Aunt June studied the photograph I had used for my school presentation and asked whether anyone had handled it. I remembered Mr. Reynolds taking it from me before the assembly, examining it longer than necessary while making jokes about my mother’s career. When I told them, Mom and June exchanged a worried glance. Mom placed the original photograph beneath a small blue light, revealing a tiny symbol near its edge: a broken wing. Someone had secretly marked it. Before we could investigate further, every monitor in the room flickered, filled with static, and displayed the scarred face of Elias Voss. He looked older and thinner than in the photograph, but there was no mistaking him. He smiled at Mom and asked whether she was still running toward danger. When she demanded to know where Carter was, he replied that the admiral was safe for now. Then his eyes shifted toward me. “Not what I want, Rachel,” he said. “Who.”

Voss addressed me directly and told me to ask my mother why Ghostwing had responded to only one person’s neural signature. He claimed the project had been shut down shortly after I was born because of something connected to me. Before Mom could respond, the screens went dark and a strange mechanical hum rolled across the sky above the cabin. She pulled me close and revealed a truth she had hidden my entire life: my father had not died in the crash she had described. The man who had just spoken to us was my father, Elias Voss. Mom explained that she had loved him before discovering how far his ambition had taken him. When Ghostwing became dangerous, she had destroyed its core to prevent it from becoming a weapon. Voss had disappeared, and she had believed him dead. Now he was back, and whatever he wanted from me was connected to the technology she had spent years trying to bury.