Too many things were happening at once.

Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, but I didn’t need any. We were at a low enough altitude that the air was still palatable, and I had a nearly-full oxygen injector in case it became hard to breathe.

Alarms were wailing in my ears. Warning lights blinked all over the cabin and in the cockpit, where the pilot had miraculously managed to keep his hands on the throttle.

Wind blasted in from outside, throwing papers, pillows, clothing, and anything else under five pounds all over the cabin with chaotic intent.

My guts lurched inside my abdomen. Our plane was veering hard to the right as the pilot pulled hard enough to dislocate the throttle from its the socket in an effort to regain control while maneuvering around sweeping whiskers.

“Hold on!” he shouted, not pulling his eyes from the controls.

There was a deep incision running lengthwise across the floor of the cabin where the centipede had slashed our underbelly. Air was rushing through, and oily fluids were gurgling in the crevice.

Not a good sight.

We rolled hard to the left, and everyone was tossed again. I hugged a seat back with enough force to crack the plastic in an attempt to avoid being thrown. Some of my fellow passengers managed to do the same. Others, who’d been dazed or knocked unconscious by the first strike, were flopped hard against the other side of the aircraft.

I’d read somewhere it was better to take an impact if your body was limp. For their sakes, I hoped that was true.

“Pull up!” someone screamed from the rear of the jet as we were flipped on our heads once again.

Our pilot was fighting his hardest, but we’d plummeted so far that we were no longer flying but gently falling down the vortex of the centipede’s mouth. Our plane spun like a leaf in the breeze as the cyclone pulled us lower.

That haunting scream from the throat of the centipede was growing mind-shatteringly loud.

We continued to bounce around the cabin. I clung to my anchor of a chair, snagging Lannon by his shirt as he flew past. He hung limply in my grip.

“Lannon!” I shouted at him. “Are you okay?”

Blood poured down his face and right arm.

“Analgesics are still kicking in,” he grunted. “My shield ran out when we were fighting on the ground.”

I helped him grab the seat next to mine with his good arm.

Our spinning motion stabilized, but we were still riding the death current swirling into the mouth.

“Pull up!” I echoed the cry from another conscious passenger.

“I’m trying!”

Our pilot heaved back on the yoke like he wanted to uproot it from the dashboard. The entire aircraft vibrated with the full-bellied roar of the thrusters.

We slowed our descent, but we didn’t begin climbing.

Our pilot spoke rapidly into his microphone, communicating with the other jets that had been in our convoy.

“This is one-twenty-three-echo-bravo. We’ve been hit. We are going down. I repeat. We are going down.”

Oil splashed me. A reminder that our engines could splutter and crash at any given moment. The screaming cacophony blasted in my unprotected ear. Wind buffeted my face through the bleeding gash in our cabin floor.

This wasn’t going to work.

I was going to die here. Just like my mother.

I expected a feeling of peace to accompany that acceptance, but all I felt was an overwhelming frustration.

I was angry, of course, about my mother’s sudden high-dive into the centipede’s mouth. We’d sort of almost reached this half-baked truce. She’d finally begun to show the better parts of herself that had been tucked away since my childhood.

And now she’d hurled herself out of an airplane with only a brief apology shouted over the sound of her skydiving.

I’d finally gotten a taste of the relationship I’d wanted with her my whole life, and she’d most likely just killed herself.

And more than I was frustrated with my mother, I was frustrated with myself.

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I was frustrated by my powerlessness. All this had happened because I’d wanted to save my mother from being killed. And in the end, I hadn’t changed anything except managing to get my hometown destroyed in a nuclear blast.

I was frustrated by my own bullheadedness, charging in to assist in this attack rather than staying home with Jack and Violet. I didn’t have to be here. I wasn’t critical to this mission. And I’d chosen to volunteer my life away regardless, raising a fat middle finger to my family in the process.

As we slowly spiraled into the monster’s mouth like shit down a toilet bowl, all the long hours in the lab, the conferences in other states, and the two months wasted on the widow’s nest felt like, simply, a waste. Precious hours I could have spent watching my daughter grow up or basking in my husband’s presence, I’d shoved away like rotten leftovers. Why? Because I didn’t want to be a nobody like my mother? The answer seemed childish now.

And lastly, I was frustrated by the limitations of my own body. I needed to think – to focus and put together a plan. But all my thoughts were stampeded by an overwhelming, bowel-ripping panic. A primal fear of death that was so deeply wired in the human mind that, for a second, I understood how radish demons felt when their instincts overpowered their rational judgements. The fear was annoying, and I didn’t want to spend my last moments trembling like a cow before slaughter.

We’d stopped tumbling through the air, and my fellow passengers had begun climbing up from the floor. Clifton, Whitehall, and the other FBI agents from this Earth had fared poorly. They had no body shields or modifications. The other passengers were better but still shaken up.

And, of course, we were still descending into the centipede’s mouth, despite maximum output from the jet’s thrusters. Our plane was angled upward, nose steering away from the mouth, but we’d passed the event horizon, and all our propulsion was simply slowing our demise.

“We’re going down!” the pilot warned over the loudspeaker.

“Keep trying!” Vargo shouted.

I clawed my way to a window and grabbed another seat back for stability. Pressing my face against the glass, I could see bits of the fight below. The massive, shredding mouth of the centipede obscured a greater and greater portion of my view as we dropped within a few thousand feet.

“Michael!” I spoke on the main communication line. “What’s happening?”

“Michael’s dead,” a voice answered. “This is offspring number seventeen. We’re cutting away at the centipede, but it still isn’t going down.”

“Cut faster,” I urged. “Please.”

G-force was beginning to press me into the floor as our plane spun faster and faster around the base of the vacuum. I had the augmentations to resist the compressive force, but I feared it would overwhelm the physiology of our pilot soon.

Lannon shouted something at me, but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything over the grinding metal scream of the centipede. My head felt like it was being bisected with a chainsaw. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything but brace myself for the moment we fell into the monster’s lips and smashed ourselves into splinters on its whirring teeth.

I preemptively used the commands on my watch to pump a bolus of analgesic into my circulation. I didn’t want dying to hurt more than it had to. My arms and legs grew numb.

I screwed my eyes shut and waited for the end. I heard the monster’s roar drop suddenly in intensity.

And then we lurched.

I kept waiting, but the flurry of pain and crushing teeth didn’t come. Instead, the centrifugal force pressing me down eased in intensity.

“Got him!” a voice said through my communicator.

Cautiously, I opened my eyes.

The interior of the jet’s cabin still surrounded me.

“We’ve escaped the vortex. I repeat. We’ve escaped the vortex,” our pilot was shouting into his microphone.

It was true.

We were sailing in a gentle escape orbit, putting as much distance between ourselves and the centipede as we could.

I looked through the window at the scene behind us, corneal lenses sharpening the image.

The centipede wasn’t swallowing air.

The radish demons had chiseled away a bite through its midsection, and the bug had fallen like a tree at the hands of a lumberjack, its towering frame belly-flopping to the earth. The creature was writhing and snaking. Kicking up radioactive dust and slashing out in all directions like a bristling porcupine.

The demons were flitting in and out of carbon clouds, peppering their steadily enlarging wound. Burning through armor and connective tissue. Digging deeper into the viscera of the centipede.

There weren’t many radish demons left. Dozens were in the sky, but most were holographic – only a few wielded lasers. The numbers were less important now, though. The centipede had lost its ability to protect itself.

Bilious fluid gurgled out of the bleeding wedge. Digestive organs and stringy tissues spilled out through the opening.

One particularly bold demon landed on the wound. It shed its flight pack to reveal its native form and dug deep purchase into the fascia with its claws. He jammed the barrel of his rifle deep into the wound and pumped a dozen rounds into the steaming tissue before being knocked away by a whisker.

“They’re killing it,” someone murmured next to me.

I turned. Lannon’s face was pressed against the window next to mine, jaw dropped in awe.

“Find Sally!” another demon cried over the communication line.

Blasts from the lasers continued to eat away at the wound until the centipede wishboned. Flailing in distress to such a degree that it split itself in two at the point where much of its body had already been carved away by vengeful demons.

The two segments squirmed with the intensity of garden worms on cement, disappearing in a fog of soot and dust.

The scene of the battle grew smaller and smaller as our pilot pulled us away, looking to put the plane on a runway before our damage caused us to fall out of the sky.

“Sally!” a voice chittered in my ear. “She might be alive!”

By the time the dust settled, I could only magnify my vision enough to see two segments of centipede lying lifeless on a bed of char.

There was no burst of air from the monster’s perforated intestines. It didn’t pop like a balloon when cut open.

Logically, that meant the air the centipede swallowed wouldn’t be coming back.

If the swallowed air was gone forever, it also meant my mother was, too.

“Where is she!”

I recognized the voice of offspring number seventeen.

He’d realize the same thing after a few minutes of searching the body segments. There would be no saving Sally.

Our plane dipped lower and lower as the surge of our engines grew weaker. Our pilot touched us down on a tiny runway south of the city. We left a splattering trail of engine oil on the tarmac.

I fell back against my seat. Feeling like I was the one spilling oil from my insides.

We’d won.

And despite what my mother had always said, it wasn’t me who’d saved the world.

It was her.