“You cared about being worshiped by it.”
The room tightened.
Voss lifted one hand, and the men behind him raised their weapons.
Admiral Carter stepped forward.
“Elias, take me. Let the boy go.”
Voss did not even look at him.
“Carter, you were always noble at inconvenient times.”
He turned to me.
“Lucas, the aircraft will respond to you. You can feel it already, can’t you?”
I wanted to say no.
But deep beneath the facility, I could feel something.
A pulse.
Not sound exactly. Not thought. More like pressure behind my eyes, a rhythm calling to a part of me I had never known existed.
Mom saw my face.
“Don’t listen.”
Voss smiled.
“He hears it.”
Then everything happened at once.
Aunt June dropped a smoke device from her sleeve. The room filled with gray. Mom shoved me behind a console. Carter tackled one of the armed men with the kind of speed I did not expect from an admiral. Aunt June shouted something rude and swung the shotgun like a club.
Mom grabbed my wrist.
“Run.”
We ran through the smoke into the hangar.
The Ghostwing aircraft sat in the center, its surface shimmering like heat above asphalt. Men moved around it, shouting as alarms began to blare. The pulse in my head grew stronger.
Lucas.
I stopped.
Not because I wanted to.
Because the aircraft knew me.
Mom pulled me hard.
“Lucas!”
Voss’s voice came through the hangar speakers.
“Bring him to the cockpit, Rachel. Or I lift the aircraft and let the unstable field burn through everything in this facility.”
Aunt June cursed over the radio.
“He’s not bluffing. The field is overloading.”
Mom looked at the aircraft, then at me.
For the first time, she looked truly afraid.
I understood then what courage was.
It was not standing on a stage while people clapped.
It was my mother, years earlier, pregnant and terrified, choosing to destroy a program powerful men wanted to keep. It was Carter telling Voss to take him instead. It was Aunt June living in hiding for twelve years because she refused to let the dead stay buried wrong.
And maybe it was me, a thirteen-year-old boy who had started the day being laughed at in an auditorium, stepping toward the thing everyone feared.
“I can stop it,” I said.
“No.”
“Mom, I can feel it.”
“No, Lucas.”
I took her hand.
“You saved Carter. You saved me. Let me save you.”
Her eyes filled.
Then she nodded once, though it looked like it broke her.
We climbed into the Ghostwing cockpit together.
The moment my hands touched the controls, the world vanished.
Not blackness.
Sky.
Endless sky.
I saw signals like threads of light, radar waves bending, the aircraft’s unstable field twisting in on itself. I saw Voss’s code trying to lock me in, trying to make my mind a switch inside his machine.
Then I heard Mom.
Not through my ears.
Through memory.
Check the locks. Walk through the door.
I pushed back.
The aircraft screamed.
Outside, lights exploded across the hangar. The field collapsed inward, not outward. Panels sparked. The pulse in my head became pain, then pressure, then silence.
When I opened my eyes, Mom was holding me.
The aircraft was dead.
Voss stood below the cockpit, staring up in disbelief.
“No,” he whispered.
Admiral Carter and Aunt June had him surrounded with security personnel who had finally arrived through the facility’s emergency entrance.
Mom climbed down first.
Voss looked at her, broken fury in his eyes.
“You took my son.”
Mom’s voice was calm.
“I raised mine.”
Voss looked at me then.
