Chapter 2: “The Silver Wreck”

  Scene 1: Exploration

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  The hangar felt even larger at night.

  Ren’s boots clicked softly against the cracked tile floor as he stepped deeper into the dark. The moonlight only reached so far, slipping through broken panes high above. Beyond that, the room was shadows and echoes. The kind of silence that knew how to keep secrets.

  He pulled a stubby crystal lantern from his jacket pocket. The base was scorched, the switch a little finicky, but when he twisted the igniter, a faint tkk-tkk-tkk gave way to a low hum, and a cool glow bloomed outward — pale blue, like frost caught in glass.

  The airship loomed ahead: skeletal, stripped of its skin in places, exposed piping looping out like severed veins. He moved toward it with care, brushing aside hanging cables and brittle strips of insulation as he went.

  It wasn’t just one ship in here.

  Parts lay strewn across makeshift workbenches. Propeller blades — cracked and splintered. Crystal housing rigs — scorched and half-welded. A shattered gauge cluster was still bolted to a curved beam that had once been the dorsal spine of something… fast.

  But the centerpiece was clearly the one.

  The ship. His ship.

  The Silver Dart.

  Ren ran the light over the forward console. The instrumentation panel had been sheared in half. Dust coated everything — except for one spot on the left edge where a hand-sized section had been recently wiped clean. His own doing. Last night.

  He knelt beside the cockpit floor, the wood beneath his knee giving a soft creak. The side wall had been marked with faint engraving — almost gone, but not quite. A logo: three feathers curling around a stylized number: 9.

  Beneath it, tucked behind a warped support strut, was a metal tube canister about the size of a rolled-up blueprint. He twisted the latch and slid it free.

  It hissed.

  Inside: four long parchment scrolls, edges browned with age but remarkably intact.

  He unrolled one across the nearest bench and held the lantern low.

  A schematic.

  No… a blueprint. Hand-drawn in black and red ink, annotated with old-school pilot shorthand. Diagrams of the hull, crystal conduit flow, temperature regulation valves, propeller gear channels…

  And scrawled diagonally across the bottom margin:

  “Project Featherstream — Rev. 6 — For Testing Only”

  He leaned closer. The ratios were strange. The numbers didn’t make sense.

  3 → 6 → 9.

  Again and again, like a key turning through locks:

  Expansion factors. Pressure drop curves. Lift-to-burn modulation notes in tight scribbles:

  “3cc crystal solid → 1800cc gas = 9x LH lift”

  “Stability drop @ 29.2°C = core resonance threshold?”

  He blinked.

  It was a whole language. A coded system of design based not just on combustion or lift… but on rhythm. On flow.

  It wasn’t just a machine.

  It was a theory.

  He looked down at the other scrolls — blueprints for the central bag stabilization chamber, twin drive system mods, and one partial diagram labeled ‘Prototype Control Loop Delay Suppression — Experimental’. All of it built on the same framework: the logic of 3, 6, and 9.

  Something between instinct and awe started curling inside his chest.

  He whispered it aloud, tasting the shape of it:

  “…Featherstream.”

  Scene 2: Found Object

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  The air inside the hangar had shifted.

  Ren could feel it — not in temperature or weight, but in the way it moved. Slower. Like the space itself was holding its breath.

  He rolled up the blueprints and returned them to their canister with deliberate care. The old paper crackled softly under his fingers. Then he stood and turned his light back toward the hull of the Silver Dart.

  Most of the frame was stripped bare — jagged welds and corrosion eating through the belly panel, copper vein conduits snapped like ribs under stress. But as he swept the lantern along the inner wall, something flickered back at him.

  A faint shimmer — not quite a reflection.

  He crouched beside the starboard engine housing. A large inspection plate hung loose, its bolts rusted and partially sheared. Carefully, he braced his foot against the lower rail and tugged.

  Clnk — the plate gave with a pop of ancient pressure.

  Inside the narrow cavity was a tangle of tubing and burnt insulation… and tucked deep behind a fractured coolant line, half-lodged in a compartment clearly not designed for it, was something smooth and pale.

  Ren reached in, gently.

  It came free with surprising ease — warm, like it had been absorbing the heat of the air around it.

  A crystal shard.

  Palm-sized. Oblong. Faceted but worn. Its edges had softened over time, like sea-glass — except this shimmered faintly from within, pulsing in slow, shallow waves.

  Ren turned off his lantern.

  The hangar went dark.

  But the shard still glowed — just enough to reveal the edges of his fingers, the lines of his palm, and the faintest trace of blue light radiating outward into the shadows.

  The hum wasn’t audible, but he felt it.

  A vibration. Subtle. Rhythmic.

  Three… Six… Nine…

  He couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t rationalize it. But his fingertips tingled as he turned it over, and something inside him tightened — a knot he hadn’t even known was there.

  It wasn’t just a power source.

  It was… alive.

  And it had been waiting.

  He slipped the shard into his coat pocket, pressed the inspection plate gently closed, and stepped back from the Dart. Just far enough to see the full silhouette of the ship’s ruined body lit faintly in that strange, crystalline glow.

  He didn’t smile.

  Not yet.

  But his heart was beating harder than it had all week.

  Scene 3: Flashback/Overlay

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  The moment Ren closed his hand around the crystal shard, something shifted behind his eyes.

  Not a headache. Not dizziness.

  A sensation—like wind pressing in on both ears, thin and high and fast.

  He staggered back instinctively, his heel catching the edge of a broken strut. His hand hit the cold floor of the hangar to catch himself—but he didn’t feel the floor.

  He felt sky.

  Wind roared past his ears. Not imaginary. Not metaphorical. Actual wind—cutting, high-altitude, carrier-grade airflow that howled around the frame of a ship moving far too fast for its size. His vision didn’t black out. It brightened—washed in late-afternoon sunlight burning across copper-plated wings, the curvature of a gasbag taut above him.

  Ren wasn't seeing it through memory.

  He was inside it.

  The controls were older—cable-fed, hand-levered pitch throttles—reacting just fast enough to keep the roll stable. The Silver Dart, intact and blazing through a wide-spiral dive, chased a set of floating race markers across a wide, sun-drenched valley. A second ship, bright crimson, flanked just behind the Dart's port side.

  The pilot’s hands—not his—tightened on the yoke. Strong hands. Scarred. Familiar.

  A voice—low, gravel-edged, and 40 years younger—shouted over the wind.

  “Featherstream active—she’s holding! Gimme more on the rear prop—we're light on left thrust!”

  Then—

  The light flared. A scream of steam.

  A sound like splitting glass and tearing metal.

  The left drive spun out, fire trailing from a coolant line. A burst of blue—

  Then nothing.

  Ren jolted back into himself, breathing hard, his forehead damp with cold sweat.

  He was kneeling in the hangar again. The crystal shard glowed faintly from his open palm. The air was still.

  His heart raced.

  Not a dream. Not a memory.

  Residual crystal impression?

  Feedback from a stored energy state?

  Trauma echo?

  His mind reached for science while his body tried to remember how to breathe.

  His grandfather’s voice echoed back from the vision.

  And the word he’d said — the year.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  “We don’t talk about ’61.”

  Scene 4: Intro to Aircrystal Science & Properties

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  The classroom was unusually quiet for a morning science period. Not solemn, just… focused. A few students were still hunched over toast from the dining hall, chewing sleepily, while others copied down formulas from the brass-framed chalkboard at the front.

  Ren sat near the middle, propped slightly sideways with his elbow resting on the side rail of his desk. His eyes kept drifting to the crystal shard in his coat pocket — now wrapped in a piece of handkerchief cloth, tucked deep beneath his notes.

  He hadn’t told anyone. Not even Jiro. Not yet.

  Up front, Shiraishi-sensei adjusted her goggles and drew three nested circles on the board in clean, precise strokes. She spoke with her usual calm cadence, the kind that demanded attention without raising her voice.

  “Today’s topic: the Aircrystal Phase Principle and its three core properties — solid, liquid, and gas — and how they relate to the 3-6-9 expansion ratio.”

  Ren blinked.

  Three. Six. Nine.

  He sat up a little straighter.

  Shiraishi tapped the innermost circle. “The crystal, in its natural state, is a compact, room-temperature solid — inert and stable. Roughly the size of a fingertip to a closed fist. Odorless. Colorless. Harder than quartz, but more brittle when stressed.”

  She drew an arrow outward. “With the application of low-intensity, consistent heat — around 28 to 32 degrees Celsius — the crystalline bonds begin to loosen. The material shifts into a liquid state, expanding to roughly 600 times its original volume.”

  The girl to Ren’s left — tall, crisp uniform, silver pen tapping in perfect rhythm — raised her hand without hesitation.

  “Correction, Sensei,” Rin said. “If the ambient pressure is below one standard atmosphere, the expansion reaches 630x. At sea level, yes — 600x. But not at altitude.”

  Shiraishi paused. “Noted. Continue.”

  Ren watched her. No notes. No hesitation.

  She doesn’t memorize it. She understands it.

  Shiraishi moved to the outer ring. “When exposed to combustion — direct ignition or high-energy spark — the liquid vaporizes instantly into a pressurized gas, expanding up to 9,000 times its original solid volume, and producing a lift mass nine times lighter than helium.”

  A hand in the back raised. Jiro. “How do you bottle something like that without turning it into a bomb?”

  Shiraishi nodded. “Carefully. Through reinforced ceramic tanks with external phase jackets. Cooling coils prevent uncontrolled gas rise.”

  Another student muttered, “I heard one tank went off during testing and sent a chicken coop into orbit.”

  Ren leaned forward, absently doodling concentric rings on the edge of his paper. “But… if the crystal starts as a solid and ends up as gas… isn’t the liquid just a transitional state?”

  He didn’t mean to speak aloud.

  But the room went quiet.

  Shiraishi turned. “Repeat that, Kisaragi?”

  He glanced up, realizing far too late that everyone was now staring.

  “I… I mean, if you heat it and it expands at each stage, but the liquid isn’t the final use case — just the step before ignition — then wouldn’t the system efficiency depend on how quickly you pass through the liquid phase? Like how long it takes the engine to bypass thermal latency?”

  A pause.

  Shiraishi slowly lowered her chalk. “That’s… not a common observation from a second-year student.”

  Ren opened his mouth. Then closed it.

  Rin turned her head slightly, watching him now.

  Shiraishi moved back to the board. “We’ll discuss transition phase latency next week. For now, copy down the diagram and read the case study from the Onzen Caverns discovery — thirty years ago, to the day.”

  As chalk scraped the board, Ren exhaled and leaned back. He could still feel the crystal pressing lightly against his ribs, radiating a cool, quiet thrum.

  He didn’t understand everything.

  But he was starting to understand something.

  Scene 5: Grandpa Appears

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  By late afternoon, the sun had slouched low over Hinode Academy, casting long copper shadows across the field behind the dorms. Most students had filtered off to club activities or evening drills. The sky smelled faintly of engine oil and the budding cherry trees near the northern wall.

  Ren walked the overgrown path to Hangar 7 with purpose.

  He hadn’t stopped thinking about the crystal. Or the schematics. Or the memory—vision—whatever that thing was the night before. His brain had been spinning through equations all class, even when he pretended to take notes.

  When he reached the door, he didn’t hesitate. The padlock was where he left it—unlatched, looped loosely like a polite warning. He pulled the chain free and stepped inside.

  The light had changed. The interior felt less haunted now, like the ship inside was slowly realizing it had company again.

  He crossed the hangar floor toward the Silver Dart’s skeletal form, set the lantern on the bench, and carefully unrolled the scrolls again. His hands moved without thinking—tracing wire paths, pressure conduits, and feed loops with a mechanic’s instinct.

  He was already sketching potential mods on the back of an old test sheet when the overhead vent gave a creaky squawk, followed by the unmistakable clunk of a heavy boot.

  Ren jumped.

  A shadow moved across the far wall. Then:

  “Didn’t I say if you’re gonna rummage through the wreckage,” came a familiar voice, “you might as well do it right?”

  Ren spun around.

  Grandpa Goro stood in the doorway, sleeves rolled, wrench slung over his shoulder like a war banner. His leather tool apron was stained with decades of mechanical sins, and his smile was pure mischief.

  Ren blinked. “You followed me?”

  “Please. You think I didn’t clock where your boots tracked in the dust yesterday?” Goro tossed a rusted red toolbox with a heavy clunk onto the nearest bench. “You left a trail clear as a leaky steam valve. That’s your mother’s walk. Always too focused on where she’s going to notice where she’s been.”

  Ren stepped aside as the old man pulled a cracked stool out from under the wing and sat down, popping open the toolbox. Inside: a mix of old crystal clamps, coiled copper wiring, and hand-forged gear pulleys—stuff you couldn’t find in the main hangar anymore.

  “You flew this,” Ren said, quietly. “Didn’t you?”

  Goro didn’t answer right away. Just picked up a file and began cleaning the rust from a gear.

  “It lived,” he said finally. “Briefly.”

  Ren looked over at the battered control cluster. “It could again.”

  Goro paused. Looked up.

  “Then here’s the deal, hotshot: If it flies, it lives. You pull it out of this grave, and she’s yours.”

  Ren’s throat dried. “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch,” Grandpa said. “Just don’t die trying.”

  He stood, cracking his back with a wince. “Oh, and clean the carb filter before you try to ignite anything. That’s not a challenge. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

  With that, he started back toward the door.

  “But wait—why’d you leave it? What happened in ‘61?”

  Goro didn’t turn around.

  “Ask me again when she flies.”

  The door creaked shut behind him.

  Ren looked down at the toolset, then at the ship.

  If it flies, it lives.

  Challenge accepted.

  Scene 6: Enter Hana

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  The light outside had dipped into that soft, golden hour where metal looked warm and shadows stretched like lazy cats. Inside the hangar, Ren had rolled up his sleeves, his school jacket tossed over a nearby bench. The lantern’s glow pooled over the wing strut he was working on, casting everything in pale blue and flickering amber.

  He was elbow-deep in a pressure relay valve that hadn't been touched since the early days of Japan's crystal racing scene. The whole thing was gunked with carbon scoring and seized crystal residue. His hands were covered in grime and confidence.

  “Come on,” he muttered. “I know you're not fused shut. You're just being dramatic.”

  The valve assembly snapped free with a sudden pop.

  At that exact moment—

  A clatter echoed from the far end of the hangar.

  Ren whipped around, holding the valve like a makeshift weapon.

  A small brass pressure gauge rolled across the floor, ticking and spinning until it bumped gently against his boot.

  A pair of boots followed it.

  “Ah—found you,” said a soft, distracted voice.

  Hana Minase stood in the open doorway, arms full of spare fittings, her goggles crooked on her forehead and her expression one part curious, one part startled deer.

  She looked at the valve. Then at Ren. Then at the exposed skeleton of the Silver Dart behind him.

  Her eyes widened, just a little.

  “That’s not junk,” she said quietly.

  She stepped forward, slowly, like she was walking into a memory.

  “That’s a ship.”

  Ren blinked. “You're—uh—you’re the girl from science class.”

  Hana nodded, her gaze already scanning the struts and piping. “You asked about thermal latency curve transitions. You were wrong about the upper coefficient. But… right about the flow logic.”

  “Thanks?” he offered.

  She walked right past him to the Dart, reaching out without hesitation to touch the hull plating near the conduit spine.

  “This isn’t factory,” she said. “These mods… someone rebuilt this to channel fluid crystal through a dual-phase buffer. That’s—impossible. But it’s here.”

  Ren cleared his throat. “Uh, not that I mind the sudden inspection, but… what exactly are you doing here?”

  “Oh.” Hana blinked. “I was chasing a broken gauge.”

  Ren gestured toward her boots. “You mean this broken gauge?”

  She glanced down.

  “Oh,” she said again.

  The silence hung between them for a second too long. Then Hana noticed the toolbox.

  Her voice dropped. “This isn’t a club ship. This is… personal.”

  Ren hesitated. Then nodded.

  She turned to him fully, for the first time. “Are you rebuilding it?”

  “I’m… trying,” Ren said, suddenly aware of how sweaty and dirty he looked.

  A small smile ghosted across her lips. “I’d like to help.”

  Ren froze.

  “Oh—uh—really? I mean—uh—sure. I guess. If you want to.”

  Her hand twitched upward like she meant to offer a shake, but halfway up, she seemed to reconsider, and it became more of an awkward salute before retreating into her coat pocket.

  Ren rubbed the back of his neck. “I'm Ren.”

  “I know,” Hana said, cheeks slightly pink. “Everyone knows.”

  Scene 7: Workshop Vibes

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  By the time the sun had fully set, the hangar had transformed.

  Lanterns hung from rusted hooks and makeshift clamps, casting pools of pale light across every bench and beam. The shadows danced across the Dart’s exposed hull, flickering over twisted copper veins and ghostly conduit paths.

  Ren sat on an overturned crate, tools scattered in a half-organized halo around him. Hana knelt nearby, one knee tucked under her, scribbling notes and equations on the back of a blueprint with alarming speed and terrifying precision.

  She hadn’t stopped talking for five straight minutes.

  “See, if you reroute the crystal injector to bypass the phase-loop regulator, it might reduce the thermal drag — assuming the pressure envelope doesn’t rupture — but then you’re back to the intake bottleneck on the exhaust loop unless—”

  “Hana.”

  She looked up, mid-equation. “Yes?”

  “Breathe.”

  She blinked. “Right.”

  Ren leaned back against the fuselage and exhaled. His muscles ached, and he was pretty sure he’d permanently blackened three fingers with oxidized grease, but it was the best kind of tired. The kind that meant something had started.

  He glanced at her notes. “I don’t understand half of that.”

  Hana tilted her head. “But you rewired the conduit lattice to pull energy from the secondary loop. That’s… not in any textbook.”

  “I just did what felt right,” Ren said, shrugging. “The flow was jammed. It needed room to breathe.”

  “You think like an engineer,” she said.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I’m not. Just… not used to that kind of thinking coming from someone who doesn’t carry fourteen rulers in their bag.”

  Ren smiled. “Do you?”

  “Fifteen,” she said flatly.

  Their eyes met. She looked away first, quickly burying her face in the schematics again.

  Footsteps echoed from the hangar door.

  They both turned.

  Grandpa Goro strolled in, carrying something wrapped in a canvas cloth. He stopped just short of the workbench and dropped it with a thud between them.

  “Little something for the ambitious,” he said.

  Ren opened the cloth slowly.

  Inside was a crystal core housing — heavy-duty, polished metal casing with copper contacts and an empty circular chamber at the center. Faint serial markings along the base read:

  Flight Unit: G-Goro – 03

  He stared. “This was yours.”

  “Pulled it out of the old badge when they retired me,” Goro said. “Figured one of you might as well make use of it before it corrodes into a paperweight.”

  Ren ran his thumb along the outer rim. It still had weight to it. A kind of memory.

  Hana reached out reverently, her voice soft. “This could stabilize the entire lower lift chain. We’d just need to pair it with a resonant crystal to—”

  Ren pulled the wrapped shard from his coat pocket.

  Hana stared.

  The faint blue glow pulsed in perfect rhythm with the empty core in front of them.

  Grandpa nodded once. “Well then.”

  No ceremony. No lecture.

  Just three people in a forgotten hangar, quietly realizing they’d just reignited something that hadn’t stirred in decades.

  Scene 8: Final Shot

  —-: Ren Kisaragi

  The hangar was silent again.

  Not empty — not at all — but held in that electric stillness that only comes when something sacred is about to happen. The lanterns burned low, casting slow, deliberate shadows over the Silver Dart's bare bones. The dust no longer felt oppressive. It felt suspended.

  Ren held the crystal shard in one hand, the old core housing in the other. His palms were slick. His pulse was fast. He knew this was just a test fitting — nothing powered, nothing dangerous — but it felt like something more.

  Like a first breath.

  He knelt next to the Dart’s intake manifold, where the central liftline met the auxiliary stabilization feed — the very spot Grandpa had reworked for a dual-phase hybrid back when people still called it “mad science.”

  The core casing clicked into place with a soft metallic clink. It fit the housing bracket like it had never been removed — just… waiting.

  Hana stood off to his left, quiet for once, hands clasped behind her back. Even Goro said nothing — just leaned against a post in the shadows, arms folded, eyes watching with that unreadable look that hid too much history.

  Ren brought the shard closer.

  The glow brightened in slow pulses as it neared the core — like it recognized its destination. The humming returned, deeper this time, resonating not just through his fingers but up into his wrist, into his chest.

  He held his breath.

  Then, carefully, he slotted the shard into place.

  Click.

  A sharp whirr echoed up the conduit. Then silence.

  Then — a pulse.

  A sudden flicker of light arced through the internal tubing, racing down crystal veins long thought dead. The exposed pipes glowed faint blue in delicate lines, lighting up the ship’s framework like stars rejoining a forgotten constellation.

  The nameplate — once dull and dusted with age — shimmered.

  Letters that had been nearly invisible came alive beneath the glow.

  The Silver Dart

  Ren sat back on his heels.

  No dramatic surge. No roaring ignition.

  Just a whisper of life returning to steel. A heartbeat.

  “I think…” he said softly, “it remembers.”