The hangar had become a war of noise. Rain hammered the corrugated roof; the storm's outer bands had arrived early, testing the doors. Inside, the Mi-17 sat under work lights while crews chained down loose equipment and taped storm film over the windows of the offices. Emma had commandeered the cockpit and the aircraft's auxiliary power to run a live startup simulation—real switches, real sequence, dead rotors.
"Again," she said.
Cooper's hands moved across the overhead panel. Fuel boost pumps. APU. Engine one to ground idle. He was fast—too fast, skipping the beat where a pilot was supposed to listen to the machine before advancing it.
"You're rushing the itt check," Emma said. "This engine's older than your car. It lies to you for the first three seconds. You wait, you watch the trend, then you commit."
"I know how to read a gauge."
"You know how to read a new gauge. This one drifts." She reached over and pulled his hand back off the throttle. "In the valley, in that storm, if you rush this and the temp spikes and you don't catch it, you'll shut down the wrong engine to save the right one."
Something flickered across his face at that. She filed it away.
They ran the hover simulation next—Halvorsen watching from the crew door, arms folded, saying nothing. The sim projected a downwash-loaded hold over an unstable landing zone, the kind where the aircraft's own rotor wash kicked debris and killed lift. Cooper flew it on the instruments and the projected sight picture, hands and feet coordinating collective, cyclic, pedals.
It went well for ninety seconds. Then the simulated tail rotor loaded up in a crosswind gust, yaw building, and Cooper did the thing.
He dumped collective and stomped left pedal—correcting the yaw by killing the very lift that was keeping the nose out of the debris. On a real hover-load LZ it would have driven the aircraft down into its own brownout and rolled it.
Emma saw his hands move before the sim even registered the input, and she knew that motion. She'd read the accident report. Two years ago. A training flight. A copilot named Reyes who didn't come home.
"STOP." She didn't say it gently. She slammed the sim freeze and grabbed his wrist. "That's it. That's exactly it. That's the input that killed Reyes."
The hangar went quiet under the rain. Cooper's face drained white, then flushed. "You don't get to say his name."
"Somebody has to." She held his wrist, held his eyes. "The board called it a gust event. It wasn't. You corrected yaw by dumping lift in a loaded hover and the ship couldn't recover. You just did it again. In a sim. Which means you'll do it in the valley unless you burn it out of your hands right now."
"You weren't there—"
"I read every page." Her voice dropped, hard and level. "You've been flying scared of the wrong thing for two years. You think you froze. You didn't freeze. You acted. You made the smooth, confident, wrong input because it felt like control. And it's still in your hands."
Halvorsen hadn't moved. The whole crew had stopped working, pretending not to watch, watching.
Cooper's breath came ragged. For a long moment Emma thought he'd walk. Then he looked down at his own hand still on the collective, and his voice came out smaller than she'd ever heard it. "I've flown that gust in my head every night. In my version I catch it." He swallowed. "I never catch it, do I."
"Not the way you're reaching for it." She let go of his wrist. "Left pedal was right. Dumping collective wasn't. You separate them. Yaw with feet. Hold the lift with your left hand like it's Reyes's hand and you're not letting go this time."
He stared at her. Something between them changed—not warmth, not yet, but the recognition of one professional handing another the truth no one else would.
Then the crew chief called across the hangar, tapping his watch. "Captain, Lieutenant—weather's ahead of forecast. Pass closes in ninety minutes. After that the ceiling's below the ridgeline. Mission window's gone."
Ninety minutes. Not eight hours. Not enough to certify anyone.
Halvorsen finally uncrossed his arms and stepped into the cockpit doorway, rain dripping off his cap. He wasn't looking at Cooper.
He was looking at Emma.
"Lieutenant Miller," he said quietly, so only the three of them could hear. "I can't legally reinstate you before that pass closes. But I can put a grounded pilot in the right seat unofficially and answer for it later." He paused. "If you fly that seat and anything goes wrong, there is no version of this where you keep your wings. You'll take the fall for all of it."
The rain roared. Cooper looked at her.
"Can you fly right seat, Miller?" Halvorsen asked. "Knowing it ends you either way?"
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