, and he had to save her.

Sean was coming back past him with a thick coil of rope. John snatched it out of his hands, whipping it into a loop and fastening it around his body with the ease of long practice. "This is my job," he said. "I'm the freaking professional."

The kid stared at him. "Tell me what to do."

"I'm going to try to climb down the truck, get to the cab and see what's going on there. I'll need you to guide the rope. I'll get those people out of there and you'll need to help them back up." And me, hopefully, he added to himself.

Sean nodded, his thin face tense. "Let's do it."

John tied off the rope to an intact section of railing. On the girder beside him was a blue and white crisis counseling plaque that read: The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic. "I hope not this time," he muttered as he stood at the edge.

He couldn't look down. If he did, it would be all over. It was a miracle he'd even gotten this far, and now he had to –

Starve the imagination. John forced back the rising nausea, ignored his clammy skin and the hammering of his heart. You've got to do this or she'll die.

He clambered up the side of the dangling semi, pausing to make sure it would take his weight. It groaned a little but held position. He held Sean's eyes as he backed slowly down the length of the truck, out into open air. Don't look down. You're doing fine. Don't look down.

The kid stared as John went lower and lower, handhold after handhold, feeling behind him with his feet, focusing only on the truck, the metal under his hands. He was shaking with the force of his concentration by the time his feet hit the rear structure of the cab and he knew he had reached his destination.

"John!" Sylvie's voice floated up to him through the open window in the back of the cab, the sound thin and wavering against the wind. "I knew you'd come!"

John anchored himself to the impossibility of that voice. He called out, "Sylvie! I'm going to send down a rope. I need you to ask your father to tie it around you so we can get you up on to the bridge. Then give me two tugs when you're ready. OK?"

"OK!" she called out cheerfully.

John steadied himself, braced against the back of the cab, and said a prayer to the patron saint of hopeless causes. He could hear Scott in his head, scolding him for removing the rope in such a precarious situation, but he did it anyway. Peeked just enough between his feet to see the loop at the end feed down past the cab and a thick, tattooed arm grab it and pull it in.

It was freezing out here, but John didn't allow himself to think about that…it was too much of a reminder of that mountainside. Abruptly he felt a double tug on the rope and began to haul it up. Very quickly he had an armful of little blonde girl. She hugged him tightly and kissed him on the cheek. "I told you I'd see you again," she said.

Then she pulled away a little, and he looked down into her upturned face and with a shock, realized that she was blind.

"I can see in my dreams," she told him, as if she'd read his mind. She was smiling.

John didn't have time to think about it. He looked up to the young man on the edge of the bridge and gave the thumbs up. The kid began to haul on the rope and Sylvie seemed to float upwards toward him.

John watched as he helped her over the railing and into the arms of waiting passers-by. He saw one of them wrap a blanket around her, and knew suddenly that he was all right with it, now, even if the truck fell. There had been a purpose for his survival on the mountain after all. He had lived so he could save her.

The circle was complete.

The rope came spiraling back down, and John passed it along the side of the cab to Sylvie's father. He heard it, then, the thwap-thwap of rotor blades, and looked up to see the Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter closing in. He waved to the orange-suited crewman sitting in the open doorway with the long plastic litter on his lap. He risked a quick glance down and realized Sylvie's father had seen it too.

He waited until the helicopter had Sylvie's father on the litter and were hauling him up. Then he put the rope around his own body again and prepared to make the climb back up to the bridge.

The Coast Guard crewman abruptly started waving at him and pointing upwards. The helicopter banked hard and swung away from the bridge. John looked up, saw the movement the crewman had seen, knew what it meant. He pushed off with both feet and jumped away from the cab, swinging as far in the opposite direction as he could just as the semi broke free with a tremendous roar and rushed down past him in a hard river of metal.

He watched the monster truck sail down toward the dark water in an almost graceful arc, strike the surface and disappear in a boiling whirlpool of foam. The bigger they were, he thought, the harder they fell…

"John!" Dev shouted from above. "Are you all right?"

John glanced upwards, saw his friend's worried face peering down over the railings, Adi beside him, equally concerned. Saw Sylvie in her white dress, wrapped in her blanket, her arms around Sean's neck.

And then it dawned on him.

He had looked down when the truck fell, all the way down at the water two hundred twenty feet below, and all he had felt was the cold salt sting of the wind. No panic. No clammy sweat or thundering heartbeat. No nausea.

No fear.

John broke out in giddy laughter, swinging back and forth at the end of the rope, waiting for the Coast Guard chopper to come back around and pick him up. He gave Dev the thumbs up.

There wasn't any hurry. He could do this all day.