Nobody spoke for nearly twenty minutes.
Then Aunt June said, “Air traffic is blind over the northern corridor.”
Mom’s jaw tightened.
“He’s testing it.”
“Or showing off.”
“Voss never did anything for one reason.”
I leaned forward.
“What does he want with me?”
Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
“Ghostwing’s first interface was designed around pilots. It needed reflex, pattern recognition, spatial instinct. Voss pushed it further. Too far. He wanted the system to respond directly to the human nervous system.”
“That doesn’t explain me.”
She looked back at the road.
“When I was pregnant with you, I was exposed to part of the system during the final sabotage. Not radiation. Not poison. A signal pattern. A neural imprint. We didn’t know what it meant. After you were born, the system responded to your brain activity on a passive test.”
I stared at her.👉 Read the Full Story
“I was a baby.”
“I know.”
“So they shut it down?”
“I shut it down,” she said. “I destroyed the core and buried the research. Voss tried to stop me. His aircraft went down during the extraction. Carter survived because I chose to pull him out before pursuing Voss.”
“And now Voss wants me because…”
“Because if he rebuilt Ghostwing, he may still need the living key.”
The living key.
I sat back slowly.
Outside, the night blurred past.
