“My mom flies an F-22 fighter jet.”

“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.