Bonus Chapter: "Eclipse Protocol"

  Scene 1: The Glitch

  —-: Mei

  The walls flickered in pale cobalt, stuttering on the edge of flicker and failure. Mei sat hunched forward in the sim chair, sleeves rolled to the elbow, her pale fingers clenched around the controls like they were a lifeline.

  Onscreen: clouds. Crosswinds. 3 seconds to impact.

  The sim cockpit vibrated with ambient tremor, a low whine winding toward redline. Every element of the race replay was old data—three years, two months, sixteen days old. The day she had burned through the sky… and lost him.

  “Stabilizers down. Vector deviation +3.4. Pilot—”

  skkkkRRtCHh—BOOM.

  The audio glitched. It always glitched.

  It always glitched right there.

  Her hands tightened.

  She could rerun the sim a hundred times. Had, in fact. But the core failure was always the same: too much pressure on the port crystal relay. A 0.06 second delay between pivot and pull. Akio had laughed it off when she first warned him. Smiled like he could outfly math.

  Then the drift came. The spiral. The silence.

  “Restart.” Her voice cracked in the dark.

  The program whirred.

  And it began again.

  This time she tried overcompensating the thrust correction five seconds early. The Dart—no, not the Dart, the old ship, the one that doesn’t exist anymore, stop thinking of it like it’s still alive—angled too soon. The visual data blurred. Smoke trails. A scream.

  No.

  Her scream.

  Mei ripped the headset off, breath short and face damp. She blinked at the sheen on her cheeks, reached up to touch it, and stared like it didn’t belong to her.

  In the corner of the darkened room, the monitor flickered with corrupted coordinates. Her own old design file still open.

  She whispered to herself, “If I had just recalibrated the margin… If I’d shared the overflow estimates—”

  A high-pitched chirp broke the spiral. Her datapad buzzed.

  Message from Rin:

  “You left your jacket in the hangar. Don’t freeze up. I mean that literally.”

  Mei didn’t smile. Not exactly. But something inside her chest moved.

  She tapped the message closed and whispered to the screen, “I didn’t fly today. But I’ll make sure they can.”

  Her gaze dropped to the notes on her lap—handwritten equations, all scribbled over with one repeated phrase in tiny, neat strokes:

  “Predict everything. Or lose everyone.”

  She hit delete.

  Scene 2: Margin of Error

  —-: Mei

  The soft whir of her datapad echoed louder than it should in the stillness.

  Mei sat cross-legged beneath the Dart’s chassis, steam drifting upward like ghosts whispering from the bolts. The gearbox above her gleamed with new plating—Rin’s last-minute reinforcement. It was smart. Intuitive. But it was off by half a degree. Enough to matter at 7,000 rpm.

  Her stylus hovered above the schematic, uncertain.

  She could fix it. She should fix it.

  But if she did… they'd ask how she knew. And she'd have to explain. Again.

  Not just the math, but the feeling. The part that never fit into lines or numbers.

  She'd tried once. With Akio.

  He listened, grinned, and flew like rules didn’t apply. Until they did.

  Now the others looked to her for calculations. But not for leadership. Never for trust.

  She let them. It was safer that way.

  Mei minimized the highlighted correction and stored the real data under a locked subfolder. Labeled it with a fake time stamp.

  Then she uploaded a simplified version to the team server — stripped of redundancies, flattened for ease.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Safe.

  Not right.

  But safe.

  She slid out from under the Dart just as morning light breached the fog. The sun hit the nose of the airship like a spotlight on a stage she wasn’t ready to stand on.

  Behind her, footfalls clicked.

  “Hey, you’re up early.”

  It was Hana — hair still sleep-mussed, goggles around her neck. She dropped into a squat beside Mei, rubbing her eyes. “Working on anything top secret?”

  Mei hesitated. “Just… cleaning code.”

  Hana yawned, stood, and stretched. “You’re the only person I know who makes code sound like therapy.”

  She said it as a joke.

  But Mei couldn’t laugh.

  Instead, she watched the sun flicker on the Dart’s hull and whispered to no one, “I’m not hiding. I’m… protecting them.”

  Even if it meant lying.

  Scene 3: Mirrors Don’t Lie

  —-: Mei

  The simulator dome cast long shadows over the grass, its outer plating hissing with residual heat. Mei stood behind the perimeter tape, arms folded, watching a projected version of herself spiral out of control again.

  The sim didn’t crash.

  She did.

  In the holographic display, the same pattern looped: perfect start, calibrated turns, acceleration into the canyon straits—and then a thermal bloom that pulled the right wing up too sharply.

  A flutter. A wobble.

  Then static.

  Her own voice on the intercom glitched into a distorted shriek.

  “Akio, adjust throttle! You’re—”

  —[error—error—error]

  —“Mayday. Mayday.”

  Mei closed the sim with a sharp flick of her wrist. Her hand trembled.

  Behind her, gravel crunched.

  “You fly better alone?”

  Rin’s voice. Quiet. Not cold. Not warm, either. Just… there.

  Mei didn’t turn. “I’m not flying.”

  “You’re still sweating like you are.”

  Silence stretched.

  “I wasn’t watching you,” Rin added. “I was walking. But… I stayed.”

  Mei finally looked at her. Rin stood with her jacket halfway zipped, goggles hanging loose, and arms crossed like she was keeping something in. Or keeping something out.

  “You didn’t flinch during the race,” Mei said.

  “I was too angry to be scared.”

  Mei nodded, eyes distant. “That’s a strategy.”

  Rin tilted her head. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  Mei said nothing. Then softly:

  “I’m always scared.”

  The wind shifted, blowing the simulation’s final vapor trail sideways like a ghost tail.

  “I calculate everything,” Mei murmured. “Every draft, every point of drag, every failure mode. Because if I don’t—someone gets hurt.”

  Rin leaned back slightly. “You think the rest of us don’t worry about that too?”

  “No,” Mei whispered. “I think you trust the wind. I don’t.”

  Another long silence.

  Then Rin, softly:

  “My mom used to say… flying isn’t about control. It’s about conversation. You don’t tame the wind. You just ask it to dance.”

  Mei’s lips twitched—almost a smile.

  Rin shrugged, stepping away. “Maybe you should ask once.”

  And just like that, she left.

  No lecture. No demand. No judgment.

  Just a seed dropped, silent and weightless, into the chaos of Mei’s thoughts.

  Scene 4: Predict Everything. Or Lose Everyone.

  —-: Mei

  The charts were bleeding again.

  Ink pooled in the margins of Mei’s notes, spreading like bruises across careful diagrams. Overlapping flight paths, thermal columns, ring rotations — everything plotted, everything cross-checked.

  Except this time, the pen in her hand wouldn’t stop shaking.

  She’d been up for hours. No one else stirred. The dorm’s soft, rhythmic creaks played backup to the mechanical tick of her timing crystal.

  Predict everything.

  That was the first law of survival in a cockpit.

  Or lose everyone.

  She stared at the top of the page. At the title she always wrote when she recalculated: “ECLIPSE PROTOCOL.”

  The same words she’d scrawled the night before Akio’s crash.

  She remembered how proud he’d looked, wearing her math like armor.

  And how wrong it all went.

  Mei gritted her teeth. Her gaze locked on the heading again. This time, she picked up the pen—and scribbled over it, hard. Until the words vanished beneath angry crosshatching.

  Something hot swelled behind her ribs. Guilt. Rage. Grief. They tangled in her throat like wire.

  She shoved her notebook off the desk.

  It landed facedown with a soft whump. Pages spilled out — every line, every flight route she’d hidden from the team since the Kyokuto visit.

  She’d been holding back.

  Mei slowly dropped to her knees, fingertips brushing one of the maps.

  A deep draft tunnel under the left cliffside—high risk, low visibility, but if angled with the new stabilizer tuning, it could cut six seconds off a standard route.

  She hadn’t shown it to anyone.

  Not because it wasn’t good.

  Because if something went wrong again, and someone crashed—

  “I can’t be the reason they fall,” she whispered into the shadows.

  But she heard Rin’s voice from earlier, echoing in her skull:

  “You don’t tame the wind. You just ask it to dance.”

  Mei shut her eyes tight.

  And for the first time in over a year… she let the silence answer.

  Then she stood.

  Gathered every one of her hidden diagrams, routes, and fail-state maps. Folded them neatly. And carried them down the dark hall.

  To the one person reckless enough to trust her worst fears.

  Scene 5: She Gave Him the Real Maps

  —-: Mei

  Ren was asleep on the wing again.

  Curled like a cat atop the cooling coil of the Dart, a wrench still in one hand, grease smudged under his cheek. He snored like an old coal kettle — soft and oddly comforting.

  Mei stood at the base of the wing ramp, holding the maps like they weighed more than they should.

  The ones she hadn’t given him before.

  The real ones.

  The ones that scared her.

  Her boots echoed faintly as she stepped onto the metal platform. She stopped beside him and stared down, lips pressed into a flat line.

  She could just… leave them.

  Slip the folder into the toolkit beside him and vanish. He’d find them eventually. Maybe he’d use them. Maybe not.

  No risk.

  No trust.

  No heart.

  Mei’s grip tightened. Then she reached out — and flicked his forehead with two fingers.

  Ren startled awake like he'd been launched by steam pressure. “Wha—?! The engine didn’t explode, did it?!”

  Mei shoved the folder into his chest before he could sit up. “Maps. Use them.”

  He blinked. “Wait, what?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He opened the folder anyway.

  Flight overlays. Dynamic heat drift charts. Secondary escape paths for every checkpoint. A shortcut she hadn’t told anyone about — labeled simply: “If we’re desperate.”

  Ren looked up at her, eyes wide and completely awake now.

  “These are yours?”

  She nodded once.

  “You trust me with these?”

  “…I trust the team,” she said quickly. Then paused. “And you’re piloting it.”

  He grinned. “That sounded dangerously close to a compliment.”

  “It’s not. Don’t let it go to your head.”

  “Too late.”

  She stared at him — messy-haired, soot-smudged, undaunted.

  And for the first time, it didn’t terrify her to imagine him using her routes.

  She sat beside him, not saying another word. They watched the light creep up the hangar walls, soft and gold, catching on the Dart’s rivets like stars that had come home.

  Mei didn’t need to control everything.

  Just enough to keep flying.

  And this time, maybe that was enough.