I was flying a dying aircraft when a voice came through a secret frequency—the brother I’d buried seven years ago whispered, “They needed you to take the blame.”
Chapter 3
“We lost primary navigation, autopilot, half our flight displays, and all our radios except guard,” he said, each word carefully placed, the way a man places his feet on ice. “Then — I don’t know what happened to him. He was fine. He was fine. The autopilot kicked off without being commanded, and I reached for it, and when I looked over he was like this.”
I moved into the jump seat and strapped in without asking permission, and every forgotten instinct returned at once, the way water returns to a shape. My eyes went around the panels in a practiced sweep — attitude, altitude, heading, airspeed, vertical speed, fuel, temperature, pressure. The big glass displays were dark, but the standby instruments glowed amber and honest, and they told me three things: we were level, we were fast, and we were still two thousand miles from anywhere.
“What still works?” I asked.
“Basic controls. The standby flight instruments.” Riko’s voice cracked on the last word. “Trim, mostly — it’s electrical, and whatever ate the display bus is crawling. I’ve been trimming manually for the last twelve minutes. That’s why the captain — he was fighting the climb trim when — ”
“When what?”
“I don’t know. Something must have startled him. He was fine, and then the trim fought back, and then he made a sound I’ve never heard a human being make, and — ” Riko’s eyes flicked to the captain’s head wound and away. “— and I called for a military pilot. Whatever this is, it isn’t a checklist problem.”
I scanned the panels again, slower this time, looking for what my body already knew was missing. The cockpit smelled of hot electronics and the thin copper smell of blood. Every warning light on the overhead panel that was still alive burned the color of an angry star.
Then I saw something that made my stomach tighten like a fist.
The surviving navigation screen — the last working one, a tiny amber monochrome display that normally shows the weather radar — was not showing weather. It was showing a string of numbers, clean and deliberate, blinking in the corner the way a cursor blinks when it’s waiting for input.
Coordinates.
Thirty-seven fifty-four north, twenty-four seventeen west.
I read them once, and then again, because my mind refused the first pass. That was the trick of it — the numbers were ordinary. Every ocean has ten thousand sets of coordinates, and every one of them means nothing until someone dies on them. These meant everything.
Seven years earlier, those exact coordinates had been the last thing I saw through a shattered canopy glass before the world went to black and red and salt. They were the point in the mid-Atlantic where my wingman, Daniel Mercer, went into the water and did not come up.
“That’s not a waypoint,” I heard myself say. My voice sounded thin, like it was coming through a door. “That’s not on any route.”
Riko looked over, fear slanting through his eyes. “What are you — ”
“Thirty-seven fifty-four north, twenty-four seventeen west,” I said, and the words took the temperature of the cockpit down ten degrees. “That’s where Daniel Mercer died. I know. I was the one who watched him go.”
Riko’s face went the color of the panels. “Maeve — Commander, I’m sorry — who?”
Before I could answer, the guard radio crackled — the one radio Riko had said still worked, the universal emergency frequency, the channel nobody transmits on casually because it is reserved for the voice of trouble.
Static filled the cockpit, the hiss of an ocean of white noise.
Then a man’s voice came through, calm as a hand laid on a shoulder.
“Falcon Two. You always did take your time.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins. Every hair on my arms rose at once, the way they do when lightning is about to strike. Nobody had called me Falcon Two since that night. Nobody could have called me Falcon Two — that name died with the squadron, died with my commission, died with the man who gave it to me, standing on the flight line at Morón, the last day of his life, grinning like a fool, saying “Two, you’re the only woman in this Air Force who flies like she’s already late for something.”
Riko was staring at me, his hands still on the yoke, his breath visible in the chill of the cockpit. “You know him?”
I reached for the radio. My hand was steady. It is a strange thing, training — the hand holds while the heart shatters.
“Identify yourself.”
A soft laugh answered, close and warm and impossible, like a voice from a dream that refuses to end.
“You already know.”
That was when the lightning came — not a storm lightning, but something closer, slower, deliberate — and in its silver glow, outside the windshield, I saw another aircraft pacing us through the cloud layer.
Small. Fast. Sharp as a knife on the dark.
Military.
An F-16.
My heart stopped, and then restarted on the other side of time, in the world that existed before my entire adult life was built around the lie that Daniel Mercer was dead.