That doesn't make any sense. It does if you stop looking for one thing that's wrong. Marcus felt something tighten in his chest. the same feeling he'd had four days ago when the engine died beneath him for the first time. Not fear this time, but something closer to a held breath. Explain it to me slow like I'm not a mechanic.
Ethan hesitated, glancing around at the crowd, pressing closer against the fence, at Reaper's crossed arms, at Dutch's careful guarded expression, at Sal's open skepticism. He wasn't used to an audience. His father's garage back home had maybe two customers waiting on a busy day, not 3,000 strangers in a wall of cameras. "Can we clear some of this out?" Ethan asked.
"I work better when I'm not being watched by half of Arizona." That got another laugh softer, this time less mocking. Marcus almost smiled. "Fair enough." He raised his voice.
"Everybody back. Give the kid some room." It took several minutes to push the crowd back far enough that Ethan could breathe. And in that gap, Reaper leaned toward Marcus, voice low and hard. You're really doing this in front of the cameras.
After Cole, after Oay, after Falner, three professionals who told you this bike might not be fixable, you're going to let some teenager give you a theory. I'm going to let him finish a sentence, Reaper. That's all I'm doing right now. And if he's wrong, then he's wrong. And we're exactly where we were an hour ago.
And if he's right, Marcus didn't answer that one. He didn't have an answer for it yet. And some part of him, the part that had spent four sleepless nights running his hand over cold metal, begging it silently to make sense, didn't want to hope too hard, not after watching Hope die three times already that week. When the crowd had thinned enough, Ethan crouched back down beside the bike, and Marcus knelt next to him close enough to hear every word. "Okay," Marcus said.
"Talk to me." "Every person who's looked at this bike," Ethan said, has been looking for one big failure. One part that's dead. One wire that's cut one thing broken bad enough to explain everything. That's how you're taught to think about machines.
Something fails. You find it, you fix it. He touched the cable again gently. But nothing on this bike is failing. Not by itself.
Then why does it die? Because four or five small things are happening at the exact same time, and none of them are big enough to notice on their own. Ethan's voice had steadied now some of the nervousness burning off as he found his footing. There's a connection here. He tapped the cable that only misbehaves once things heat up.