He paused with his hand on the door. "Eat something. Sleep 2 hours. Then come back.
A man who hasn't slept makes mistakes and you cannot afford mistakes on this engine." He looked at the Harley one more time and in his face was a grief so old it had become part of his architecture. "Victor built something impossible here. Don't let it die on the floor because you were too proud to sleep."
He left. Ethan stood alone in the room with the bike. "Okay, Dad," he said quietly to the empty air, to the machine, to whatever was left of a man he'd never gotten to meet. "Let's figure out what you were trying to tell me."
He slept 90 minutes on a cot someone pushed through the door without comment. When he woke up, there was food on a tray next to the cot and coffee that was actually hot. He ate and drank and went back to work and the hours dissolved into the particular timelessness of deep mechanical focus where the world narrows to the object in front of you, and everything outside it stops mattering. He worked through the blueprint methodically.
Victor Ryder had been there, was no other word for it, a genius. Not the theoretical kind, the applied kind, the kind that takes an abstract principle and makes it physical, makes it real, makes it do something in the world that it wasn't doing before. The engine he had designed operated on a calibration sequence that required specific components to be set in a precise relational order, not just installed correctly, but balanced against each other in a way that had to be done by hand, by feel, by a kind of listening that most mechanics never developed because most engines didn't require it. Most engines were built for mechanics.
This engine had been built for one specific mechanic. The thought hit Ethan so hard he stopped working for a moment. His hands went still on a component, and he just sat with it, the understanding that his father had built this machine, knowing on some level that might have been hope rather than certainty, that a son he had never raised might someday walk through a gate in the Nevada desert with grease on his hands and nothing to lose. That the skills Ethan had developed in a dozen backyard shops and highway side garages and back alley repair operations, the listening, the feel, the refusal to trust computers over fingertips weren't accidents.
They were inheritance. He picked up the component and kept working. Two hours into the second day, he heard it for the first time a sound from inside the compound that broke through the concentration he'd built around himself like a shell. Voices, raised voices, the specific acoustic signature of men arguing who are trying not to be heard arguing, which paradoxically makes them louder.
He caught fragments, his name, the bike, the word outsider, and once clearly the name Rex. He kept working. 20 minutes later the door opened without a knock and a man walked in that Ethan had never seen before. Tall, maybe 60 with the build of someone who had been powerful a long time ago and still carried the architecture of it even if time had changed the details.
A face that had been handsome once now mapped with the kind of lines that come from years of holding the jaw tight. Eyes that were interesting. Not hostile. Not curious.
Something more complicated than either. Something that looked at Ethan the way you look at a message you didn't expect to receive and aren't sure whether to read. "So. You're the mechanic," the man said.
Not a question. "You're Rex Malone." Ethan said. Also not a question.