Chapter Text
Private Jet – 36,000 Feet – Over the Pacific – 14:43 GMT
It should’ve been smooth.
Private jet. Controlled flight plan. Handpicked crew. No turbulence forecasted.
Everything about the trip was Mycroft Holmes distilled: clinical, secure, and offensively expensive.
The seat leather hadn’t even creased yet.
Enola Holmes sat sideways across two of them, barefoot and bored, her head tilted back so the cabin light caught the edge of her hair. A book lay open on her lap—some dense translation of Sun Tzu, annotated in three different colours—but she wasn’t reading. Her eyes were on the rivets in the ceiling. Counting them.
Something was off.
Not obvious. Not immediate. Just… off.
It was the kind of feeling she trusted. A tremor in the gut. A minor tightness behind the eyes. The silence in her brain wasn’t the usual peaceful hum of calculation—it was waiting.
“Did you check the flight crew yourself?” she asked without turning.
Mycroft looked up from his tablet, slow and deliberate. “Obviously.”
“Like—background check? Psychological profile? Blood type? You’ve made me do worse for groceries.”
He sighed. “You’re being paranoid.”
“You say that like it’s a flaw.”
She sat up and glanced toward the front of the cabin. The cockpit door was closed. It had been closed for over an hour.
Her fingers moved, out of habit, to the side pocket of her operational backpack—waterproof, pressurised-sealed, rated for war zones—strapped beside her seat.
Inside:
-
A pistol, holstered in velvet.
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A flint-strike lighter.
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An injectable sedative.
-
And most importantly—her custom-built encrypted device.
She fished it out, thumbing the screen.
Nothing.
Dead.
She flipped it, swore under her breath, and held it toward the window.
“No sun. Of course not.”
It was storm-cloud dim out there—blanket grey despite the altitude. Her solar charge was minimal at best, and the internal battery had bled dry during last week’s excursion. She hadn’t thought to manually juice it. Sloppy.
Mycroft noticed. “Power issue?”
“Just my luck,” she muttered. “And of course your planes are a decade behind the USB curve.”
“Because I don't design my jets for covert espionage.”
“Pity. That would’ve been useful right about now.”
She wasn’t joking. Not entirely.
She sat still, watching the air itself. Listening.
The engines hummed. Too clean. Too stable.
The twist in her gut pulled tighter.
14:57 GMT
They’d been in the air nearly four hours. For the last twenty minutes, Mycroft’s phone had been searching for signal.
No reception. No roaming. No global satellite ping.
He toggled airplane mode. Nothing. Rebooted.
Enola’s voice was flat: “Signal should’ve come back an hour ago.”
He glanced at her. “We’re over open ocean.”
“Even over open ocean, satellites exist. Especially on a registered corridor. You booked us on T9-A, right? One of the main Pacific loops?”
Mycroft didn’t answer.
He tried calling the cockpit.
No response.
Enola stood slowly, stretching her leg to test the pull in her thigh muscle. She grabbed her pack, slung it over one shoulder, and walked barefoot down the narrow aisle.
The cockpit door was locked.
Clunk.
She tapped lightly. Waited.
No answer.
“Mycroft.”
He was already rising. His expression had shifted—no longer dismissive, no longer smug. He moved toward her, pulling his backup device from his inner coat.
Enola glanced sidelong. “You still think I’m paranoid?”
“I’ve learned not to answer that when you use that tone.”
He reached forward to knock—
That was when the lights flickered.
Only for a second—just a dimming—but it was enough.
They both froze.
Enola whispered, “Count to twenty. If we don’t get something—anything—I’m opening that door.”
“And if it’s just turbulence?”
“Then we’ll feel it before we hear it.”
14:59 GMT
The silence wasn’t passive anymore. It was thick. Intentional.
Enola pressed her ear to the cockpit door.
Nothing. No footsteps. No voices. No static on the intercom.
Just the hum of a plane pretending it still had a pilot.
She stepped back and drove her elbow hard into the panel.
“Enola—”
“Glass-reinforced polycarbonate. That wasn’t going to work,” she muttered, shaking the sting from her arm.
Mycroft tried his override code.
A red light blinked.
Access Denied.
“What the hell do you mean denied? This is my aircraft!”
Enola dropped her bag and unzipped it with surgical speed.
She pulled out a flat black toolkit, fingers flying over metal, carbon, silicon.
Jammed a folded tool into the panel joint, twisted—wedged in another—
Click.
A hiss of static.
Then a mechanical snap behind them.
They turned.
The cabin’s left exit light had flipped from green to red.
Then the depressurisation alarm screamed to life.
“What did you do?!” Mycroft shouted.
“That’s not me. That’s the plane reacting to—”
She froze mid-sentence. Her eyes narrowed.
She dropped the tools.
“He bailed.”
Mycroft blinked. “Who—”
“The pilot. He’s gone. He jumped.”
Her voice was flat. Cold. Certain.
“And if he jumped, he knew the plane wouldn’t make it.”
“But that’s—”
“Bombs.”
15:01 GMT
She was already moving.
Back to her gear. She pulled out a compact gunmetal cylinder—one of her nastier little toys.
Slammed it against the cockpit door. It latched with a hiss and a chirp.
“Get your coat off.”
“What?”
“Now, Mycroft.”
He obeyed, fumbling. She ripped his tie off mid-motion and wrapped it around his hand.
“No time to play hero,” she muttered. “If I get the door open, we jump. No questions. No arguments.”
“You want to jump from a jet?!”
She looked at him, wild-eyed and perfectly calm.
“Time to learn how to fly, brother mine.”
The device blinked green.
Boom.
A deep, dull concussion rocked the doorframe.
She kicked.
The door flew inward, hinges smoking.
Empty.
Parachute harness: gone.
Safety belt: unbuckled.
Co-pilot’s seat: untouched.
And on the console, taped neatly at the centre—
A blinking red light. Countdown.
03:44
03:43
03:42
Mycroft stared. “No. No, no, no—”
Enola was already scanning. “It’s wired to the nav. Touching controls could set it off.”
03:35
“Mycroft! Does your emergency case still have the pressurised window punch?”
“I—”
“DOES IT HAVE IT.”
“Yes!” He dove, dragged it out, handed her the tool.
She ran to the cargo bay.
03:18
She jammed the punch into the airlock panel, twisting until it cracked with a metallic groan.
“Help me with this!”
He threw his weight into the latch. It resisted—then gave.
The cargo door screamed open.
Wind slammed them like a wall.
Below: ocean. Endless. Black. Cold.
Enola grabbed her backpack—sealed, tactical, weighted—and hurled it into the void.
It vanished.
She turned to the loose aircraft seat.
It wasn’t loose.
“Damn it—help me!”
Mycroft hesitated a beat—then slammed his shoulder into the base while she attacked the bolts with a wrench.
The plane groaned. Smoke curled from the walls.
02:54
Two bolts off. Then three.
Mycroft stumbled. “Why are we wasting time?! We need to jump!”
“You’ll die.”
“Terminal velocity plus unbroken water? Your spine’ll shatter. This seat breaks surface tension. We ride it in.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Deadly.”
02:27
The last bolt cracked.
They wrenched the chair free. Enola dragged it to the cargo ramp, hands slick with sweat.
Wind clawed at them. The sea yawned below.
02:13
She scanned the cargo walls—found a pair of nylon-reinforced cargo straps. Yanked them free from a stowed kit and began tying herself to the seat.
Then she reached for Mycroft.
“No—”
“Yes. Shut up.”
02:04
She looped the strap over his chest, under his arms, around the chair. Again. Again.
“This is mad,” he gasped. “This is madness.”
“This is math,” she said, cinching the last knot. “Lean forward. Don’t move unless I say.”
01:47
The plane tilted. Lights flickered. A panel sparked.
01:29
She slid in beside him, strapping their legs with more salvaged fabric—her belt, his scarf, shredded lining from her jacket.
Mycroft’s hands were shaking.
She leaned in—pressed her forehead briefly to his.
“Don’t look down. Look forward. You’re not going to die. Not today.”
01:12
She braced.
“Get ready.”
00:57
Outside: wind, sky, sea.
Inside: a red light, pulsing like a heartbeat.
00:32
They were locked in.
No time for anything else.
Mycroft opened his mouth.
Enola beat him to it.
“See you on the surface.”
She kicked.
00:01
The first bomb detonated.
From above, the plane ripped itself apart.
A fireball rushed across the sky—not from the fuel tank, but from internal charges buried in the avionics and pressure seals.
The explosion wasn’t elegant.
It was brutal. Angry. Final.
But by then, they were falling.
Strapped to a screaming metal seat, tumbling through the atmosphere like two puppets lashed to a missile.
Enola’s teeth rattled from the wind. Her eyes were open.
Calculating. Focused. Unblinking.
Watching the water rise—
Too fast.
Behind them, the sky bloomed with flame.
Wings snapped. Steel shrieked.
But she didn’t look back.
They hit.