Chapter 103 - The Skyward Descent
Darkness swallowed us as the aircraft tumbled through the tempest. The gravity generator failed, tearing loose gear, shattered glass, and metal shards from the decking, sending them swirling around us like shrapnel.
I didn't reach for an emergency harness. I wrapped my entire body around Clara, tucking her head under my chin, planting my boots against the steel ribbing of the fuselage, and taking every impact upon my own spine and shoulders.
"Julian!" I screamed through the roaring vortex of wind tearing through the ruptured seals.
"Deploying aerodynamic airbrakes manually!" his voice came from somewhere near the forward cabin, accompanied by the brutal sound of gears grinding against unlubricated steel. "We’re coming in too hot! Brace for impact! Brace—"
The world inverted.
A deafening roar of splintering oak and tearing metal erupted beneath us. The belly of the gunship slammed into the treetops of the dense, old-growth mountain forest. The shockwave reverberated through my bones, knocking the breath completely out of my lungs. Branches thick as telephone poles punched through the aluminum hull like needles through cloth.
I squeezed Clara tighter, screaming through clenched teeth as a flying piece of jagged plating sliced open the back of my shoulder. Hot blood soaked through my shirt, but I refused to loosen my grip.
*You survived the empty nursery. You survived the funeral with an empty casket. You will survive this.*
With a catastrophic screech that sounded like the death cry of a prehistoric beast, the fuselage plowed into the rocky earth, skidding hundreds of yards through shale and dirt before slamming into a colossal granite bluff.
Then, total silence.
The only sound left was the hiss of burning hydraulic fluid, the crackle of localized fires in the shredded canopy above, and the patter of freezing mountain rain splashing through the torn ceiling.
Coughing through a thick cloud of toxic smoke, I pushed a heavy metal beam off my legs. Every muscle in my body throbbed with excruciating pain, but my hands immediately moved to examine the small form curled beneath me.
"Clara? Clara, can you hear me?"
The little girl stirred. Her jacket was filthy, her hair matted with debris, but she was breathing. The silver glow in her eyes had receded, leaving behind large, frightened pools of dark hazel.
"Mommy..." she whimpered, shivering violently against the freezing mountain draft. "My knees hurt."
"I know, baby. I know. But you’re alive. You’re safe." A ragged sob broke from my throat as I kissed her cheeks, wiping away soot with trembling fingers.
A groan came from the front of the cockpit.
I whipped around, drawing the sidearm tucked into my waistband, my instincts on hair-trigger alert.
Through the twisted wreckage, Julian was pinned beneath the collapsed pilot console. A jagged shard of reinforced polymer had impaled his lower abdomen, pinning him to the floorplates. Blood was pooling beneath him, steaming faintly in the cold air.
He looked up at me, his face translucent, his breathing shallow and wet.
"Eleanor..." he wheezed, coughing up a spatter of dark crimson. "She... is she whole?"
I stood up slowly, lifting Clara into my left arm while keeping the gun lowered, but ready. I walked toward the broken shell of my former husband—the man who had sworn to love me before a priest, the heir who had stood beside his monstrous father while they orchestrated the theft of my child.
"She’s alive," I said coldly. "No thanks to the Sterling dynasty."
"The... the transponders are dead," Julian whispered, clutching his wound with trembling, oil-stained hands. "The crash... it killed the signal for now. But you can't stay here. Look out the viewport..."
I stepped around the wreckage and looked through the cracked windshield toward the northern valley.
My blood ran cold.
Even from fifty miles away, towering above the jagged ridgeline of the Appalachians, a colossal, monolithic structure rose into the clouds. It was an obsidian spire of brutalist architecture, humming with a sickly violet aura. And radiating from its apex were the harmonic frequencies that held the hundred and forty-four thousand dormant children across the continent in synthetic stasis.
May you like
"The Obsidian Cradle," Julian rasped, his eyes glazing over with fever. "Arthur's master facility. The Alpha Node... it’s pulling her there. If you don't destroy the central core... her mind will burn out before the sun rises."
***
