Ignition

What readers said

Biotech, politics, crime - that's the brew of Ignition. Thriller, action, suspense, and technology, masterfully blended into a novel that takes the reader into a world of technology that is mostly hidden from everyone. Get ready for a novel where every word has a calculated meaning.

Ignition is a pulse-pounding thriller that explores the depths of human resilience, the complexities of morality, and the terrifying potential of genetic manipulation.

"Alexander’s novels are thrillers about manipulation, consequence and politics that's so raw and real, that readers won't be able to look away. Don't expect happy endings or simple answers."

"Tough and without compromise. Get ready for a ride through the dark side of power, where every little action sets off a chain reaction."

Table of Contents

What readers said

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

Mentions

About the Author

Prologue

Jade wakes up with pain shooting through her legs. It’s 4:30 am, and the light burns into her eyes, but she slept like the dead—or more precisely, like a woman who’d already died. She and Tibour did the fifty again yesterday as part of her training. Tibour was SAS, and Jade used to be an RAF pilot, with a license that covers nearly everything the RAF offers. But none of that matters now. She’s part of the team—the first pilot ever assigned to an SBS unit, and a woman, no less. Things change.

She groans, her muscles protesting as she pulls her feet out of the damp bunk. The castle they use for extended training has ancient walls, probably several hundred years old. The morning sun coaxes dampness from the stones, here in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, on a goddamn island. A hint of amusement crosses her face as she imagines Mel Gibson, painted blue, swinging a claymore at redcoats.

She joined the RAF shortly after the sudden, brutal death of her family, enduring endless checks and psychological tests. Relentless exams, designed to weed out the weak, finally led to her flight license. She learned to hide her inner world; her father was a well-known psychiatrist, her mother a scientific writer on psychology. They loved discussing their work with her, and she learned far more than she let on.

If her father, Professor Dr. Moreau, were alive to examine her, he’d diagnose her as a narcissistic, deeply violent psychopath with self-destructive tendencies. But he’s no longer on this forsaken rock of Earth; she’s the last of her family. And, in a way, fortunately, they gave her everything she needed, everything to remember. She learned to analyze, manipulate, and control her emotions with ruthless efficiency.

Searching for purpose, she found it first in the RAF, and now in this SBS team. After nine weeks with her three teammates, they feel like a small family—each ready to kill for the others. Her thoughts drift to Emily. They broke up ten weeks ago, after three years of shared strength. Emily had been the first replacement for her lost family.

Time to get up. A new day to win. Jade swings her burning legs over the edge of her damp bed, giving them a few light stomps to release the cramps, and stands up. She heads to the bathroom, stretching her body along the way. With under ten percent body fat, no more than sixty-seven kilograms spread over one meter seventy-five, and able to carry Tibour’s rifle and magazines for another three kilometers—she’s constantly testing her body’s limits. Her willpower always triumphs over flesh.

She sits for a moment on the toilet, listening to the splashing sound and focusing on the day ahead. She’s proud of her control, always doing more than required, self-centered and steady. Her parents would be satisfied, and she honors them in that way.

Jade grunts as she presses the flush button, the whooshing sound breaking her train of thought. She scratches an itch on her right hip. Cold tiles send shivers up her bare legs as she crosses the room, yanking open a drawer with a metallic screech. Her fingers sift through the soft cotton of her tracksuit, a welcoming distraction from the memories that claw at her. Her past will not define her—nor will the ghosts that haunt her sleep.

Chapter 1

What a stunning day. The smell of slowly grilled meat, the sound of some kind of mesmerizing electronic music pulsing louder with every second, a beat that’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a disco ball hovering in the air casting colored glitter over her face, the barbecue, the grass, the green backyard with its sandy hills, a surreal, but beautiful view. Jade leans back, pressing her back against the wall behind her, taking a deep breath to memorize this unbelievable scene. She closes her eyes, savoring every second, feeling the relaxation and peace. She feels her heart slowing down, her mind drifting away, making room for relaxation, lifting her up…

A brutal punch shatters the dream. The disco ball hits her chest with the speed of a bullet, a hard pressure, like an alp from her nightmares grasping her tightly, pressing the air out of her lungs. She panics, trying to move, getting away from this wall, but she can’t. The wall holds her with hidden tentacles. With her body pressed against the wall she can’t breathe, wants to scream, to call for help, but no sound leaves her mouth — no air left.

With a last flickering view the beautiful backyard evaporates into the abyss.

A jolt rips through Jade, catapulting her back into the world, her brain can’t distinguish for a few seconds between what’s real and what’s not. The smell of burned meat, the intense heat, the disco ball, her vision is blurry, distorted. Her hand flies instinctively to her face, smearing a sticky liquid across her cheek and eyelids as she struggles to focus her eyes.

What the fuck? What happened? Jade looks perplexed at her bloody hand, the words barely audible through the ringing in her ears. She tries to move her head, but pain races through her skull, letting the disco ball explode into millions of colored pieces. Her brain struggles to process the images her eyes capture before her as her vision clears.

Damn that’s a lot of blood. Jade slurs her words, her mouth dry like a desert. Ouch, damn, my head, she chokes out again.

Memories are flooding back, striking her with the force of a train out of control. The sudden turbulence, the hard push from the gust, pressing the left wing up, tilting the Cessna to the right, hitting the rocks, ripping a section of the wing off, and sending the old bird downwards. Her training kicked in, a few milliseconds of automated handling, the fine line between death and survival. As routined and cold as she could be, she screams Cover! fighting to maintain control. A deafening cry followed by the crunching sound of metal against sand. The wheels got busted, she felt the dust crashing through the cockpit window and piercing her skin with a thousand needles of glass, the abrupt stop, pressing the air out of her lungs. Then, it seems, she fainted.

Jade fights with her body, her eyes wide open, blinking against the harsh sunlight. Disgust wraps around her like a suffocating shroud, tightening with each attempted move. Every muscle screams in protest, every joint throbs with an exploding ache, her senses torture her with the constant smell of burned meat, mixed with the metallic taste of blood in her mouth. Jade gags, the smell triggering a wave of revulsion, bile surging up her throat like a geyser ready to erupt. Her body wracked with spasms, she retches violently, emptying the contents of her stomach onto her flight suit, adding another layer of filth to the already devastated fabric.

She had been flying low, trying to stay under the radar as long and often as she could, always evading the high penetration radar of the military. But the Gobi with its unpredictable winds and unforgiving terrain doesn’t like to be disturbed by a low-flying plane today. Her instructor’s yelling voice echoed in her ears, high-pitched and chattering – she always imagined talking to Donald Duck. They called him Duck in her team.

Jade, trying to fly low and avoiding radar always comes with a price. You fly low, you get caught in the shit!

Jade coughed out a smile, pain shooting through her ribs.

Yeah, yeah, I got the message loud and clear today, Duck, she groans. But hey, at least I’m still alive, thanks to you.

Jade takes another deep breath, a few seconds to concentrate and focus. The nausea fades, her will winning over her battered body. Nothing is lost, yet. Her eyes scan the broken cockpit panel, assessing each piece of equipment as if it were part of an inventory, as if one wrong move wouldn’t have her splintered with shards.

Oh, that sound, her ears ringing, the collision warning screams, Impact, Impact, Impact! Yeah, yeah, you stupid arse of a bloody mechanic, I know! Jade switches the alarm off. Silence. Blessed silence. Only the frizzling sound from the damaged electronics and this intensive, disgusting, constant smell of burned meat. She takes a deep breath, concentrating not to vomit again, trying to disconnect mind and body, racing to assess the damage. No fire, at least. And since I’m alive, the plane didn’t crash totally apart. Good.

That smell of burned meat makes her sick — Jade looks down. Blood, glass mixed with the former content of her stomach and… is that an ear? Her arms instinctively shoot up, searching frantically for her ears, releasing a relieved breath as she finds both at their natural place. Jade looks down again, twinkling her toes, moving her legs slightly. Bloody, but intact. Okay, good, she whispers to herself. I have bloody great legs. She moves her head to the right, staring into a dead eye.

Jade flinches back, terrified. What the…? The headaches hit her again; the vision starts to blur. She needs a few seconds to focus her eyes and take a closer look. Who the fuck is that? Her headaches overshadow anything; she can’t think. A few deep breaths, slowly in, slowly out. The headaches seem to fade.

Ah, yes, the lab doc. Tom? No, that wasn’t his name. Or was it? She can’t even remember his name. He looks awful, must have hit the instruments pretty hard — so hard, in fact, that an eye popped out. And obviously, his right ear was ripped clean off, finding an unlikely resting place on her leg as if seeking a nap. The right side of his face seems to have melted into the instrument frame. The sizzling wreckage releases small plumes of smoke where his face creates a kind of symbiotic connection with the metal, feeding the remaining electricity with flesh to produce permanent plumes.

Jade, get your shit together, she talks to herself, feeling the rebellion of her stomach, the spasms starting already again. Acid crawls up, burning her throat, ready to explode. Jade forces herself to take a deep breath, holding the air in, counting to ten. Her stomach welcomes the exercise. She manages not to throw up; the pressure fades, leaving a dull feeling.

She stares apathetically at Tom, like she needed to burn this scene into her memory, this strange assembly of death and technology. She remembers now that he was one of the lab folks, working on that drug her boss wanted so badly.

Well, isn’t this just glorious, Jade laughs silent, her voice laced with dark humor. Looks like we’re both fucked.

The memories cause a flickering between reality and the past. Shit, she got hit hard. But she’s alive. That’s all that matters now. Get out, girl, move! she berates herself, forcing her body to move.

Baby steps, her instructor’s chattering voice reminds her. After surviving a crash, it is always before your death. Analyze, separate the mind from the body, and focus on survival. That’s exactly what she’s doing now. Pain in the left side, radiating—possible fracture, but tolerable. Multiple small cuts across the face and hands, bleeding minimally. The left knee is swelling, but it is functional. A headache is on the left side, with swelling.

She fumbles for the harness release, the metal cold and slippery against her bloody fingers. The belt releases with a satisfying click, the click of freedom. The world spins as she stumbles out of the cockpit seat, her legs buckling beneath her. She lands on her hands and knees, stuck between her seat and Tom. She grunts and tries to push the dead body out of her way, but he’s blocked. Again, push!

Tom makes a strange whooshing sound accompanied by the crunch of broken glass, as he slides lifeless halfway down to the bottom of the former cockpit. Why wasn’t he strapped in?

Broken glass scrapes her hands and knees as she crawls, each movement adding new wounds to her already pierced body. Jade whimpers in agony, pushing herself forward through the wet, sticky coating of the former cockpit, blood dripping out of her mouth, painting a small line to the bottom, like a lifeline leading her through the wreckage.

Jade crawls onto the sandy ground, forcing herself up despite the pain. She takes a moment to stretch and gingerly test each limb, assessing the damage, forcing herself to stay focused. A fast view into the remaining pieces of the reflecting screen from the former instrument board. Compared to Tom, she doesn’t look so bad. A few cuts and splinters everywhere, her face a mess of tiny wounds. Looked better this morning, she confesses to herself. She moves her arms, legs and neck again. Nothing broken, it seems. That’s good, otherwise her mission would be ending here. With her death, in the middle of motherfuckin’ nowhere with a dead doctor on her side… But it would be hard to explain too why he’s here, when the police would find her. And if others would find her, for sure she would be dead a few minutes later. Too much value to steal, no witnesses needed.

She manages a skew smile – quite a thing, this song about a wind of change. She always hated this song. Shit. It hurts. She feels the adrenaline surging, not sure what hurts more now. That a damn sidewind pushed her down, something no air defense or missile during the last years could manage, or the real, throbbing pain.

Jade glances at her watch: 6:36pm. They took off from Lijiang at noon. Beautiful River, as her rusty Chinese translates it. Yeah, a great place for me.

Four hours and something in the air, sometimes as low as hundred-fifty meters. She must be somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred kilometers from Lijiang, more than a hundred kilometers away from her refill point.

Jade grumbles, ‘And that damn fortune cookie said ‘beauty will touch you’?’ She lets out a frustrated scream, raw and fierce, cutting through the desert silence before fading into the void. It helps—primal relief—but also wastes a lot of energy.

That felt good; releasing the mental pressure with primal instincts helps Jade to focus, but also wastes energy. She knows that, from now on every second counts for her survival, and for sure for her future. She makes a list in her head: Transponder, medic, supplies, first aid, cargo. One step after another, sticking to the list, no distractions.

The first step is easy: Disabling the emergency beacon. It doesn’t matter that the beacon has sent pings already — she insisted on a hacked version with no GPS, nobody wanted that the plane can be tracked. Maybe her boss now knows that something happened, but to find her would need another plane and someone who can fly it — and they don’t have either right now. Jade stretches a bit and reaches from outside through the frames of the cockpit window, click, the blinking stops. She doesn’t want company when she’s traveling light.

She looks at the plane, a stretched piece of metal, deformed by the physics of the crash. The first aid kit was on the right side, at least as they started today. That side of the cockpit looks like a crushed soda can, explaining the devastation she brought over this Tom. A decision had to be made in the milliseconds of automated reaction — she or he. She yanked the stick to the right, just before impact, making sure it’s him.

Crawling back into the cockpit, searching, trying to clean the way from the splinters of broken glass with her arm, is the next task on her list. The crash created an organized chaos, but Jade can spot the box with the red cross buried behind Tom. She shoves the body further back into the seat and grabs the kit. Good, it’s not broken. She moves to the left side where she stored the water canister behind the pilot seat; she always has water with her when she’s flying; ten liters of liquid, it can get hot in the cockpit, and water is always good. Her side of the plane is not as badly damaged as the right one, thanks to her fast reaction, and the canister is intact, exactly where she left it. I’m a badass pilot, she grunts, a flicker of pride in her voice. Sorry, Tom.

Transponder. Check. Water. Check. First aid kit. Check. Wounds cleaned? Nope, that’s the next step. This one she likes most. Pain. Controlled pain, the kind that’s making her feel alive. She saved this part as her treat, her goodie, like she always saves the best part of a meal for last. Emily always laughed about that. If you die now, you’ll miss that, she’d tease.

I have something to look forward to, why would I die? she’d retort.

Emily. Lost, but free. She couldn’t take it when Jade joined SBS—black ops, the first female pilot on the team. God, Jade had fought so hard for this. She reduced emotions into analytical decisions, everything had to step behind her goal. At the end of her training, during the daily Sambo sparring sessions, no one wanted to face her anymore. Live or die, she never died. She loves Sambo, the Russian combat fighting with his brutal efficiency, direct takedowns with just one goal: to submit or kill. Efficient and silent.

Back to track, Jade, she barks at herself, but the headaches come and go like a wave, a pulsar, hammering behind her forehead. Where are the damn painkillers? she snarls, rummaging fast through the first aid kit, driven crazy by an increasing, throbbing, hammering pulse behind her eyes with each move she makes. Jade finds a package — Gankang? Need something better! The Triad should be able to provide some pills they are famous for…

The throbbing pain, increasing by the second, is driving her mad. She feels like her head is going to explode, frustration and aggression mixing into a cold, suddenly growing hatred that erupts in her tunneled, blind madness. Jade rips the package apart, her face masked with furious rage. The pills are scattered all over the place, and she crushes each one into a white dust in her typically uncontrolled act of nihilistic destruction.

This eruption took only a few seconds, as fast as the rage erupted, it disappeared. Jade feels the adrenaline rushing, her heart pumping in the same rhythm as the jolts in her head. She checks the first aid kit again, bandages, tape, scissors, emergency blanket, pads, water sterilizer, and another pack of that kids stuff. Better than nothing, she rips the pack open, and a strip of Dezocine falls into her hand. Clever, she mutters, clever. Jade stuffs three or four pills into her mouth, her teeth shred the pills, releasing the bitter taste of opioid directly into her system.

The headache is fading, slowly replaced by a dull ache. Jade is now ready to clean her wounds, picking each splinter from her face using the horizontal indicator as a mirror. Every removed splinter brings back memories. Emily. The bar. The tequila. Her hotel room. The passion, rubbing their bodies against each other, the heated sweat, the flash of a blade. A muffled, hissing cry of ecstasy. The cool touch from the blade’s metal against her skin. The reminder of this voice, Emily’s voice, a low, lavish growl in her ear, pulls her back to the present. You like that, don’t you, little bird?

Yes, she hisses through clenched teeth, the word an epiphany, a yet unknown way to feel. From that night on, it was always more than pleasure, more than a distraction. It was a connection forged in fire, a mutual addiction to the exquisite agony that made them both feel truly alive. Jade moans, followed by a series of hissing breaths. Another splinter gone. A small price to pay for this flood of memories. Wounds cleaned, as best as she could. She closes the kit. Check.

The cargo. The only box in the cargo area is this small thing, the drug she had to get her hands on. This mission, two years in the making, was carefully planned, together with her black-ops team, Team Five, part of SBS, the Special Boat Service of Her Majesty. Jade is sure that her majesty doesn’t know shit about the elite unit.

Then they did this operation deep down in Africa, and it went extremely sideways, she had to go undercover, almost a year and a half ago, all by herself. Her whole team went rogue with her, this fucking shit was way too much for everyone, even for her. She knows the story of her missing Special Forces team, and now they are taking matters into their own hands. Since then they have been hunted down, they have had to disappear in different parts of this fucking world, fighting their own way through.

Jade managed to get into the Tea Road Triads, fighting her way up. It hadn’t been easy. Gaining the Triads’ trust required more than just brutality. She traveled from Mongolia to Lijiang over dirty, less known passages, over twenty days in the Gobi Desert, with a group of smugglers, riding on camels near a city called Datong. Her skills as a pilot, perfected over the years in areas her government always denied to be active in, landed her a leading position, flying for Lijiang’s Triad boss. It’s great to be a good looking, ruthless woman with a psychologic disorder in that world, hard to crack, cold blooded with a long track record of successful operations, but also presentable in higher societies.

Her story, a desperate ex-special forces girl with an undeniable death-wish, brutally efficient, holds up. Her reputation as a pilot, a woman, who could fly anything with wings, opened doors that would have stayed closed otherwise. She’d carried out a few kills here and there to manifest her position, each one a calculated move to gain access to the inner circle, closer to her target — Tom.

Tom, or whatever was his name, was easy prey for her. He was in his early fifties, a handsome guy. Jade got close to him, showing false admiration, and had fast, hard sex with him in the small, smelly compartment behind the kitchen once or twice. That she didn't like men and their dicks didn't matter. It's just business.

And just like that, he was like a dog. She said Jump!, and he jumped. Okay, she said that she wanted to see what he was working on, and he was so naive to show her the lab. She knocked him out, stole the data, downloaded it to her thumb drive, got a box of the drug, grabbed Tom, and left the building, telling everyone that Tom had half a bottle of whiskey and had already thrown up twice. Nobody risked coming close to them. Jade doesn’t even know his real name. Why would she? He’s just a target she needed to get her mission done, disposable and worthless.

Get the drug, take the guy, and leave — those were her orders. She met the boss once, quite a powerful woman, head of the triad, owning the Tea Road and multiple hotels in Lijiang and a lot more in Datong. Nothing goes without her approval.

Born a fourth child, a daughter, her mother risked her life twice to protect her. The first time they brought her back to life, after her father beat her mum unconscious, but the second time her father beat her even harder. Her mom didn’t survive that night. She left her home the same night, at the age of six, lived on farms, stole, murdered, and worked as a barmaid in shady dumps to earn money. She went back to her home by the age of twelve, by day. Her father died a slow, painful death the following night, she managed to hold him alive over twelve hours as she cut piece of piece away from him, but she had shown mercy to her brothers and gave them a fast death with her machete, afterwards. She planted white flowers on her mother’s grave, paid an older couple to care for the grave, and left forever.

By fourteen, she had built her first call girl ring, sleeping with one of the police inspectors and the mayor of Lijiang simultaneously, blackmailing them ever since. Trafficking, drug mules, weapons, technology. The influence of her empire grew from year to year, now she deals with the Chinese government, the Russians, the UK, and who knows else. To rule that empire she needed a private pilot, so Jade came into the game. True story? Who knows.

Jade shakes her head, the motion sending a fresh wave of pain through her skull. No more memories, clenching her jaw against the next wave of nausea. Focus, Jade. Every second counts, each one bringing her closer to dehydration, exposure, death. The desert is a silent predator, and she is its prey. But she is also a predator herself, trained to survive.

Which way? Jade spins on her heels, trying to get a sense of her position. The sun has already begun its descent, painting the sky with fire. She closes her eyes, mentally tracing the map in her mind. Lijiang, the starting point, a city in the Yunnan province. She took off heading north-northwest, following a strange, but doable flight path she designed to avoid the Chinese air control on her first jump to the refill point. Jade replays the flight path in her head: Six hours flight time, max, to reach the small settlement at the oasis in the middle of the Gobi, drop off this Tom, refill, going ten thousand feet at forty-five percent after a few minutes, a six hours jump during the night to the small airfield outside of Datong. It’s a normal flight routine from the oasis, a bunch of scientists doing something there, some kind of rare earth was found a few years ago.

But the crash has thrown off these calculations, dumped her in the middle of nowhere, sand and stones with no clear landmarks. In reality four hours, give or take, in the air, roughly eight or even nine hundred kilometers covered, hundred or so to go to reach the oasis. So much for that plan.

Jade snorts, turning back toward the plane as the setting sun casts her silhouette against the desert. The wind pumps sand into her crusted hair, whispering strange promises of endlessness, eager to cover her tracks with a faint dusting of sand.

Survival. It’s the primal instinct she’s trained for, a relentless drive that has kept her alive through countless missions, countless operations. But this time, it’s different. This time, she feels vulnerable for the first time, and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment.

Shit, Jade curses, kicking at a loose pebble, looking into the endlessness, a grain of sand in the desert. Why the fuck I’m doing this? Jade squats down, her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. Her whole body is a single numbness, silenced by opium, and she wants to live? For what? What’s the purpose of living? We are born to die, her father always said. The idea of living is what we do when we live, we decide how, if, and when. Dad. Mum. All dead. That’s life, fuck it.

But that doesn’t matter now, she wouldn’t let the desert win. She would never let anything or anyone win. She would fight her way out, she would kick asses again, and she would live to see another day. What was that freakin’ movie?

I didn’t come so far to die here, she reminds herself. I don’t give up, I fight. Pffft, so far, what a metaphor, far in the nowhere.

Baby steps, she reminds herself, echoing her instructor’s words. One problem at a time. Next, the cargo. My life insurance. She has a job to do, and leaving the cargo isn’t an option. Let’s crack that box.

The cargo box. Metal, locked, looking pretty solid, seemingly hard to crack.

That’s the sense of a cargo box. Should be, it would be a shame if a bump destroyed whatever is inside. Jade damns her own idea to seal the box and send the key to her destination, to have a plausible deniable facade in case things go sideways.

Night falls slowly over the desert, the wind quickly cools the air, small clouds of dust begin to form. The heat fades, replaced by a freezing chill that sweeps across the desert like a phantom.

Who could know that they went so sideways? Life’s a bitch, a sarcastic, brutal, lovely little bitch. Jade’s dark humor has never failed her, brought her through so much in her life.

God it’s getting freezing cold. Jade shivers. She could burn some fuel, but she also doesn’t want any company, and a fire would be detectable from satellites, and be seen dozens kilometers away. The plane. Jade gets inside, covering behind the box she has to open, but the temperature drops fast, too fast for her taste.

Jade grabs the first aid kit, rips the cover of the blanket open and wraps herself into the thin, metallic foil, resting her back against the box, a few minutes relaxation. The adrenaline starts to fade, a next wave of sickness comes over her, her body is near collapsing as the adrenaline finally wears off. Drink water, she reminds herself. After a few sips she doesn’t see anything anymore, it’s getting dark, fast.

She changes her position, now looking out of the hole the ripped door has left, the thin foil wrapped like a poncho. The stars emerge, one by one, until the entire sky is ablaze with countless lights. The Milky Way stretches across the view, a grandiose river of stardust against the inky blackness. Nature is so beautiful, she thinks as she lays her back against the box, a bit of rest would be great, maybe that’s the message Miss Fortune and her Cookie wanted to tell her this morning.

Jade wakes up abruptly. The moon shines, it seems she has fallen asleep for a few minutes or even hours? She can’t tell, but sleep is a luxury she can’t afford in her current situation. Stay awake, girl, stay awake. She feels the cold, it must be around ten degrees celsius. She hated the desert from the moment she arrived here. Nothing has changed.

The cargo, right. The box, a stubborn metal box, old-school with a lock. Jade starts to search for the toolbox the plane has. Ah, luckily it’s directly behind her, strapped to the hull. She opens the leather wrap, finds a few screwdrivers, a small crowbar, a hammer, and two pliers. Jade weighs