"How much time do I have?" "Vote starts at 9:00. It's 5:15 now. Less than 4 hours."
Ethan recalculated in real time. He was at 68% of the calibration. The remaining 32% included the hardest sequences and the final live engine adjustments. Under normal pace, 6 more hours.
Under maximum compression, maybe 3 and 1/2. Under the kind of pace where you couldn't afford a single mistake, and where the difference between precision and speed had to be held in perfect tension. "Tell Joker I'll be ready," Ethan said. Silence from the other side of the door.
Then Tank said with something that sounded like the very beginning of belief, "Yeah, okay. I'll tell him." Footsteps moving away. Ethan went back into the sequence.
At 7:00, the door opened without a knock, and this time it wasn't Tank, and it wasn't Joker. It was Rex Malone, and he wasn't alone. Two men stood behind him in the doorway, not threatening, not blocking the exit, but present in the way that presence is a statement. Rex stepped inside.
His two men stayed at the door. Ethan didn't stand up. He stayed crouched beside the engine with his tools in his hands and he looked at Rex the way he'd learned to look at men who came into rooms with back up steadily openly without either submission or aggression. The look that says, "I see you.
I'm not afraid of you, but I'm also not going to be stupid about you." "You should stop," Rex said. His voice wasn't cruel. That was the thing that Ethan hadn't expected, the lack of cruelty in it.
Rex Malone had the voice of a man delivering a verdict he found painful, not a man enjoying the delivery of it. He looked at the engine and how far the reassembly had progressed and something moved through his face that was too fast and too complicated to fully read. "You've got talent," Rex said. "I'll give you that, more than any of the others."
He paused. "But the vote is happening regardless and after the vote none of this matters." "Then why are you here?" Ethan asked.
"If it's already decided, why come tell me to stop?" Rex didn't answer immediately. He looked at Ethan, really looked the way he had in the earlier conversation with that unnerving quality of a man seeing something through Ethan that reached further back than Ethan himself. "Because I don't want to watch Victor's son spend his last hours of effort on something that's going to be voted into a scrapyard," Rex said.
"Despite everything, I don't want that." "Despite everything," Ethan repeated. He set down his tools, stood up slowly. "Tell me what everything is, Rex.