One girl, a quiet 17-year-old named Priya, who reminded Ethan uncomfortably of himself a year earlier, had been working nights at a gas station to help her family pay rent, teaching herself electrical repair from library books because nobody had ever offered her anything better. "Why should we trust this program?" Priya had asked on her very first day, standing in the new training bay with the same wary, guarded posture Ethan remembered wearing himself. Programs like this always sound good on paper and then disappear in a year once the news cycle moves on. Ethan had appreciated the honesty of the question more than he could say.
"Because I built it," he said simply. "And because I know exactly what it feels like to stand at a gate wondering if anybody's actually going to give you a real chance or if you're just going to be sent home." I'm not doing that to anybody who walks through this door. Not while I have a say in it. Priya had studied him for a long moment.
The same skepticism Marcus once wore in that garage four days into an impossible week. And then slowly something in her posture had eased. Okay, she said, "Show me what you've got."
By the end of her first year, Priya had rebuilt an entire electrical system from scratch. Something that impressed even Marcus, who visited the training center regularly, drawn back again and again by something he couldn't quite name. Maybe nostalgia, maybe hope, maybe just the simple pleasure of watching young people discover that the thing they had always been quietly good at actually had a name and a future and people willing to invest in it. "You ever think about what would have happened?" Marcus asked Ethan one evening.
Nearly a year after that impossible day in the garage, the two of them standing in the training bay watching the newest class of students work through diagnostic problems, Ethan had designed himself. If Cutter had turned you away that morning, if Reaper had gotten his way. Ethan considered the question seriously the way he considered most things. I used to think about it a lot honestly. Right after everything happened, kept me up some nights.
He glanced at Marcus. But I stopped thinking about it that way eventually because focusing on what could have gone wrong felt like it was taking something away from what actually did go right. You let me through that gate. That's the part that matters. Marcus nodded slowly, watching Priya across the bay explain something complex to a younger student with the same patient, careful precision Ethan had once shown an entire garage full of skeptical bikers.
"You know what the funny thing is?" Marcus said. "That motorcycle sits in my personal collection now. Doesn't get ridden much anymore. Too valuable.
Too much history attached to it to risk on the open road. He smiled. Something warm and a little sad in it. But every time somebody new joins the club, every time some young rider comes through looking for their place in this world, I bring them by to see it. And I tell them the same story every single time.