It was a brief, humorless sound, more like something escaping than something chosen. "Bother me?" He turned and looked at the Harley again. "Victor built 20 years of his soul into that machine, and now his son, his son who he never even" He stopped.
Something crossed his face that was genuinely unreadable. Something between rage and grief that had been living together so long they'd stopped being distinguishable. "No," Rex said. "It doesn't bother me.
It's the most Victor thing that could have possibly happened. Even from the grave, the man wins." "Wins what?" Ethan asked.
"Everything," Rex said bitterly. And then before Ethan could respond, before he could ask the question that was forming at the front of his mind, the question about Rex's brother and what really happened on that run years ago, Rex turned and walked out of the room and pulled the door shut behind him. Ethan stood alone. His heart was going fast.
He controlled it, consciously slowed his breathing, let his hands relax, and then did something he'd learned to do in every high-pressure repair job he'd ever worked, he redirected the adrenaline, poured it back into the work, let it fuel precision instead of panic. He picked up the next component, and that's when he saw it. On the underside of the component he just picked up a piece he'd cataloged 6 hours ago, but hadn't yet examined fully, was a hairline crack. Not from use, not from stress or age or the ordinary violence of a working engine.
The geometry of the crack was too clean, the location too deliberate. Someone had scored the metal with a fine blade barely deep enough to see positioned perfectly to cause a catastrophic failure at maximum engine stress. Not immediately, the part would function for a while long enough to pass an initial test, long enough for whoever was doing the repair to feel confident, and then at the exact moment the engine hit full power, the part would fail. The engine would destroy itself from the inside.
Ethan set it down carefully. He looked at the door. He looked at the window, which was covered, which meant nobody could see, and which meant he was alone with this information, and whatever he did next would determine everything. He could go to Joker right now, show him the part, make the accusation directly.
Rex had just been in this room. Rex had confirmed, without confirming it, that he knew things he shouldn't know about what was happening in here, and Ethan had physical evidence in his hands of active sabotage. He looked at the cracked component. He thought about Rex's face when Rex had said even from the grave the man wins.
The absolute absence of triumph in it. The grief underneath the bitterness, the grief that had never actually resolved into anything that had just kept cycling the same wound for years. Whatever had happened between Victor Ryder and Rex Malone, it hadn't made Rex happy. It had eaten him alive from the inside, and the sabotage wasn't the behavior of a man who felt powerful.
It was the behavior of a man who felt powerless. A man who had one remaining way to influence a story he'd lost control of decades ago. Ethan put the cracked component in his jacket pocket alongside the blueprint. He picked up a replacement from his own supply, the right part this time correctly manufactured with exactly the tolerances the blueprint specified.
He set it in its place in the sequence. And then he kept working because the bike still needed to be fixed, the clock was still running, and if Rex Malone wanted a confrontation, Ethan Ryder was going to be ready for it on his own terms at a time of his own choosing when the Harley was alive and running and the truth had no more places to hide. Outside the door the compound was quiet. Too quiet for midday.