The sound of the prototype powering up traveled through the walls like distant thunder.
A low vibration spread beneath our feet. The lights above the control room flickered, and the aircraft schematic on the monitor changed from blue to amber. Numbers began scrolling beside the wireframe model, accompanied by a series of warnings that meant nothing to me but clearly concerned the adults in the room.
Elias Voss watched the display with a satisfaction that made my stomach tighten.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" he said.
My mother didn't look away from him. "Shut it down."
"You're still giving orders as though you have authority here."
"I know exactly what that system can do."
"Then you should appreciate what I've accomplished."
One of the armed men moved toward us. Mom shifted her weight, putting herself between me and the weapon. Her right hand hovered near her jacket, but she had no firearm.
Admiral Carter leaned heavily against the console. His breathing was uneven, and a dark bruise had begun spreading along his jaw.
"Rachel," he said quietly, "we need to get to the main control station."
Voss heard him.
"Nobody is going anywhere until the interface test is complete."
I looked at the screen again. The diagram showed a human silhouette connected to the aircraft through a series of neural-response channels. The outline looked disturbingly similar to a medical scan.
"Why do you need me?" I asked.
Voss turned toward me.
"Because the system recognizes something in your neurological patterns that it doesn't recognize in anyone else."
"That doesn't mean I can fly your aircraft."
"Not yet."
Mom's voice cut through the room. "He's a child, Elias."
"And the system doesn't care about his age."
The words were delivered without anger. That made them worse.
Voss stepped toward the monitor and touched a control. A new image appeared, showing several columns of measurements and a set of unfamiliar waveforms.
"During the original tests, the system registered a response when Rachel was carrying you. We dismissed it as interference. After your birth, the readings appeared again under controlled conditions. Your mother destroyed the equipment before we could investigate further."
"Because you wanted to experiment on him," Mom said.
"Because I wanted to understand what we'd discovered."
"You wanted to own it."
His eyes narrowed.
"You're still confusing ambition with cruelty."
June had quietly moved behind a row of equipment cabinets. I could see only the edge of her sweater and the barrel of the shotgun she had carried from the cabin. She was watching the armed men rather than Voss.
Mom noticed her position, too.
"Lucas," she said, never taking her eyes off Voss, "remember what I told you."
Stay behind me. Follow every instruction. Run when I say run.
I nodded.
Then Voss reached for a small control panel attached to the wall.
A metallic click sounded behind us.
The door locked.
"Let's stop pretending this is a negotiation," he said. "The aircraft is ready. The interface is the final obstacle."
Carter pushed himself upright.
"You're going to destroy everything you claim to be protecting."
Voss gave him a thin smile. "Only if people insist on standing in the way."
June moved.
She stepped out from behind the cabinets and swung the shotgun toward the nearest guard. The sudden movement startled him. His weapon jerked upward, and the shot struck the ceiling with a deafening crack.
Mom seized my shoulder and pulled me down behind the console.
The room erupted into noise. Carter lunged at the second guard, knocking him against a bank of controls. June shouted for us to move. Mom grabbed the metal box from the desk, then pushed me toward a narrow service door.
"Go!"
I stumbled through the opening. A corridor stretched ahead, lit by red emergency lamps. Mom followed, slamming the door behind us.
Gunfire echoed from the control room.
"Where are we going?" I gasped.
"Maintenance access."
She ran ahead, moving with the quick, economical strides I'd seen in old photographs of her beside aircraft. We reached a junction where three corridors met. She stopped briefly, studying the signs.
"Left."
We turned into a narrow passage lined with electrical conduits. A heavy door stood at the end, its access panel glowing green.
Mom entered a code.
Nothing happened.
She tried again.
The panel flashed red.
"Come on," she muttered.
Footsteps sounded behind us.
She pulled me toward a side alcove and pressed her back against the wall. A moment later, two guards hurried past the junction, their voices overlapping as they called to each other.
When they were gone, Mom opened a small maintenance cabinet and removed a compact electronic device.
"June taught me how to bypass these locks," she whispered.
She connected the device to the panel. The light flickered, changed to yellow, and finally turned green.
The door released.
We stepped into a room filled with old flight simulators. Several had been dismantled, their seats stacked against the walls. At the far end, a wide window overlooked a cavernous hangar.
The prototype stood beneath bright industrial lights.
It was larger than the model on the monitor had suggested. Its dark, angular surface reflected almost nothing. The wings swept backward sharply, and its cockpit sat beneath a canopy that seemed almost black.
No ordinary aircraft should have looked so silent while surrounded by so much machinery.
Mom stared at it.
For the first time since we'd entered Raven Mesa, I saw something other than fear in her expression.
Grief.
"That's what he built with everything we left behind," she said.
I stepped closer to the window.
"Is it an F-22?"
"No. It's based on several designs, including the original Ghostwing test platform. The airframe is different, but the technology is familiar."
A red indicator began blinking near the hangar entrance.
Mom's attention snapped toward it.
"He's moving the aircraft."
Below us, a crew of technicians hurried around the prototype. A service platform rolled away from the cockpit. A man in a dark flight suit climbed the access ladder.
Voss appeared on a raised walkway overlooking the hangar. He spoke into a headset, then turned his face toward the observation window.
Even from that distance, I knew he had seen us.
Mom grabbed the radio.
"June, do you copy?"
Static answered.
She tried again.
"June, this is Rachel. Where are you?"
A faint voice crackled through the speaker.
"Control room. Carter's alive. We've got a problem."
"What kind of problem?"
"The launch sequence has started."
Mom looked at the aircraft.
"Can you stop it?"
"Not from here. Voss has locked out the main systems."
Mom lowered the radio.
I stared through the window as the hangar doors began to open. Beyond them lay a strip of runway carved into the desert, its surface glistening under the floodlights.
The prototype's engines started.
A tremor ran through the observation room.
"Mom," I whispered, "what happens if he takes off?"
She looked at me.
"Then we lose our chance to stop him."
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: The Invisible Aircraft Rose Above the Desert, and I Discovered Why My Father Had Been Waiting for Me
The Moment My Teacher Turned My Proudest Memory Into a Joke in Front of the Entire Eighth Grade
Part 5 of 40
