Tonight. She lifted her head. You just told me there's nothing to fix. You said it's the physics. You can't fix the physics.
Marcus agreed. But you can move the flight envelope so you never touch the frequency. You keep the RPM below the resonance node. You fly the demonstration inside a narrow band, and you fly it clean, and you never once let that rotor climb into the range that kills it. The aircraft can still do everything the government wants to see.
It just can't do it the way Cortez is planning to do it, because Cortez doesn't know where the edges of the cliff are. He paused. But somebody does. Evelyn stared at him. You, she said.
You're talking about you. I'm talking about the truth, Marcus said. Tomorrow's flight can succeed. It can silence the complaint and win the contract and prove the aircraft is exactly as good as you've been telling everyone it is. But only if it's flown by someone who knows precisely where the resonance lives.
Precisely how to stay under it. And precisely how to make the whole thing look effortless while doing it. And Cortez doesn't know any of that. He's going to fly it like a normal aircraft, and it's going to kill him. And it's going to take your company down with him.
And you think you could fly it? Marcus didn't answer right away. Because that was the question, wasn't it? That was the whole thing. Nine years he'd kept the seat empty.
Nine years he'd told himself that man was dead, that the pilot was gone, that there was only the father now. And here was this woman, this proud, terrified, brilliant woman asking him the one question he'd sworn he would never answer again. "I didn't say that. " Marcus said quietly. "I said someone needs to. What I'm telling you is that the man you've got is going to die, and the flight plan you've got is going to kill him.
And you have one night to change both of those things before the whole world watches your company fall out of the sky. " Evelyn Carter looked at him for a long, long time. And then she asked the question that had been eating at her since the moment she'd first seen him standing beside the aircraft. "Who are you? " she said. "The truth. Right now.