The Gobi Desert promised nothing but dust-shrouded death. From ten thousand feet, the expanse of sand looked like a rusted copper sea, undulating monotonously beneath a sky whose color nearly resembled a purplish bruise. Hot winds slammed into the fuselage of The Sparrow, creating a cacophony like a thousand devil's claws scratching the plane's titanium walls.
Mateo Rossi gripped the control stick with whitened knuckles. Cold sweat seeped from beneath his flight helmet, running down his temple, which still throbbed from the lingering wounds from Mo'orea. Beside him, Elena sat on alert, her fingers dancing across the HUD screen displaying the desert's thermal fluctuation graphs below them.
"Teo, we're entering a radar blind spot. If there's a stray missile from the Mongolian border, we wo
