She ran her hands through her hair. “That does sound a little more like Pippin.”
“Doesn’t it?” Romeo’s smile was kind, and it gave her the smallest lift. Small but necessary.
Tristan approached, and the solemn look on his face brought her back down. “Is it bad?”
“Yes,” he said. “They haven’t had any communication from Sylph. The radio, network—everything is jammed. No doubt she’s too scared to open her signal and sneak a message through. They’re pretty sure she’s still in the sky and that the drones haven’t crossed the d-line yet, but the satellite could be wrong. I’ll be able to switch on the shortwave when I’m close enough and get her report on what’s happening.”
“The Streakers shouldn’t be used as messenger pigeons,” Chase said. “There’s got to be more we can do.”
“What I can do is blast back here in time to give everyone enough warning to seal themselves in the bunkers.”
Romeo headed to the cockpit. “Come on, Arrow,” he called back.
Tristan pinched her ear before pulling his helmet on. “This might seem superstitious, but I don’t want to say good-bye.”
“Deal,” she said, forcing her chin up.
Chase watched Phoenix leave the hangar and sweep into the dark sky. She wrapped her arms around her chest and started back to the Green, but she could go no farther than a large tarp spread across the floor. It was covered in bits of wreckage.
Dragon.
The charred, smashed remains of her beloved bird. The emptiness that Tristan and her friends had helped hold back sprung forward, and she felt Pippin’s absence all over again.
? ? ?
Adrien was swearing in French, digging through a pile of Dragon’s smoke-stained parts. Her head was half inside a dismantled engine. “Socket wrench,” she called out to no one.
Chase handed the wrench over. “Here it is.”
“Merci.” Adrien glanced out at her.
“What are you doing with my baby?” Chase asked.
Adrien chuckled. “She was my baby first, Ms. Harcourt.”
Chase put some ideas together that she hadn’t bothered to before. “You built the Streakers in Canada and then shipped two of them here. And you worked with the Canadian Streaker team, but you never came here to see us. Why?”
“We weren’t supposed to be working together, were we?” She tightened a bolt, huffing. “But now we’re together for good and ill. What’s left of us anyway.”
The engineer seemed to be hinting at the larger picture. Pippin wasn’t the only one who had been lost. JAFA was gone, its cadets and servicemen scattered or dead, and all because people like Tourn thought we could beat Ri Xiong Di at its own game.
“We can’t win,” Chase said.
Adrien looked at her. Grease had smeared along her face, and the red alarm light tinted her white hair to a soft pink. “We cannot. Not as we currently stand.”
“How do we do it then?”
Adrien dipped back into her work. “You already know that answer. More Streakers means more strength. You have done your part on that front. Well, you did your best.”
In light of the accident and the global uproar, the government board had yet to rule on the Streakers. Or so Chase thought. “Did the project pass? I haven’t heard anything.”
Adrien didn’t answer, and that was answer enough. Of course the government board would have scratched the Streaker project after her abject failure in the face of that red drone.
Of course.
Adrien wiped her hands on a rag. “You haven’t brought a knife with you, have you?”
Chase was taken back. “What?”
“I need a long knife to salvage some of the software.” Adrien pointed to a hunk of jet guts. “To see if it is intact.”
Looking over the wreckage, Chase remembered the crash with a shock of heat. She fell to her knees, and Adrien took hold of Chase’s arm. “No tears,” the woman commanded. “Help me take her for pieces. It will do your heart good.”
The two of them struggled for over an hour, trying to get Dragon’s metal skin unbent from the machine’s insides. Chase felt alive through the strain of the work. She enjoyed breaking parts of her jet away and swearing and sweating into her eyes.
When they were done, both of them seated on the tarp amid a few thousand tiny parts, Chase asked a question that felt strangely important. “What will you do with all this?”
“Put her back together. Fix some design flaws we learned from your crash. I only have a few weeks to quiet the government’s doubters so that you might have your Streaker fleet.”
“You still think you can change their minds?”
Adrien answer was a shrug. “They want Streakers without young pilots, but I cannot fix that. Only teenagers have the physical durability, impulse-fast reflexes, and mental agility to adjust to the demands of the engines. You learn with the speed of heat.” The engineer looked proud of herself for using a jock pilot term. She even winked. “We will find a way to prove to our governments we need the money. We will keep moving forward.” Adrien motioned to the parts around them. “We will rebuild.”
Chase looked over Dragon’s remains. “When I left her on the shore of that lake, she didn’t look so mangled. She just looked…halved.”
“They had to recover her fast to hold back Ri Xiong Di satellite interest. They knocked her into pieces to transport her.”
Chase faced Adrien, feeling stronger for the first time since she woke in the infirmary. “You have to fix her. I need her.”
“Dragon may yet be rebuilt. I have faith. She was my favorite, but…” Her voice tilted. “Will you fly her?”