Wednesday was a fugue state. Anya moved through her life like a ghost, haunting the hallways, her entire consciousness tethered to the silence in her inbox. She checked her email between classes. She checked it walking across the green. She checked it in the library, her leg bouncing with a nervous energy that was a new, horrible kind of fatigue.
The silence had lasted for over fifty hours. It was no longer a lack of response; it was a statement. Your work, Miss Sharma, is not worth a single one of my words.
Thursday. 4:17 PM.
She was in the library, staring at a propulsion textbook, when her phone vibrated on the table. A sudden, violent buzz that made her gasp.
Her heart stopped. It was him.
From: Singh, V. K., Major
Subject: (no subject)
Her hand shook as she tapped the notification. The email body was empty. No "Miss Sharma." No "Well done." Just an attachment.
[FIELD_DATA_RAW_S-14].zip
Anya stared at it. She had submitted her V1 failure model. He had, without comment, just sent V2. She downloaded the file. It was password-protected.
She stared at the prompt. This was the real test. She typed: PROJECT_THUNDER. Access Denied. She typed: SHARMA. Access Denied.
She sat back, her mind racing. What was the core of their interaction? What was the flaw he saw in her? She typed the word he had thrown at her like a weapon, the word that defined the problem.
FATIGUE
Access Granted.
The folder opened. It wasn't a spreadsheet. It was a single video file, taken from a cockpit-mounted camera. The timestamp was three years old.
She clicked 'Play'.
The video was chaotic. The sound was a roar of wind, stressing metal, and a high, thin screaming alarm. She saw a pilot's gloved hands fighting the control stick. She saw the ground, a blur of green, spinning too fast.
And then, the voice. Clear, panting, but utterly controlled.
"Mayday, Mayday. Structural failure. Port wing. I'm... I'm losing her."
It was younger, strained, but it was his. The screen went to static.
Anya sat frozen in the public library, surrounded by students highlighting textbooks. She was in a cockpit, three years ago, listening to a man die. Or almost die.
He hadn't just sent her data. He had sent her him.
The question burned in her chest: Why? Was it a threat? This is what happens when your math is optimistic. Or was it a plea? Find the why that the static swallowed.
She packed her bag. She didn't go to her flat. She went to the concrete bunker. The sub-basement lab was cold and empty, the fluorescent lights humming their flat, tuneless song.
She plugged in. On the left screen: her "brutal map" of failure. On the right: his crash.
She became an archaeologist of trauma. She watched it again. And again. She synced the audio files with her diagnostic software. She listened not to the alarms, but to the metal. There was a low, resonant groan seconds before the main snap.
At 04:17 AM, under the relentless lights, she found it.
It wasn't just material fatigue. In the video, at timestamp 01:34, just before the pop, the g-force gauge spiked. It was a micro-second event. A non-linear variable.
Her model churned. The "brutal map" lit up.
It wasn't a cascade; it was an execution. A single, faulty rivet. A 30-cent piece of metal, improperly installed, had created a microscopic point of heat and vibration. It was a constant, quiet hammer. The "tired" alloy of the wing didn't stand a chance.
Her "optimistic" model had assumed a clean world. He had given her the dirty one.
She annotated the file. She drew a single, sharp red line from the crash data to the failed node in her algorithm. Beside it, she wrote two words: Resonant Frequency. Rivet failure.
She saved it: PROJECT_THUNDER_V2_ANALYSIS. She did not email it. This was not a file to be sent into the silence. This was a finding to be delivered.
Friday. 07:55.
Anya stood before Room 407. She was not the same woman who had stood here last week. She was pale, her eyes shadowed, but they were still. She wore a simple ponytail, no armor. She clutched her laptop containing his ghost.
"Enter."
She pushed open the door. The room was identical. The cold light, the smell of black coffee. He was seated, uniform pristine, typing. On his desk, the old, reddish-brown leather book sat like a silent witness.
He did not look up.
"Miss Sharma," he said, his voice flat. He did not ask if she received the file. He gestured to the chair. "Your... analysis."
Anya sat. She did not open her laptop. She looked him in the eye.
"The file... S-14," she began. Her voice was low, steady. "I synced the cockpit data with the V1 failure model. Your assessment was correct. My initial model was insufficient."
She saw the barest flicker of a muscle in his jaw.
"The failure wasn't fatigue alone. That was a pre-existing condition. The trigger was a single, resonant frequency from a point-source failure. A rivet. In the port-wing joint."
The room was so quiet Anya could hear the hum of his laptop fan. She had just described the mechanics of the thing that had broken him.
He did not move. He watched her. He was a man carved from stone, but his eyes... they were no longer assessing. They were seeing. It was the stunned, sharp-edged acknowledgment of a soldier who has just seen a recruit hold her ground under fire.
Finally, Major Vikram leaned back. He broke eye contact, his gaze dropping to the old leather book. His fingers reached out and brushed the cracked spine—a movement of profound grounding.
"The report," he rasped, his voice rougher than she had ever heard it. "You will send it to me. Encrypted."
"Yes, Major."
He stood up. He walked around the desk and stopped directly in front of her, looming, enveloped in the scent of starch and cardamom.
"You are no longer 'optimistic'," he stated. It was a verdict.
"Good work, Project Thunder."
He stepped back, turning away. "Dismissed."
Anya walked out, her legs shaking so hard she barely made it down the hall. Project Thunder. He had named her.
She went back to her flat, drained. She ignored the messages from Kavya. She ignored the world. She had survived.
But the silence didn't last.
Friday. 6:58 PM.
Her laptop pinged. An email.
From: Singh, V. K., Major
Subject: URGENT - V2 ANALYSIS
Anya's blood turned to ice. It was too soon.
Miss Sharma,
Your analysis is adequate. It has, however, created a new variable.
I am in the Aeronautical sub-basement lab, B-12. Your presence is required. Now.
Adequate. The word was a slap. And he was in her lab. On a Friday night.
Anya shoved her laptop into her bag and ran. She ran across the darkening campus, fighting the tide of students heading to pubs for the weekend. She ran down the concrete steps into the bunker.
Lab B-12. The heavy fire door was propped open.
She stopped in the doorway, breathless. The lab was vast and cold, loud with the whirring of servers. He was there.
He wasn't at her small station. He was at the main console, a U-shaped bank of high-powered monitors. He wasn't in his jacket; he was in his olive-green duty shirt, sleeves rolled up, revealing sinewy forearms. He was keying commands with a speed that was almost violent.
On the workbench, a small electric hotplate boiled water. A battered metal mug sat beside it. He had colonized her space.
"You're late, Miss Sharma," he said without turning.
It was 7:06 PM.
"I ran, Major."
He turned, pivoting in a fluid motion. He looked... like her. His eyes were red-rimmed, not with emotion, but with the acidic burn of exhaustion.
"Your analysis," he said. "It's correct."
He pointed to the main screen. It wasn't her V2 model. It was a scatter-plot. Thousands of green dots. And a dozen sharp, red ones.
"I took your rivet-frequency calculation," he said, his voice low and intense. "I ran it against the entire active fleet's maintenance logs."
Anya's bag dropped to the floor.
"The green dots are the ones without the faulty rivet batch," she whispered.
"Correct. And the red... are the ones that have it. The ones built with the same hammer. The ones that are... tired."
He hit a key. The red dots zoomed in. Each one was a plane. A designation. A crew.
"Your V2 analysis didn't solve the problem, Miss Sharma. It escalated it. My crash... was a preview."
He looked at her, and his eyes were burning. "I need a prognosis. I need to know which of them fail first."
He looked over his shoulder, pinning her to the floor. "I need you to run your model—your Project Thunder—against every single one of those red dots. I need a timeline. I need to know who."
He was asking her to ground an entire fleet. He was asking her to save them.
"My... my laptop is insufficient," she whispered.
"I know."
He gestured to the simulation console directly next to his.
"Your station, Project Thunder."
It was not a question. It was an assignment. He was plugging her in.
Anya looked at the empty black chair next to him. She looked at his back, already turned, already working. She was "classified." She was scared. And she had never felt so seen.
She dropped her bag and sat down. The roar of the servers swallowed them both.
The work began.
Anya and the Major are locked in a race against time.
But as the night wears on, the lines between officer and asset begin to blur.
What happens when the walls of the fortress crack?
Find out in Chapter 4...