Chapter 6 - Altitude of Vengeance
At thirty thousand feet, the air was dangerously thin, and the King Air punched through towering cumulus clouds that shook the aluminum fuselage like a child rattling a tin can. Marissa sat rigidly in the pilot's seat, her eyes flicking between the artificial horizon and the auxiliary navigation screen she had rewired using Andrew’s master codes.
The screen was currently pinging a private GPS coordinate logged in the metadata of the surveillance photographs: *The Blackwood Estate, an isolated compound nestled deep within the rugged pine forests of northern Ontario, Canada.*
It was a fortress. According to the deep-web architecture files hidden inside Project Artemis’s digital archive, Blackwood wasn't just a home; it was a private behavioral conditioning facility disguised as an elite boarding school for troubled prodigies. Here, children plucked from the wreckage of manufactured tragedies were stripped of their names, their histories, and their families, molded into cold, brilliant instruments of corporate sabotage.
And Lily was there. Eleven years old. Wearing a green dinosaur pin like a badge of silent rebellion.
Suddenly, the cockpit's auxiliary comms system hissed to life. A synthesized, modulated voice crackled through the speakers, devoid of any natural cadence.
*“Unidentified twin-engine aircraft, tail number N442BH. You are currently trespassing in restricted sovereign airspace governed by the Blackwood Syndicate. Alter your heading to zero-four-zero immediately, or intercept protocols will be initiated.”*
Marissa didn’t flinch. She reached out, flicked the broadcast toggle to an open-frequency frequency, and leaned close to the cockpit microphone.
“Tell Sterling,” Marissa said, her voice dropping into a register of cold, absolute steel, “that the ghost he thought he buried in Ohio just cleared customs.”
A heavy, suffocating silence stretched across the comms line for five agonizing seconds. Then, the synthesized voice returned, carrying a faint undertone of human surprise. *“Sergeant Hale? The file said you died in the same fire.”*
“Files lie,” Marissa snapped, and she cut the transmission.
Through the frost-rimed cockpit windshield, the jagged, snow-dusted peaks of the Canadian shield loomed out of the darkness. Cradled in a deep valley below sat a sprawling, fortress-like estate surrounded by towering concrete walls, watchtowers, and a perimeter security grid that pulsed with blue electrical light.
Marissa pulled back hard on the yoke. The King Air’s nose pitched upward, shedding altitude in a rapid, aggressive descent that screamed over the pine trees. She wasn't planning on landing legally. She was planning on leaving a crater.
As the compound rushed up to meet her, the automated defense systems of Blackwood Estate roared to life. Searchlights cut through the falling snow, crisscrossing the sky like searching fingers. Red anti-air warning alarms wailed across the valley.
May you like
Marissa locked her jaw, her knuckles turning bone-white as she gripped the flight controls. “Hold on, baby girl,” she whispered into the freezing cockpit. “Mama’s coming home.”
***
