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Mauna Loa, Hawai‘i

Rebecca Cruz watched in horror as the figure fell out of the helicopter and into the lava stream below.

She had been down-mountain, making a final check of some new bomb locations, when she’d heard the explosion from the summit and saw the spray of lava rock filling the sky, along with what looked like fireworks.

So many things had happened quickly then: The helicopter came out of the suddenly orange sky; the quake knocked Rebecca and her brother David to the ground; the copter made a sharp, almost violent turn to its left.

Then the man—she assumed it was a man—fell from the helicopter, silhouetted against the morning sky like a cliff diver, like a movie special effect.

Except this was terrifyingly real.

“David, let’s go!”she yelled. She got back on her feet and ran toward where she thought the man had landed.

David stayed where he was. “Go where?” he yelled. “There’s no way someone could survive a fall from that height. And we need to get out of here before that thing blows again.”

But Rebecca was sprinting ahead, stumbling occasionally over the new lava rocks littering this side of Mauna Loa. The one time she did go down, she broke her fall with her hands, popped right back up, and kept going.

“There’s a crater lake over there you can’t see!” she said over her shoulder, waving him to come along. “Maybe he fell into it.” She looked down briefly, saw blood on the palms of her hands from where she’d skinned them on some jagged rocks.

Mac had shown her the lake when he’d first brought her to this area, told her that lakes like this were formed from an accumulation of rain and groundwater.

“What are the odds of him landing there?” David called out. “It looked like he was falling directly into the lava.”

But reluctantly, he followed her.

Rebecca was a runner and hiker. Her brother was not. The distance between them grew as they made their way across the rough, uneven terrain.

“We need to find out!” she said.

The volcano had quieted, and the only sound in the sky, in the distance, was the helicopter.

Rebecca picked up her pace, as if this were some kind of crazy race, not stumbling at all now, not running for her life, just running for whoever had fallen from the sky.

“We have to go back for him!”Leah Cutler said to Jake Rogers.

“We can’t,” he said. “The ash is sticking to the blades—I can feel it! I need to get us back to the airport before we end up like Morgan.”

Brett got out of his seat and crouched down next to Rogers.

“Turn around,” Brett said.

Rogers, eyes fixed on the summit to their left, said in a low voice that only Brett could hear, “There’s no point, Mr. Brett. I’m sorry, but we both know he’s dead.”

“Go back,” Brett said, “and find a place to get us on the ground.”

“Mr. Brett,” Rogers said, “that eruption just now might have been only an appetizer.”

“It wasn’t a request,” Brett said.

“Dude, listen to me,” Rogers said. “It’s not just the blades not working the way they should. Listen to the freaking engine. There’s something wrong with it too.” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, it’s time to cut our losses.”

“Turn around and go back now,” Brett said. “Or get out of that seat and I’ll fly it myself. Because I can.”

Jake Rogers hesitated, reviewing his options. He realized that the rich man taking the controls would be the worst one.

So he banked the Airbus H225M hard to the east.

For now, the activity and the light show at the summit had stopped. He didn’t know how long that would last, though. None of them did, including Brett. The sudden quiet probably meant that the water that had caused the brief but violent eruption had cooled or begun to evaporate or both.

He was hoping the quakes would stop long enough for him to put J. P. Brett’s bird safely on the ground near the locus of the eruption, since that was clearly the plan now; there was nothing he could do to change Brett’s mind.

Rogers had a general idea of where they’d been in the sky when they lost Morgan, but he didn’t know the precise location, partly because so much of the terrain looked the same—like Mars, some pilots said—and partly because he’d been occupied trying to keep the helicopter in the air.

Morgan is even crazier than I am,Jake Rogers thought. Or he was.

Rogers flew to a crater lake on this side of the volcano. Above the lake was a containment pond the army must have built in the past couple of days; he could see it was already filling with lava.

Leah Cutler, looking out her window on that side of the helicopter, was the first to spot Morgan.

She started screaming again.