Marcus sat there on the silent motorcycle hands, still on the controls, staring at Ethan with something between disbelief and desperate hope. Ethan looked up from the thermal scanner, and there was no doubt left in his face at all. "I was right," he said. "I know exactly what's happening now." The words hit the garage like a current running through wet ground.
Say it again, Marcus said, voice unsteady in a way it hadn't been in years. Slower. There are four separate points of failure, Ethan said, standing up. Energy building in him now that he'd stopped fighting to prove himself and started simply explaining what he'd seen. None of them big enough to matter alone.
A heat sensitive connection right here. He pointed to the cable he had identified first that only misbehaves once the engine's been running long enough to warm up. That's failure one. Failure 2 is a timing gap in your sensor array, small enough that it stays inside normal tolerance until the heat from failure 1 starts throwing things slightly out of sync. Failure 3 is a calibration mismatch in your control software.
I'd bet money it's still tuned for an older version of this engine from before whatever upgrade caused failure 1 in the first place. And the fourth? Marcus asked barely above a whisper. Ethan hesitated for the first time since he'd started talking. The fourth one's a pressure issue, and it's the one that actually pulls the trigger.
Once the first three line up, the heat, the timing gap, the software mismatch pressure builds somewhere it shouldn't, and the whole system reads it as an emergency and shuts everything down to protect itself. He looked around at the faces staring at him, none of them quite able to process what they were hearing. It's not broken. It's protecting itself from a problem nobody built it to survive. Sal Vitali sat down on an overturned crate, hard like his legs had simply stopped agreeing to hold him up.
16 hours, he said mostly to himself. I spent 16 hours in this garage, and I never once considered four small things happening at once. Nobody would, Ethan said, and there was no cruelty in it. No triumph over the men who had failed before him. Just a strange gentle honesty.
You're trained to look for one big answer. That's not a flaw in you. It's just not how this problem works.
Marcus climbed off the bike slowly, and for a long moment, he simply stood there, looking at Ethan Carter like he was trying to memorize something he was afraid might disappear if he blinked. "Can you fix it?" he asked. Ethan didn't answer right away, and in the silence, Reaper's voice cut through harder than before, but with something new underneath it. Not mockery this time, something closer to fear of being wrong. That's the question, kid.
You've done a nice magic trick explaining what's happening. Anybody can diagnose a problem and sound smart doing it. Can you actually fix it? I think so, Ethan said. You think so?