Page 116 of Aviatrix

“And the daughter?” Gary asks.

“Maude,” Thea says. “Died eighteen years ago, at eighteen. There’s an obituary, but no medical records. No cause of death listed.”

“Eighteen,” I echo quietly, a chill brushing the back of my neck.

The Legion was formed eighteen years ago. VAL was last flown around that same time. And that’s when Maude, Walker’s daughter, died?

Too many pieces. Too close together. That’s not coincidence. That’s a pattern.

“What?” Thea looks at me.

“Walker—Calvin—said the Legion started eighteen years ago,” I say slowly. “His daughter died that same year.” I glance around the table. “That’s not nothing.”

“No,” Scooter agrees. “It all has to be connected.”

Gary nods, then motions for Thea to continue.

She presses on. “He claims he was abducted by aliens. There’s documentation—some kind of formal record—saying he started to mentally decline seven years ago. He said a white light pulled him into their ship.”

“There’s no way that documentation survived,” I say.

“It didn’t,” Thea admits. “What little is left either slipped through or was redacted. He was honorably discharged,” she adds. “Named Colonel Jones as his successor. At his own request.”

I frown. That doesn’t track. He gets abducted, unravels mentally, but still has the clarity to name his own replacement? I file that detail away.

Gary looks around the room. “Anything else?”

Thea shakes her head. “That’s it. For now.”

Gary exhales, jaw tight. “Now, onto our final topic.” His expression shifts, worry etched into every line of his face. “The transmission from the desert base.”

I force another bite of waffle. It turns to paste in my mouth. I swallow hard, but my stomach rolls the second it lands.

“What transmission?” Thea asks, already sitting straighter.

“The one we sent Nova in California,” Scooter answers.

“We decoded some of the encrypted data from Langdon,” Gary says.

I inhale sharply. “Wait, really?” My fork freezes mid-air. “How?”

Gary waves the question off. “That’s not important.”

Translation: Classified.

“But what we found…” He pauses, then continues, “It’s troubling. The aliens were searching for someone connected to Colonel Jones.”

“How do we know that?” Thea asks.

“They hacked the system on multiple occasions and left breadcrumbs behind.” Gary sighs, like he can’t believe we didn’t catch on. “Each time, they focused on locating the Colonel, and then branching out to his contacts from there.”

My appetite vanishes completely. The aliens made it clear when they found me in the control tower at Langdon that they’d been looking for me. They knew me by name. Knew my location. They must have known of my connection to Lark. Lark was the hub, but I was the thread they wanted most.

How long have they been watching me?

“We thought it was Amber at first,” Scooter adds context. “Despite what Nova heard in that control tower, we believed Amber was the original target, particularly after the White House strike seemed to align with her location.”

The pieces click into place with horrifying clarity.