I want you to know I understand exactly what it costs. I paid that price myself a long time ago. I did the right thing when the right thing was expensive, and it took my whole life away from me, my name, my career, the person I used to be. Everything. He looked at the young engineer.
I'd do it again. Every time. Because a man who keeps things he can't live with isn't really keeping anything at all. He's just carrying a weight that gets heavier every year until it kills him. He paused.
You're going to be all right, Daniel. Whatever happens tomorrow, you already did the part that matters. The rest is just noise. Daniel Okafor, 26 years old, exhausted, and terrified, and prouder than he'd ever been in his life, looked at the man in the pilot seat and had to turn away so Marcus wouldn't see his eyes fill. At 4:00 in the morning, Evelyn Carter came back.
She'd gone home to change, and she'd come back, and she brought coffee, and she found the pilot and the engineer bent over the flight controls together, and she stood in the doorway of the hangar and watched them for a long moment before either noticed her. You should be sleeping, she said finally. So should you, Marcus said without looking up. I can't sleep. Neither can I.
She came and stood beside the aircraft. She looked up at the rotors, and then she looked at the man in the cockpit, and she asked the question she'd been carrying all night. Why are you doing this? She said quietly. And don't tell me it's about Cortez or the company or Daniel's job.
I mean the real reason. A man doesn't come out of 9 years of silence to climb into the exact kind of aircraft that took his life away unless there's something bigger pulling him. So, tell me the real reason. Please. Marcus was quiet for a long time.
And then in the empty hangar at 4:00 in the morning, he told her, "9 years ago," he said, "I was flying an experimental aircraft that everyone above me said was safe. I told them it wasn't. I told them the exact same thing your engineer's been telling you. And they didn't listen because I was just the pilot, and the pilot doesn't design the aircraft. The pilot just flies it.
So, I flew it. And it failed. Exactly the way I said it would. And I lived because I was good enough to bring it down. But the man in the aircraft beside me that day was not as lucky, and I watched him go into the ground because a room full of people who were smarter than me on paper decided they knew better than the man in the seat. " He stopped.