Chapter 20
En route to Dubai, one week ago…
Katya
For the first hour of the flight back, it almost felt like we might get away with it.
The cabin lights were dim. Andrei sat opposite me, one arm stretched along the back of the leather seat, eyes half-lidded but alert. He hadn’t stopped watching me since we’d cleared the runway, like if he looked away for too long, I’d vanish back into smoke and fire.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Define okay,” I said.
He cracked a faint smile. “Alive. In one piece. Still challenging me.”
“In that case,” I said, “yes. Perfectly fine.”
He was about to say something else when the plane shuddered.
Just a little tremor. A short, unnatural jolt that didn’t match the smooth air we’d had so far.
It felt like a wrong note in a symphony.
Andrei’s head snapped up.
“That wasn’t turbulence,” I said.
“Nope,” he agreed.
The jet twitched again, almost like someone had yanked the yoke and then let go. My stomach lurched.
I reached automatically for the armrest. “What the hell?”
The cabin lights flickered.
Andrei stood. “Stay here. I’m going to check with the pilot.”
“Like hell!” I sniped, unbuckling. “I’m coming with you.”
He shot me a look that said he wanted to argue, but the plane made the decision for us. It dipped suddenly, nose dropping just a degree or two, but enough to make the horizon tilt in the windows.
“Fine. Let’s move.”
We headed up the aisle toward the cockpit. The flight stewardess stumbled out of the galley, wide-eyed.
“Did you feel that?” Andrei asked her.
“Yes, sir. The pilot hasn’t said anything. He—”
She didn’t finish.
The plane pitched hard to the left.
The floor dropped out from under my feet. My shoulder slammed into the bulkhead. Andrei grabbed the back of a seat to stay upright. The attendant was thrown sideways into the opposite wall with a cry.
Alarms started chirping, muffled through the cockpit door.
Andrei lunged for the cockpit door, grabbed the handle, and pounded on it. “Open up!”
No answer.
The door didn’t move.
Another sudden dip threw him forward into it. His forehead hit the reinforced panel with a sickening thud. He cursed under his breath, staggered back, hand flying to his head.
I caught his arm. “Hey! Look at me.”
“I’m fine,” he gritted out, but there was a smear of red on his fingers when he pulled them away.
The jet pitched again, this time dropping hard enough to throw our stomachs into our throats. Something came loose and clattered in the galley behind us.
The attendant was pale. “What’s happening?”
A synthetic voice crackled from the ceiling speaker. “Autopilot disengaged. Warning. Terrain. Pull up.”
I swallowed. “That’s not possible. We’re at cruising altitude.”
“I know,” Andrei said.
The jet banked right without warning, far steeper than any normal turn. The floor tilted under our feet. I slammed my palm against the cockpit door again.
“Captain!” I shouted. “Open the damn door!”
Nothing.
The synthetic voice repeated its warning: “Terrain. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.”
Andrei’s pupils blew wide. “We’re nowhere near land. That shouldn’t be triggering.”
Unless the system thought we were driving straight into the sea.
Which meant someone had taken control of our flight computers.
Revenant? ARCHEON? Someone else?
Right now, it didn’t matter.
We needed that door open.
“Andrei,” I said. “Move.”
He blinked. “What are you—”
I stepped back, planted my feet, and drove my shoulder into the door right at the latch point.
The reinforced panel didn’t break, but the impact rattled it. Pain shot down my arm. I did it again. And again. On the third hit, Andrei joined me, slamming his weight beside mine. The latch squealed a fraction.
The attendant, bracing herself between the galley counters, shouted, “There’s an override—there’s an emergency access. It’s in the panel.”
“Where?” I yelled back.
She pointed shakily to a small, recessed compartment near the doorframe. I flipped it open with my nails. Inside was a covered switch and a manual crank. I pulled the cover, grabbed the crank, shoved it into the slot, and twisted. It resisted, then gave with a metallic groan.
The door popped inward.
We tumbled into the cockpit.
The pilot was slumped sideways in his seat, unconscious or close to it. A thin trickle of blood ran from his hairline. He must have hit his head on something in the chaos.
The instrument panel was lit up like a Christmas tree. Red warning indicators flashed across multiple displays. Altitude numbers spun down faster than I cared to see. The attitude indicator showed a nose-down trajectory and my stomach pitched sideways.
I slipped into the right-hand seat, fighting the urge to vomit.
“Andrei,” I said tightly, “help me.”
He pushed the captain aside, slid into his seat, blinking through a haze. He must still have been disoriented from the hit to his head, but his hands found the controls like he’d been born with them.
“You know how to fly a jet?” I asked.
“I’ve flown simulators,” he said. “Done the basics. Enough not to die, I think.”
That did not inspire the confidence I wanted, but it was better than nothing.
He grabbed the yoke and pulled.
Nothing happened.
The synthetic voice kept chanting, “Pull up. Pull up,” like a taunt.
“The controls are fighting me,” he growled. “Autopilots still on. Even though it says it’s off.”
Which meant whatever was commanding the plane wasn’t coming from inside the cockpit.
“We’ve been hacked,” I said. “Remotely.”
His jaw clenched. “Revenant wouldn’t risk losing us.”
“Unless they are done with us.”
“Or ARCHEON thinks we’re expendable,” he added.
Great. Two sets of psychopaths who might want us dead. Wonderful odds.
He fought the yoke again. “It’s not responding.”
I scanned the panel. The autopilot toggle read OFF, just like he’d said, but then the jet pushed into a steeper descent.
Okay.
If the brain is compromised, you yank the nerves.
I unlatched the breaker panel and yanked it open.
“What are you doing?” Andrei barked.
“Cutting power to the autopilot and avionics control,” I said. “If we pull the right breakers, we sever their leash.”
“‘Right breakers’ implies you know which ones those are.”
“I’m an analyst, not an idiot,” I shot back. “Revenant trained me for this. In theory.”
His eyes flicked to me. “In theory.”
“If you have a better idea, now would be a fantastic time.”
He didn’t.
Inside the little panel beside the cockpit controls, a mess of switches and labels stared back at me, half in Russian, half in English.
I didn’t understand everything written there, but I did understand the important parts: some of these switches were keeping the plane under someone else’s control. And they needed to stop.
“Andrei, I think I can cut whatever the hell is flying this thing for us,” I said, running my fingers down the rows of breakers until I found the ones tied to the autopilot system. Luckily, those were in English.
“Do it!” he yelled, struggling against the yoke like he was wrestling a wild animal.
I pulled the first switch. The control stick in his hands jerked hard. The plane bucked as if something invisible let go of us for half a second.
“Again!” he shouted.
I yanked another.
This time the cabin lights flickered, the loud electronic warning went silent, and two of the screens in front of us stopped flashing like they were possessed. The whole jet shuddered, but it suddenly felt a lot less like a runaway roller coaster and more like a very large, very stubborn machine.
“How’s it feeling?” I asked.
“Like it weighs a thousand tons,” Andrei grunted, muscles trembling in his arms as he tried to lift the nose. “But at least it’s listening. Keep going!”
I flipped the last switch tied to anything that looked remotely suspicious. The cockpit dimmed, but the engines kept roaring—thank God—and I dropped into the co-pilot’s seat, fumbling with the harness before clicking it into place.
Andrei’s face was tight with strain, his knuckles white. “Good news,” he said through clenched teeth. “We’re not diving at the ocean anymore.”
“And the bad news?” I asked.
“We’re still falling. And I’m flying with a probable concussion.”
Great.
I glanced at the pilot, who was still slumped unconscious to the side. He was no help at all. “Tell me what to do,” I said.
“Watch the screens,” he said. “Tell me if we’re still falling. And yell if we’re about to hit anything.”
“Wonderful instructions,” I muttered, but I did it anyway. I read the numbers aloud, the ones that told him how fast we were dropping and how quickly he could try to pull us back from it.
Outside, it was nothing but darkness. No lights. No towns. No ships. No helpful glowing runway. Just black water far below and black sky above.
“We’re over the sea still,” Andrei said, voice strained. “But we’re getting close to land. I’d really rather not find the ground by accident.”
“Then please don’t,” I snapped.
He actually laughed. “Working on it.”
Minutes crawled by like hours. Andrei fought the plane—every correction, every adjustment—to get it under control. My job was simple: keep him updated before we hit anything fatal.
We continued like this for a long time, until I spotted the glowing lights of our final destination twinkling in the distance.
“There,” I said, pointing. “Dubai. That’s the Dragunov estate runway over there.”
“I see it,” Andrei rumbled, voice rough. “Hold on.”
We didn’t have time for a smooth approach. We didn’t have time for radio contact. We barely had time at all.
Andrei lowered the landing gear, and the plane groaned its displeasure.
The nose dipped too low, and he corrected it.
The wings wobbled, and he steadied them.
We found the switches to deploy the right flaps to help slow us down, but the plane didn’t like us for that, either, shaking and grumbling at us.
“Easy,” he whispered to the plane, as if coaxing a scared animal. “Come on, girl. Stay with me.”
The runway lights rushed toward us.
The wheels hit the ground hard—so hard my teeth clacked together—and the plane bounced once before slamming down again. Andrei cursed, clung to the controls with both hands, and forced the jet to stay straight.
I grabbed anything I could reach—the console, the seat, maybe even Andrei’s shirt at one point—and hit the brakes when he told me to.
The engines howled in reverse.
The plane screamed back at us.
And then…
We slowed.
We slowed some more.
We slid down the runway like a wounded beast fighting its last battle.
Finally, the jet rolled to a shaking, trembling stop, engines still whining.
Silence swept the cabin, heavy and stunned.
My hands were shaking so badly I could barely unclench them.
Andrei let out a breath that sounded half like relief, half like a man discovering he was still alive. “We’re… on the ground,” he whispered. “Are we on the ground?”
“Yes. We didn’t die,” I whispered back.
“Small victory.”
We sat there breathing in the dark cockpit, the hum of cooling engines filling the space. Then he turned to me, dried blood across his forehead and at his temple, sweat on his brow, and a crooked, exhausted smile forming on his lips.
“You saved us,” Andrei spoke with such seriousness.
I shook my head. “No. You did.”
“No.” His voice softened. “You saved us, Katya.”
I swallowed. “I didn’t do anything you couldn’t have done.”
“That’s not true.” His gaze drifted briefly to the breaker panel I had torn apart. “You ripped control of this plane out of someone else’s hands.”
“And you flew the damn thing,” I countered.
“Because you kept me steady enough to do it.”
My chest tightened dangerously.
Before I could form a response, he reached across the narrow space between our seats. His hand cupped the back of my neck, fingers sliding into my hair, warm and shaking.
“Andrei—”
He didn’t let me finish.
He pulled me forward and kissed me hard.
There was no hesitation in it. No question. His lips crashed into mine with the same force as the plane had hit the runway, except this time I didn’t brace for impact. I melted into it. The kiss was all adrenaline and gratitude and hunger and relief.
His palm slid down to my jaw, angling my face as if he needed more of me. I gripped his shirt, feeling the tense rise and fall of his chest beneath my fingers. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t careful. It was two people who’d just stared death in the face and won.
He broke away only long enough to rest his forehead against mine, breath hot, lips swollen.
“You scared the hell out of me,” he whispered.
“You scared the hell out of me,” I whispered back.
His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth, a soft contrast to the wildness of the kiss.
“You did well, princess. You did so well. I’m so proud of you.”