Dawn’s Early Light - Episode 4 - Preview

Smoke from the stalled engine and burning wings filled the cabin like a living thing, black and hungry, eating the light.

The instruments screamed. Every dial spun wrong. The altimeter unwound itself in freefall and the horizon indicator had given up pretending there was a horizon left to measure. Through the cracked canopy, the night sky above along with Kara and the Eradicator shrank into a dull disc while the dark desert floor swelled beneath them; brown and gold and absolute.

Hal's hands locked around the control stick. Knuckles white. Tendons standing out like cables. He pulled and pulled and the plane did not care. It fell the way all things fall when the math stops working in their favor.

Behind him still in the co-pilot, Abin Sur said something. Words. A voice. It didn't reach him. Nothing reached him now except the three things he could still feel with perfect clarity:

The emerald ring on his finger, warm and humming with a frequency he didn't understand.

The weight of his father's jacket around his shoulders, leather and old stitching and the ghost of cologne that hadn't been manufactured in seven years.

And the fear.

It started in his chest. Spread outward. Swallowed his lungs, his throat, his vision. The cockpit blurred. The smoke thinned into something else. The screaming instruments faded into a different kind of silence, the kind that lives inside a memory you've spent years trying not to visit.

He had been here before.

He was eight years old.

* * *

"Hal."

The voice came from somewhere outside his body. Warm. Familiar. A hand pressed against his back, broad palm and steady pressure, pulling him into an embrace that smelled like sandalwood and engine grease and Saturday mornings before the world learned how to hurt him.

"Hal, buddy. It's okay. Just breathe."

He couldn't see. His eyes were wet and his chest was hitching and his whole body felt like a fist that had been clenched too long to remember how to open.

"Just breathe."

The hand moved in slow circles between his shoulder blades. The voice stayed even. Patient. The kind of patience that didn't need anything from him except for him to come back when he was ready.

Hal breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

The world reassembled itself in pieces. First the warmth of the sun on his skin, softer now, the afternoon tilting toward evening. Then the smell of jet fuel and desert sage. Then the distant murmur of a crowd gathered beyond a chain-link fence, families and reporters and men in uniforms holding clipboards. And finally, the face in front of him.

Martin Jordan. Kneeling in the dirt. Flight suit unzipped to the sternum. Brown eyes steady and searching. Behind him, the sun was beginning its slow descent, painting the sky in shades of amber and rose.

"You with me, Highball?"

Hal's throat clicked. "Yeah, Dad."

Martin studied him. The way he always studied things, with the attention of a man who flew machines that could kill him if he missed a single detail. He saw the bravery Hal was trying to perform. He saw what it was covering.

He chose not to press.

"You sure?"

"I'm fine." Hal forced the words out flat. Steady. The voice of a kid who didn't want to be a burden on a day that was supposed to be important. "Just excited. Promise."

Martin's hand came up. Rough knuckles brushed Hal's cheek. Fingers raked gently through his hair, mussing it the way they always did when he didn't have the words but wanted Hal to know he was seen.

Then he pulled him close. Tight enough that Hal could feel his father's heartbeat through the flight suit. Slow and even. The heartbeat of a man who had made peace with gravity a long time ago.

"Okay," Martin said into the top of his head. "You wanna grab a drink with your old man before I go up?"

Highball.

The nickname hit Hal like a brick wrapped in velvet. He'd earned it the summer he turned seven, when he broke the little league home run record three games in a row. Martin had told everyone who would listen. 

My kid doesn't see ceilings. Just points his bat at the sky and swings for it every time.

This was the last day anyone would ever call him that.

Hal knew exactly where he was now. Exactly when.

The Ferris Industries experimental testing site. Seventeen miles outside Coast City. The unveiling of the XR-7 prototype, the plane that was supposed to change everything.

It did. Just not the way anyone planned.