Grip let out a slow breath. Iron Jack asked whether Caleb had damaged the frame by opening it, and Jonah shook his head. 'The reason that section looks ugly now is because he exposed work that had been concealed. The evidence in the photographs is consistent with what I'm seeing here.'
Caleb felt something release inside his chest. He had been afraid of hearing that his diagnosis was wrong, and that fear had sat beside the fear of Grip all afternoon. A second set of knowledgeable eyes did not erase the danger, but it made the truth less lonely. He looked at Jonah with gratitude he could not easily put into words.
'What about the repair?' Grip asked.
Jonah described the inspections still needed before he would be comfortable signing off on normal highway use. He spoke of careful evaluation, dimensional checks, and appropriate testing, not of magic welds or certainty purchased with urgency. Caleb had addressed the immediate damaged area, but a structurally critical repair deserved more than the fact that it looked sound beneath fluorescent lights. Grip listened without interrupting.
'Can we start it?' he asked finally.
'After we finish the reassembly and verify everything appropriate for a controlled shop test,' Jonah replied. 'Starting it isn't permission to go racing through the desert. Don't confuse those two things.'
Grip looked at Caleb. 'Your uncle knew a lot of stubborn old men.'
'He kept their numbers on purpose,' Caleb said.
They returned to work with Jonah watching the final checks. By nine five, the Knucklehead was assembled enough for a carefully controlled test in the shop, and the red tank sat secure above the engine once more. The exposed repair area remained unfinished cosmetically, its raw steel refusing to let anyone forget what had been found. Caleb looked at the machine and felt pride mixed with exhaustion so deep he could barely separate the two.
When Grip asked whether he could hear the engine, Caleb said yes, under the conditions Jonah had approved. The machine started after a couple of attempts, filling the building with the heavy rhythm it had made that afternoon. Outside, hundreds of riders stopped talking to listen. They could hear the old engine alive again, and the sound traveled out of the bay into the dark like the first clear sentence after a long argument.
They conducted the test from a safe position, stopping periodically to check for the irregularity that had appeared earlier. The engine passed through the troublesome operating range without the abrupt failure Caleb had reproduced, and the obvious vibration no longer returned in the same way. On the instrument display, the readings held steady where they had previously broken apart. Caleb felt the fierce, private joy of a diagnosis that had proved meaningful.