Just that.
Not how.
Not why.
Okay.
I loved her for it.
“Check the captain,” I said. “Pulse, breathing. Use the medical kit. Ask for a doctor.”
“We have two nurses and one ER physician already assisting.”
“Good.”
I ended the call and adjusted trim.
David was watching me again.
“You said Valkyrie Seven.”
My hands tightened slightly.
“Monitor altitude.”
“I heard stories.”
“David.”
“People said Valkyrie Seven died.”
My throat closed for half a second.
“She did.”
He looked at me.
I looked back at the storm.
“She had to.”
The cockpit went quiet except for alarms, rain, and the breathing of two people trying to keep more than three hundred others alive.
Ten years earlier, Captain Emma Parker had not disappeared because she wanted a simpler life.
She disappeared because the official report had needed a ghost.
Operation Nightglass was never supposed to exist. Six aircraft. Black route. No markings. No public record. We were sent into a region where our government was not officially operating to extract an intelligence asset whose information was supposedly too valuable to lose.
The mission went wrong before we reached the target.
Bad coordinates.
Compromised signals.
A surface-to-air system waiting where none should have been.
My wingman was hit first.
Then Raptor One—Caleb Ross—took damage and had to break formation.
I stayed.
That was the part they never forgave me for.
Not the enemy.
My own people.
Because I heard a distress beacon below.
Because I saw movement near the extraction zone.
Because I disobeyed the abort order long enough to confirm that the asset was not alone.
There were civilians there.
Families.
Children.
People no briefing had mentioned.
The official order was to withdraw.
I did not.
By dawn, two aircraft were gone, three pilots were dead, and a classified operation had become a political nightmare waiting to happen.
So the story was buried.
The dead received medals with no explanations.
The living signed papers.
And I was told, with smiles colder than the altitude I used to fly, that Captain Emma Parker would never sit in a military cockpit again.
