"Six captains are committed. I told them the bike is unfixable and the attempt is a waste of club resources. I told them that." He paused.
"I can't walk that back without telling them why." Rex nodded once. The nod of a man who has just understood that the debt he's been carrying has a payment due date and the date is tonight. "Without telling them why," he confirmed.
"Then tell them," Ethan said. "Not for my sake, not for the bike, for Danny." He looked directly at Rex. "Your brother died on a mountain road.
That's true and it's terrible and it will never stop being both of those things. But he didn't die because your father put the wrong parts in an engine for eight years. He didn't die because a 19-year-old kid slept wherever he could and learned to listen to machines. He died because a road was dangerous and life is not fair."
He stopped. "You know that. You've always known that. The anger was easier than knowing it."
Rex didn't respond. He turned and walked toward the door. His two men stepped aside. He stopped in the doorway with his back to Ethan and said without turning, "How much time do you need?"
Ethan looked at the engine, at how far he'd come, at how far remained. "Two hours," he said. "Maybe two and a half." Rex stood in the doorway for a moment.
Then he said, "I'll delay the vote." And he walked out. Ethan worked in a state that was beyond tired, beyond wired. A state on the other side of both where the body simply runs on something older than energy, something closer to will.
His hands moved through the calibration sequence with a sureness that surprised even him. As if the conversation with Rex had opened something, as if understanding the full shape of the story he was inside had given him access to something deeper in himself. He reached the live engine phase at 8:47, 13 minutes before the vote had originally been scheduled to begin. He had no idea whether Rex had actually delayed it or whether 50 men were currently in a room deciding the fate of this machine while he crouched beside it with his last tools in his hands.
He pressed the ignition. The engine caught. The familiar roar filled the room and then right on cue, the scream began to build that climbing wail that had defeated 73 mechanics, that had cleared out every expert who'd ever been brought in, that had become the sound of the club's defeat more than the sound of a machine. But this time Ethan didn't step back.