At 14,000 feet, the storm found them.
It hadn't been on the forecast when the flight departed: a fast-moving cell that had developed and tracked north faster than the models predicted—the kind of weather that reminded everyone in aviation that the atmosphere did not read weather reports.
The turbulence came first: light and then moderate, rattling the cabin and pushing the aircraft left and right of heading in movements that Zariah had to correct for continuously.
Then the radio began breaking up.
"7702, say again your... static... altitude, over."
"14,000, say again you're broken—"
"Copy 14... static... maintain... we're losing you, stand by—"
And then Reeves was gone: static wall, full frequency, nothing coming through.
She looked at the navigation display: she had her position; she had her heading; she had the chart information Reeves had given her before the interference; and she had the training in her head that her father had put there across hundreds of hours of instruction, most of which she'd absorbed so completely that it no longer felt like something she'd learned—it just felt like something she knew.
She could fly without the radio; she'd done it in simulation. Communications failure scenarios were standard emergency training: you maintain the last assigned heading, squawk 7600 on the transponder to indicate radio failure, keep flying toward the destination. ATC would know what the squawk meant; they'd expect her.
She reached up and set the transponder. "Storm interference," she said to Warren. "I've lost radio contact. I'm setting 7600. We maintain 240 and keep our altitude profile. Reeves knows where we are."
Warren was watching the engine instruments. "Left engine just dropped to 71."
She absorbed that: 71% N2 was still within the range where the engine was producing useful thrust, but the trendline wasn't good. If it kept declining at the current rate, she was looking at possible flameout in—she ran the mental calculation—somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes, depending on what was driving the degradation.
"Is it a fuel issue or an internal fault?" she asked.