G-forces crushed Mateo Rossi's chest until he felt his fractured ribs were about to pierce his own heart. At sixty thousand feet, the world beyond the Prototype-X's cockpit glass was no longer blue, but a terrifying, pitch-black void, a place where the laws of nature and mercy held no sway. The Master Caution alarm wailed incessantly, its sound like the shriek of a ghost trapped amidst burning avionics cables.
"Mateo... just a little more... ninety-nine percent..." Elena's voice came through the intercom, incredibly thin and trembling, as if pulled from the depths of a dark well. In the back seat, Elena Vance was battling death itself, a death called hypoxia. Her blue lips trembled behind the nearly empty oxygen mask, yet her fingers remained glued to the data panel keyboard, locking onto
