Breaking Sky(6)

She shook out her fists. “I know. This all feels really weird. Don’t you sense it?”

“Yes. Very weird. That staff sergeant was told not to talk to us, Chase.”

“How could you tell?”

“Because he looked way too happy to say he didn’t see anything. Either that or…” Pippin ran out of words. It wasn’t like him. His calm was something Chase piled her recklessness on. That way, no matter how wrong she was—and she was wrong quite a bit—she always had the bedrock of his self-assurance.

“What?” she asked.

“Or…maybe they really didn’t see anything.” Pippin looked older than seventeen when he was this tired, and yet his face had a forever-young quality. Chase called it “boyishly boyish good looks” when she was trying to get him riled. But right now, with his hair sweat-sticky and his eyes red, he looked older than the staff sergeant she’d almost hammered.

Chase buzzed with the last of her energy. “So you didn’t see that jet on your radar, and the tower might not have seen it on the satellite. Is that even possible?”

“I don’t know.” Pippin was stumped as often as he was grave.

And he was suddenly both.

Chase took off toward the administration offices and Kale with a corkscrew feeling deep in her stomach. A secret jet without a signal didn’t smell like a backup Air Force bird. It reeked of Ri Xiong Di. Of sabotage.





4


    BRIGADIER GENERAL


   One Serious Star


Kale’s office smelled like coffee. A pot always burbled in the corner, and shelves lined every inch of wall space, sagging under the weight of old books, sad-armed plants, and military paraphernalia from centuries past. Chase knocked on the doorjamb, waiting for the brigadier general, the head of the Star, to invite them in.

He didn’t.

His head was bowed over a book on his desk, his gray hair looking soft. His shoulders, on the other hand, were hard and straight—the kind you could balance a country on. Although Chase loved to fly and the academy was home, there were days when she wondered how she’d stay in the military as a career. Then she’d see Kale in his uniform and she’d scrape around in her imagination, wanting to picture herself weathered and proud and in charge.

“General?”

Kale waved her into silence. She waited a few moments while he licked his thumb and flicked through a few pages. “General, I…”

Kale snapped a look that made both cadets stand at attention and clip their hands to their foreheads. “I need a word with Harcourt,” he said. “Donnet, you’re dismissed.”

Pippin backed into the hall and whispered, “Watch yourself. Don’t say too much.”

Chase mocked a sneer at her RIO, but Pippin wasn’t joking. He had that too-serious look on his face again. “What?” Chase mouthed.

“Harcourt,” Kale commanded. Chase stepped into his office, suddenly nervy without Pippin at her back. She couldn’t fly without him, and that feeling often permeated her time on the ground.

Kale shut his book. “Let me tell you about my night, Harcourt. Here I was, peacefully trying to eat my dinner, only to get a call from the tower. Do you know what they said?”

“No, General.”

“Dragon is crashing.”


Kale stood up, and something in Chase’s chest sat down. “So I ran to the tower only to hear it was a stunt. You broke the speed of sound at absolute zero sink rate over civilian airspace.”

“But we saw—”

“Do I look finished?” Kale was livid with hints of disappointment. He hadn’t come down this hard on her in—well—a few weeks, but it still turned her over to feel like she’d blown his approval. Again. “You give new definition to ‘colorful actions.’ We don’t even have demerits for that kind of recklessness. Plus, my eggs got cold.” He motioned to a plate of now fossilized scrambled eggs and toast. “You can’t eat cold eggs, Harcourt. They taste like socks.”

There it was. An encouraging spark at the corner of his eye.

“You eat breakfast for dinner, General?”

“You’re not the only one who enjoys doing things your own way.” He sat down and motioned for her to do the same. “So here’s my real problem. You won’t follow rules. Sylph won’t break them. I don’t know which one of you is worse. We hoped that between the two of you we would be able to figure out exactly what the Streakers can do, but I swear you won’t be happy until you send Dragon back to the taxpayers in a box of parts.”

The two of you… Did Kale really not know about the third Streaker?

She ran her hands over the cracked leather of the armchair. Wispy stuffing stuck through like white hair. “General, we have a problem… I saw another jet up there today. I sort of chased him.”

Kale leaned halfway over his desk, his face unreadable. “Another jet?”

“Another Streaker. I know it sounds crazy. I checked the tower.” She drank in his reaction, but it was empty. No lifted eyebrow. No brightness in his gaze. “They didn’t see anything on the satellite,” she continued. “And Pippin didn’t pick it up on his controls.”

“So it was a ghost. You probably saw your own reflection in a cloud pool.” His tone was final, but it made her dive into the memory of the pearly blue flash. Chase picked up a rusty bayonet off the edge of his desk and rolled it between her palms.