Chapter 37 - The Leap Over the Gorge
"There’s the parachute," Claire yelled, pointing toward the heavy reinforced cargo door at the back of the observation car.
"There’s only one rig!" Dominique said, clutching her broken wrist as she struggled to sit up. "One harness! It’s designed for a single operative!"
The train hit the beginning of the curve, the metal frame groaning under impossible centrifugal forces. Plates shattered, furniture overturned, and through the panoramic rear windows, the yawning abyss of the Rhine Gorge opened up beneath them—a jagged, two-thousand-foot drop into jagged rocks and raging black water.
"Vanessa, take it," Claire shouted, lunging toward the equipment locker.
"No! I'm not leaving you again!" Vanessa screamed back. "We survived the fire, we survived the ballroom, we survive this together!"
"Three people can't survive a single-canopy deployment," Dominique shouted over the howling wind as the emergency glass began to fracture from the speed. "The suspension lines will snap the moment they open!"
"Then we don't deploy until the last possible second," Claire said, her voice eerily calm.
She ripped the tactical parachute rig from the wall bracket. It was a heavy-duty military-grade tandem system designed for high-altitude extraction. With frantic, bleeding fingers, Claire hooked the primary carabiner around Vanessa’s chest harness, then latched the secondary tether directly into Dominique’s tactical belt.
"Claire, what are you doing?!" Dominique gasped, looking at her identical sister with utter disbelief. "I tried to kill you ten minutes ago!"
"You're our sister," Claire said, pulling the final strap tight around her own waist, binding the three of them together in a triangle of bruised flesh and torn silk. "And a Whitmore never leaves family behind."
*CRASH!*
The locomotive jumped the primary rail. The deafening sound of shearing metal tore through the carriage as the front cars began to twist like an accordion over the empty air of the canyon.
"NOW!" Vanessa screamed.
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Claire kicked the emergency release lever on the cargo door. The pressurized cabin depressurized with an explosive roar, sucking all three women out into the freezing, howling void of the Swiss night.
***
