THE GHOST IN SEAT 16C

PART 1: THE INVISIBLE PASSENGER

The best place to hide is in the middle of a crowd. You become static, background noise, a smear of color in someone else’s peripheral vision. That was the goal. It had been the goal for three years, two months, and seventeen days.

My name is Zephyr Thorne, though my passport said Sarah Jenkins, and the world believed Zephyr Thorne was nothing more than charred DNA scattered across the North Sea.

I stood in the aisle of Transatlantic Flight 247, clutching a weathered backpack that contained everything I owned in this life. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner smelled of that specific cocktail unique to international travel: stale coffee, disinfectant, and the nervous sweat of three hundred and forty people.

“Excuse me,” a man grunted, shoving past me with a garment bag that probably cost more than my rent in Amsterdam.

“Go ahead,” I murmured, keeping my head down. My voice was rusty. I didn’t use it much these days.

I found Seat 16C. Economy. Aisle. Perfect for a quick exit, though at thirty-nine thousand feet, there are no exits. I stowed my bag, keeping only one item out: a leather-bound copy of The Art of Navigation by Amelia Earhart. The spine was cracked, the leather worn smooth by my thumbs. It was my anchor.

To my left, the window seat was empty for a moment, framing the rainy gray tarmac of Schiphol Airport. To my right, across the aisle, a man was making a scene.

“I specifically requested an aisle seat near the front,” the man was saying. His voice carried the sharp, clipped cadence of someone used to giving orders that were immediately obeyed. “My knee condition requires legroom. This is unacceptable.”

I glanced over, just a flicker of eyes beneath my lashes. Brigadier Jerome Callaway. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew the type. Retired or active, it didn’t matter. He wore his authority like a second skin. His posture was rigid, his eyes scanning the cabin not with wonder, but with assessment. Threat assessment.

“I apologize, sir,” the flight attendant, Delphine, said with a practiced, porcelain smile. “The flight is completely full today. This was the closest available to your request.”

Callaway huffed, a sharp exhalation through his nose, and sat down. He smoothed his civilian jacket, but the way he moved—precise, economic—screamed military. I shrank back into my seat, opening my book to page forty-two, though I wasn’t reading. I was listening.

I was always listening.

Up in First Class, the curtain twitched. I caught a glimpse of silver hair and a tailored suit. Senator Elias Blackwood. My stomach tightened. The Chairman of the Defense Committee. His presence here wasn’t a coincidence; nothing in my life was a coincidence anymore. Beside him was Iris Vega, his aide, clutching a tablet like it held the nuclear codes. Maybe it did.

Just a flight, I told myself. Just seven hours and forty minutes to New York, then I disappear into the American Midwest. Just a flight.

But the back of my neck prickled. It was a sensation I hadn’t felt since the cockpit of the Artemis prototype. The sense that the air pressure had shifted before the instruments even registered it.

The plane began to taxi. The hum of the engines grew from a purr to a roar. I closed my eyes, feeling the vibrations travel up through the floorboards, through the soles of my worn boots, and into my bones. I knew this machine. I knew the thrust-to-weight ratio, the drag coefficient, the exact moment the lift would overcome gravity.

“Aviation enthusiast, are you?”

The voice snapped my eyes open. Callaway was leaning across the aisle, staring at the book in my lap.

I tightened my grip on the leather cover. “Something like that.”

“My second cousin flew Apaches in Afghanistan,” Callaway continued, his eyes drilling into me. He was bored, and a bored officer is a dangerous thing. “Tricky beasts, military aircraft. Nothing like these commercial buses.”

“I imagine not,” I said softly, turning a page. Please stop talking.

“Flew a bit myself in my younger days,” he pressed on, ignoring my body language. “Cessnas mostly. Still, I know enough to appreciate the complexities.” He nodded at my book. “Earhart, though. Fascinating woman. Ahead of her time.”

“She knew where she was going,” I said, offering him nothing but a platitude. “Even when the world thought she was lost.”

Callaway paused, his head cocking slightly to the side. “You have a very specific way of speaking, Miss…?”

“Jenkins,” I lied. “And I’m just a reader.”

The plane surged forward. Gravity pushed us back into our seats. I watched the cabin crew strapped into their jump seats, their faces masks of professional boredom. But I was watching the angle of the ascent. It was steep. Steeper than usual for a heavy load. Captain Nash Adami—I’d heard his name on the announcement—was in a hurry.

Why was he in a hurry?

We leveled off at cruising altitude. The seatbelt sign pinged off. The cabin filled with the noise of zippers, laptops opening, and the clinking of the beverage cart. I stared out the window, watching the cloud layer beneath us. It was a solid deck of white, looking deceptive and soft.

“Business or pleasure in New York?” Callaway asked again. He wouldn’t let it go.

“Visiting,” I said.

“Myself, I’m headed to a veterans’ symposium,” he declared, chest puffing out slightly. “Boring stuff for most, but someone has to keep the bureaucrats honest about taking care of our people.”

“Important work,” I said. And I meant it. The bureaucracy was what had buried me.

An hour passed. The beverage cart reached our row. Delphine smiled at me, a genuine, tired smile. “Something to drink?”

“Just water, please.”

The plane jolted. It wasn’t a gradual bump; it was a sharp, lateral shear. The “light chop” pilots talk about to keep passengers calm, but I knew better. We had hit a pocket of unstable air, or… something else.

Delphine stumbled. The pitcher of water in her hand tipped, cascading icy liquid over my left arm.

“Oh! I am so sorry!” she gasped, grabbing a handful of napkins.

“It’s fine,” I said quickly, pulling my arm back. The cold water soaked through my heavy blue sweater instantly. Instinctively, I rolled up the sleeve to keep the wet wool from sticking to my skin.

I made a mistake.

For three years, I had worn long sleeves. Even in the humid summers of Southeast Asia, even in the heated hostels of Berlin. I never showed my skin. But the shock of the cold water made me sloppy.

As I pushed the fabric up past my wrist, the tattoo was exposed. It wasn’t large—just a series of Nordic runes interlaced with a geometric flight path. To a civilian, it looked like hipster art.

But Callaway wasn’t a civilian.

I saw his eyes lock onto the ink. His pupils dilated. The casual boredom vanished, replaced by the sharp, predatory focus of a hawk spotting a field mouse.

“Interesting marking,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “Norse, isn’t it? Reminds me of something I saw during a joint exercise years back. Operation Midnight Spear.”

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Midnight Spear. The operation that didn’t exist. The operation where I died.

I yanked my sleeve down, ignoring the damp chill. “Just a souvenir from a different life.”

Callaway leaned closer, invading my personal space. “You know, you seem familiar somehow. Have we met before? Perhaps at a military function?”

“I doubt it,” I said, my voice turning into ice. “I’m in technical consulting. Remote work. I keep to myself.”

“Technical consulting,” he repeated, tasting the lie. “You have the posture of a soldier, Miss Jenkins. And you scan the exits every time a crew member moves.”

Before I could answer, the floor dropped out from under us.

This wasn’t chop. This was a four-hundred-foot drop in two seconds. The cabin erupted. Screams tore through the air. A laptop flew from a tray table and smashed into the overhead bin. The woman next to me gasped, clutching her chest.

I didn’t move. My hands gripped the armrests, not in panic, but to stabilize my core. My eyes darted to the window.

The horizon was tilting. We were banking hard, too hard for a commercial liner. This wasn’t weather. Weather doesn’t make a 787 bank thirty degrees to the North when the flight plan is West.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Adami’s voice crackled over the intercom. He sounded strained. Breathless. “We are experiencing some… light chop. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts.”

Liar, I thought. Your voice is trembling, Nash. What are you seeing?

I looked at Callaway. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking out the window, his face pale. “That bank angle… we’re turning off course.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

The in-flight entertainment screens flickered. A map appeared, showing our position over the Atlantic, but the little plane icon was drifting significantly North. Then, the screens went black. A collective groan went up from the passengers.

“Mommy?” A little girl a few rows ahead started crying. “Are we going to crash?”

I unbuckled my seatbelt.

“Sit down!” Callaway barked. “The sign is on!”

“Look at the wing,” I told him quietly.

“What?”

“Look. At. The. Wing.”

Callaway turned. He pressed his face against the plexiglass. I saw the color drain from his face entirely.

There, hanging in the sky like a jagged shadow against the sun, was a silhouette I knew better than my own face. Twin vertical stabilizers. Canted angles. The distinctive hunch of the intake.

An F-35 Lightning II.

And it wasn’t alone.

“Fighters,” Callaway breathed. “Those are F-35s. Why the hell are we being escorted?”

“That’s not an escort, Brigadier,” I said, my voice dead calm amidst the rising panic in the cabin. “Look at the hardpoints. Look at the missile loadout.”

The F-35 drifted closer. I could see the pilot’s helmet, the dark visor reflecting the terrified faces of the passengers in the Dreamliner. He was close enough that I could see the rivets on his fuselage. He rocked his wings—an aggressive, jarring motion.

Intercept protocol, I analyzed. He wants us to turn. He’s herding us.

The Captain came back on the line. “Ladies and gentlemen, I must inform you that we are currently being… escorted by military aircraft. We are attempting to establish communications. Please remain calm.”

Panic is a contagion. It moves faster than a virus. A man in the back started shouting about terrorists. Someone else screamed that we were being shot down. The flight attendants were strapped in, their faces ashen. They knew. They knew this wasn’t right.

I watched the F-35. The pilot raised his left hand. He flashed a signal. Two fingers, a rotation, a fist.

My blood ran cold.

That wasn’t a NATO standard signal. That wasn’t RAF. That was Artemis protocol. Specifically, it was the signal for “High Value Target Identified. Prepare for Boarding.”

They weren’t looking for a terrorist. They weren’t looking for a bomb.

They were looking for me.

I touched the chain around my neck, feeling the cold metal of the dog tags through my sweater. Zephyr Thorne. Commander. United States Space Force – Classified Division.

“You know what that signal means,” Callaway said. It wasn’t a question. He had seen my reaction. “Who are you really?”

I turned to him. The charade was over. Sarah Jenkins was dead.

“I’m someone who needs to get to the cockpit,” I said.

“They’ll shoot us down if you breach the cockpit!” Callaway hissed, grabbing my arm. “That is a hostile intercept!”

“They’ll shoot us down if I don’t,” I replied. I shook off his grip with a movement that was pure reflex—a wrist lock reversal that made him wince.

I stood up. The plane was shaking violently now, the turbulence from the fighter jets’ wake buffeting the larger airliner. The oxygen masks dropped—yellow rubber cups dangling like hanged men from the ceiling.

Breathe, I told myself. Focus. Solve the problem.

I looked down the aisle. Chaos. Parents shielding children. People praying. The Senator in First Class was shouting at a flight attendant, demanding answers his clearance level couldn’t buy him.

I grabbed my backpack. I didn’t need the clothes, but I needed the book. I ripped a page out of the back—a blank flyleaf—and scribbled a sequence of numbers on it. Not coordinates. Frequency modulation keys.

I moved into the aisle. The floor tilted sharply as the pilots tried to obey the fighters’ aggressive maneuvering. I walked with the motion, compensating, my legs finding purchase where others stumbled.

“Ma’am! Sit down!” Delphine unbuckled and lunged at me. She was brave, I’d give her that. Terrified, but doing her job.

I caught her by the shoulders. I didn’t push her back; I held her steady.

“Look at me,” I commanded. My voice cut through the screaming. It was the voice of command, the voice that had directed squadrons over the Black Sea.

Delphine froze, staring into my eyes.

“Restricted Protocol Seven-Alpha-Two,” I said clearly.

Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. It was a code that shouldn’t exist. A code that meant The person saying this outranks the Captain, the Air Marshal, and God himself in this specific airspace.

“Seven… Alpha… Two?” she stammered.

“Let me through, Delphine. Or everyone on this plane dies.”

She stepped back, collapsing into an empty seat.

I moved forward, past the sobbing families, past the praying businessman. Callaway was behind me. I could hear his heavy breathing. He wasn’t stopping me anymore; he was following me. He wanted to see the end of the world.

I reached the First Class curtain. Senator Blackwood was standing there, his face purple with rage.

“I am a United States Senator! I demand to know—”

He stopped when he saw me. He didn’t see Sarah Jenkins. He saw the way I stood. He saw the scar on my temple that I usually covered with makeup. He saw the predator walking into the lion’s den.

“Get out of my way, Senator,” I said.

“Who do you think you are?” he sputtered.

I didn’t answer. I pushed past him, marching toward the cockpit door. The reinforced steel barrier that was designed to keep hijackers out. It was locked, obviously.

I pounded on it. Once. Twice. Three times—a specific rhythm.

“Captain Adami!” I shouted. “Open the door! You have a Ghost on board!”

No answer. Just the vibration of the engines and the sickening lurch of the plane.

Through the reinforced peephole, I saw the Captain turned around, his face a mask of terror. He was looking at the radar. It was lit up like a Christmas tree. Red. All red.

I held up my hand to the camera above the door. I pulled the collar of my sweater down, exposing the neural interface port at the base of my neck—a small, circular metallic socket embedded in the skin.

The lock clicked.

The door hissed open.

The cockpit was a cacophony of alarms. PULL UP. TRAFFIC. COLLISION ALERT.

Captain Adami and his First Officer, Lin Chen, turned to face me. Adami had a crash axe in his hand.

“Get out!” Adami yelled. “I will use this!”

“Put it down, Nash,” I said calmly, stepping into the cramped space. The view out the front windscreen was terrifying. The F-35s were right on our nose now, guiding us, forcing us down toward the dark, churning waters of the North Atlantic.

“How do you know my name?” Adami’s hand shook.

“I know a lot of things,” I said. I reached over and flipped a switch on the overhead panel, killing the master caution alarm. The silence that followed was deafening.

“My name is Commander Zephyr Thorne,” I said. “And those pilots out there? They aren’t escorting us. They’re saluting.”

I reached for the radio headset.

“Don’t touch that!” Chen screamed. “They’re jamming all frequencies!”

“Not the one I’m going to use,” I said.

I put the headset on. I keyed the mic. I didn’t use the standard emergency frequency. I dialed in a frequency that hadn’t been used since 1998. A ghost frequency.

I took a breath. The air in the cockpit was thin.

“Valkyrie One-Six-Charlie,” I spoke into the void. “Authorization: Odin-Seven-Four. The Ghost is awake.”

I waited.

One second. Two seconds.

Then, the radio crackled. A voice, clear and sharp as broken glass, cut through the static.

“Authentication required, Valkyrie. We buried you three years ago.”

I looked at the F-35 off our port wing. The pilot was looking right at me.

“Check the casket,” I said. “It was empty.”

PART 2: THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

The silence in the cockpit was heavier than gravity.

Captain Adami stared at me, his crash axe lowered but his knuckles still white around the handle. First Officer Chen was looking out the window, her mouth slightly open, watching the impossible happen.

Outside, the lead F-35, a forty-thousand-pound machine of war, didn’t fire. It didn’t force us down. Instead, the pilot rolled the aircraft. It was a slow, deliberate barrel roll, ending in a sharp wing tilt—the underbelly flashing silver in the sunlight.

“He’s… he’s acknowledging you,” Chen whispered. “That’s a wing tilt. That’s a royal salute.”

The radio crackled again, the voice on the other end devoid of the static that had plagued us minutes ago.

“Valkyrie Actual, this is Raptor Lead. Welcome home. You are cleared for immediate diversion to Sector Omega. Follow our vector. We’ll clear the path.”

I keyed the mic. “Copy, Raptor. Guide us in. And tell Command to have the coffee hot. I’ve been drinking economy swill for three hours.”

I took off the headset and handed it back to a stunned Captain Adami.

“Who are you?” he asked again, his voice barely a rasp. “Really?”

“I told you,” I said, leaning against the bulkhead, the adrenaline finally starting to drain, leaving my hands trembling slightly. “I’m the reason you’re alive, Captain. And I’m the reason you’re in danger.”

The cockpit door burst open behind me. It wasn’t the flight attendants.

It was Senator Blackwood, followed closely by Brigadier Callaway. The Senator looked ready to fire someone; Callaway looked like he was ready to salute or arrest me, he hadn’t decided which.

“What is going on in here?” Blackwood bellowed. “I saw the fighters! Why are they—”

He stopped. He looked at me. Then he looked at the radar screen, which was now clear of red warning lights, showing a new, blue flight path vectoring us toward Scotland.

“You,” Blackwood pointed a manicured finger at me. “The girl from 16C. Iris, my aide… she ran a facial recognition scan on you when you walked past us.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Illegal without a warrant, Senator.”

“She got a hit,” Blackwood said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “But the system flagged it as an error. Because the person it matched… died three years ago in the Artemis Incident.”

“The Artemis Incident,” I repeated, the words tasting like ash. “The official report said it was a navigational error. A pilot disorientation crash during a routine training flight over the North Sea.”

“It was classified Top Secret,” Callaway interred, stepping forward. His eyes were scanning my face, cataloging the scar, the posture, the deadness in my eyes. “Two pilots lost. Commander Zephyr Thorne and Colonel Freya Thorne. Twins. The finest test pilots the Air Force ever produced.”

“Freya,” I whispered. The name was a knife in my gut.

“You’re Zephyr,” Callaway said. It was a statement, not a question. “You’re the one they called ‘The Ghost’.”

“And you’re all talking too much,” I snapped, my command voice returning. “Captain Adami, follow that F-35. We’re landing at RAF Lossiemouth. But not the main runway. They’re taking us to the Black Sector.”

“Black Sector?” Adami swallowed. “That doesn’t exist on my charts.”

“It doesn’t exist on any charts,” I said. “Just fly the plane, Captain. Do what you do best. When turbulence hits, some panic, some freeze. You kept flying. I respect that.”

I turned to the Senator and the Brigadier. “You two need to go back to the cabin. Keep the passengers calm. Tell them… tell them it’s a security precaution for the NATO summit. Lie to them. You’re politicians and soldiers; you’re good at lying.”

“I demand—” Blackwood started.

“You are in a metal tube at thirty thousand feet surrounded by stealth fighters,” I cut him off, leaning in close enough to smell his expensive cologne. “Your committee clearance means nothing here. My clearance is written in blood. Go. Sit. Down.”

Callaway grabbed the Senator’s arm. “She’s right, Senator. We’re out of our depth.” He looked at me, a flicker of profound respect in his eyes. “Good luck, Commander.”

As they left, I looked out the window. The coast of Scotland was coming into view—rugged, gray, and welcoming.

“Why?” Chen asked softly from the co-pilot’s seat. “Why did you fake your death? Why leave?”

I touched the flight manual in my pocket. “Because, Lieutenant… we built something we shouldn’t have. And the only way to destroy it was to die with it.”

The landing was smoother than we had any right to expect. The F-35s peeled off in a thunderous break as we touched down on a stretch of tarmac that looked abandoned from the air but was lined with high-tech runway lights that flickered on only as we approached.

We taxied past rows of hardened hangars. There were no commercial terminals here. No jet bridges. Just black SUVs, armored personnel carriers, and men with assault rifles standing in the rain.

The engines whined down. The “Fasten Seatbelt” sign dinged off.

I stood up. “Captain, keep the passengers on board until I give the signal. They’ll debrief you. They’ll make you sign NDAs that threaten you with treason if you talk. Sign them.”

“Will I see you again?” Adami asked. He looked older than he had this morning.

“Better for you if you don’t,” I said.

I walked out of the cockpit and into the cabin. The silence was absolute. Three hundred and forty faces turned toward me. The fear was gone, replaced by a thick, palpable curiosity.

I walked down the aisle. I stopped at row 16. My backpack was there.

The little girl who had cried earlier was staring at me. She was holding a piece of paper—a crayon drawing of a plane with two smaller, meaner planes next to it.

“Are you a superhero?” she chirped.

I paused. My chest tightened. “No, sweetie. Just someone who found their way home.”

I took my bag and walked to the forward door. The stairs were already rolled up.

At the bottom of the stairs stood a man I hadn’t seen in three years. General Fraser. He looked older, his hair completely white now, the lines around his eyes etched deeper by secrets.

I walked down the steps, the cool Scottish air hitting my face like a slap. Rain mingled with the jet fuel fumes. It smelled like nostalgia.

I stopped in front of him. I didn’t salute. I wasn’t in uniform.

“General,” I said.

“Commander Thorne,” Fraser replied. His voice was thick with emotion. “We buried an empty casket for you at Arlington. I gave the eulogy.”

“I know,” I said. “I watched the live stream.”

“We thought the system was gone,” Fraser said, his voice dropping. “We thought Hyperion died with you and Freya.”

“It did,” I said. “I scrubbed the drives. I crashed the prototype into the sea.”

“Then explain this,” Fraser said. He held up a tablet.

On the screen was a radar track. It showed the moment our flight was intercepted. But there weren’t just two F-35s.

There was a third signal.

It was faint, ghostly. A radar blip that appeared, moved at Mach 4, and then vanished. It hovered above the commercial airliner, unseen by the pilots, unseen by the passengers.

“That signal signature,” Fraser said grimly. “It’s the Artemis drive. It’s Hyperion.”

My blood froze. “That’s impossible. I destroyed the core.”

“Someone rebuilt it,” Fraser said. “And they used this flight—they used you—to test its targeting systems. They needed a neural link to calibrate it. Your neural link.”

I touched the port on my neck. “The beacon. It wasn’t just tracking me. It was… it was a handshake.”

“They woke you up, Zephyr,” Fraser said. “And now that the system is calibrated, they’re coming to collect the key.”

“The key?”

“You,” he said. “You’re the biological component. The Quantum Navigation System doesn’t work without a Thorne DNA sequence.”

I looked up at the gray sky. It suddenly felt very crowded.

“Where is she?” I asked.

Fraser hesitated. “Secure holding. She arrived an hour ago.”

“Take me to her.”

PART 3: THE SKY BURNS

The bunker was deep underground, smelling of ozone and recycled air. We walked past blast doors and retinal scanners until we reached a holding cell that looked more like a clean room in a laboratory.

Inside, sitting on a metal cot, wearing a gray flight suit with no insignia, was a woman.

She looked up as I entered.

It was like looking in a mirror that had been shattered and glued back together wrong. Same dark hair, same sharp jawline, same gray eyes. But where my eyes were tired, hers were cold. Burning cold.

“Hello, sister,” she said.

“Freya,” I breathed.

Colonel Freya Thorne. My twin. My wingman. The person I had watched die in a ball of fire three years ago.

“You look terrible, Zeph,” she said, a smirk playing on her lips. “Civilian life doesn’t suit you. You’ve gone soft.”

“I thought you were dead,” I said, my voice trembling with a rage I hadn’t expected. “I watched your telemetry flatline. I watched your ejection seat fail.”

“Technically, I did die,” Freya said, standing up. She moved with a predatory grace. “My heart stopped for four minutes. The recovery team brought me back. But it wasn’t our team, Zeph. It was Them.”

“The Syndicate,” General Fraser said from the doorway. “A rogue faction within the Defense Department. They’ve been funding the off-book black projects.”

“They saved me,” Freya said, her eyes locking onto mine. “They rebuilt me. And they rebuilt Hyperion. But they couldn’t fly it. Not properly. They needed the other half of the equation.”

“Me,” I realized. “The Gemini Protocol. The system was designed to split the neural load between two pilots.”

“Bingo,” Freya said. “They flushed you out, Zephyr. That intercept? The turbulence? It was all theater to force you to activate your neural port. To ping the network. Once you did that, Hyperion locked on. It’s fully online now.”

Suddenly, the red emergency lights in the bunker started flashing. A siren wailed—a low, mournful sound that vibrated in my teeth.

“General!” A soldier burst into the room. “Perimeter breach! We have hostiles on the ground! Unmarked tactical teams. And… sir… there’s something in the air.”

General Fraser looked at a monitor on the wall. The radar was a mess of static.

“They’re here,” Freya said calmly. “They’re here to take us both. Reunited at last.”

“No,” I said. The fear was gone. In its place was the cold, hard clarity of the cockpit. “General, get the passengers out. Evacuate the 787 via the south tunnels to the secondary airfield. Get them in the air.”

“And you?” Fraser asked.

I looked at Freya. “Is the Phoenix still here?”

Freya’s eyes widened. “The Phoenix? The extraction prototype? It’s been mothballed since the project ended.”

“Is it fueled?” I demanded, turning to Fraser.

“Yes, but—”

“Then we’re taking it,” I said. “We’re going to lead Hyperion away from this base. We’re going to lead them away from the passengers.”

Freya laughed. It was a sharp, jagged sound. “You want to dogfight a ghost ship in a relic? You’re insane.”

“I’m a Thorne,” I said. “So are you. Are you a pilot, or are you a prisoner?”

Freya looked at me. For a second, the ice in her eyes cracked. She saw the challenge. She saw the sister she used to fly formation with, wingtip to wingtip at Mach 2.

“Let’s burn the sky,” Freya said.

We ran. The base was chaos. Gunfire echoed in the corridors above us. We took the maintenance shafts, sliding down ladders, sprinting through utility tunnels until we reached Hangar 4.

There she was. The Phoenix.

It wasn’t a fighter jet. It was a piece of art. Matte black, swept-forward wings, engines that looked more like sculpture than mechanics. It was designed for speed, for stealth, and for one thing only: survival.

“I take stick,” I shouted, vaulting up the ladder.

“In your dreams,” Freya yelled back, but she jumped into the rear seat—the WSO (Weapons Systems Officer) position. “I’ll handle the electronic warfare suite. You just drive.”

I strapped in. My hands found the controls. The muscle memory was instant. My body knew this machine. I plugged my neural interface into the ship’s port.

Click.

The world exploded into color. The plane’s sensors became my eyes. The engines became my heartbeat. I could feel the wind outside the hangar doors. I could feel the enemy aircraft circling above.

“Canopy clear,” Freya called out. “Systems green. Powering up the Quantum Drive. Warning: Stability is at 80%.”

“Good enough,” I said. “General Fraser, blow the doors!”

The hangar doors blasted open.

I didn’t taxi. I slammed the throttle forward. The Phoenix screamed—a high-pitched shriek that shattered the glass in the control booth. We shot out of the darkness and into the rain-slicked twilight.

“Target 12 o’clock high!” Freya shouted. “It’s the Hyperion!”

I looked up. The sky shimmered. A distortion, like heat haze, materialized into a terrifying shape. It was a jagged, silver dart, twice the size of our ship.

“They’re locking on,” Freya warned. “Missile launch detected!”

“Hang on!”

I yanked the stick back. The Phoenix didn’t just turn; it defied physics. We pulled 9 Gs, shooting straight up, spinning around the incoming missile. The sky spun.

Below us, I saw the buses loading the passengers from Flight 247. They were vulnerable. Exposed.

“We need to draw it away!” I yelled. “Freya, jam their comms! Make us the brightest target in the sky!”

“Lighting us up!” Freya laughed. “Come and get us, you bastards!”

The Phoenix glowed with electronic noise. To the Hyperion’s sensors, we were suddenly the size of an aircraft carrier. The silver dart turned, abandoning the base, abandoning the passengers. It wanted the key.

“It’s following!” I shouted. “Heading North. Open water.”

We raced across the Scottish highlands, sonic booms shattering the quiet of the glens. The Hyperion was faster, but I was angrier.

“Zeph,” Freya said, her voice quiet over the comms. “We can’t outrun it. It has the upgraded drive. It can phase shift.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m not trying to outrun it.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I’m taking it to the one place it can’t navigate,” I said. “The Dead Zone.”

“The magnetic anomaly?” Freya gasped. “That will fry our systems too! We’ll crash!”

“We have manual controls,” I said grimly. “They don’t. Hyperion is pure fly-by-wire. Without the computer, it’s a brick.”

“You’re crazy,” Freya said. “I missed you.”

We hit the coast. The North Sea was a black abyss below. The Hyperion was right on our tail, its weapon bays opening.

“Now!” I screamed. “Freya, pulse the EMP!”

“Pulsing!”

A shockwave of blue energy erupted from the Phoenix. It washed over us, killing our HUD, killing the neural link. The silence was instant. The plane became heavy, sluggish. Just metal and hydraulics.

But behind us…

The Hyperion didn’t just lose power. It lost cohesion. Its phase-shift drive destabilized. The silver ship flickered, spasmed, and then tumbled. Without its computer brain to make the micro-adjustments needed for flight, it tore itself apart.

A fireball bloomed over the ocean. A second sun in the night.

I wrestled the stick, my arms burning. “Restarting engines! Come on, baby, breathe!”

The engine sputtered. Coughed. And roared back to life.

We leveled out at five thousand feet, skimming the waves.

“Target destroyed,” Freya whispered. “We did it.”

“We’re not done,” I said. “The Syndicate won’t stop. They have the blueprints.”

“Then we make sure they can’t use them,” Freya said. “I downloaded the core data from Hyperion before it crashed. I have the files, Zeph. We can leak them. Not to the government. To the world.”

“Distributed security,” I realized. “If everyone has the technology… no one has the advantage.”

“Exactly.”

I banked the plane, turning West. “Where are we going?” Freya asked.

“New York,” I said. “I have a flight to catch. Or at least… I have a promise to keep.”

EPILOGUE

Two days later. JFK International Airport.

The passengers of Flight 247 finally arrived on a chartered military transport. The press was there, but the story had already been spun. Training exercise. Communications failure. Heroic landing.

Captain Adami walked through the terminal, looking exhausted but relieved. He stopped at the baggage claim, checking his phone.

A young woman in a hoodie bumped into him.

“Watch it,” he muttered.

Then he froze. There was a book in his hand. The Art of Navigation by Amelia Earhart.

He hadn’t been holding it a second ago.

He opened the cover. There was a handwritten note on the title page.

Captain,

Rule Number 3 of flying: The sky belongs to those who never fear the fall.

Watch the frequencies. The truth is in the static.

– Z

Adami looked up. He saw the back of a woman disappearing into the crowd. She walked with a purpose, a backpack slung over one shoulder. Beside her was another woman, identical in height and stride.

They moved like ghosts. They moved like the wind.

Adami smiled, closing the book. He looked out the window at the planes taking off, rising into the endless blue.

“Clear skies, Commander,” he whispered. “Clear skies.”