He leaned in. His hands moved across the engine while it screamed three simultaneous adjustments, the sequence Victor had designed to be made live under stress in exactly this state. The first adjustment, a fractional change, the scream shifted pitch, not lower, not better, but different. Changed.
Responding. The second adjustment, his right hand on one component, left hand on another, eyes closed, reading the sound and the vibration through his palms, the way his father had read the world through the same instrument. The third adjustment, the scream peaked louder than he'd ever heard it, loud enough that he felt it in his back teeth, loud enough that footsteps came running across the compound toward the building, and then it broke. Like a fever breaking.
Like a storm stopping mid-sentence. The scream dissolved from the top down, frequency by frequency, until what remained was the engine, just the engine, running, clean and full and perfectly calibrated with a sound like a voice that had been trying to speak for 20 years and had finally found someone who knew the language. The door burst open. Tank stood in the frame, and behind him Joker, and behind Joker a crowd of men who had been either voting or waiting for a vote.
All of them stopped cold in the doorway by the sound that was coming out of that room. The sound of the legendary Harley-Davidson, the most expensive, most complex, most storied motorcycle the Hells Angels had ever possessed running. Just running. Steady and powerful and alive.
Nobody spoke. Joker's face, the face of a man who had trained himself through decades of hard living to keep his reactions private, broke completely open. Just for a moment. The grief and the joy of it, simultaneous and irresistible on a face that hadn't shown either publicly in years.
Tank, 6'4" Tank, who had been standing at that gate for 11 years and had seen everything, put one hand over his mouth. Ethan Ryder stood up from beside the engine. His legs nearly buckled, two days of concrete floors and almost no sleep and more emotional freight than most people carried in a decade. But he locked his knees and stayed standing because this moment wasn't one you sat down for.
He looked at Joker across the running engine. "She's done," Ethan said. And then because it needed to be said and because his father couldn't say it, he let the words stand.
Joker pressed both hands over his face. His shoulder shook once, just once. Then he pulled his hands down and stood straight and his eyes were wet and he didn't do anything at all about that. A man choosing not to be ashamed of something real.
Behind the crowd and the doorway a path opened. Not parted exactly, more like the crowd reorganized itself around a new gravity. Rex Malone walked through to the front. He stood in the doorway and he looked at the running engine and he looked at Ethan and his face had the expression of a man at the end of a very long journey who isn't sure yet what to feel about having arrived.
Then he looked at the engine for a long time and he said to no one in particular, to the air, to his brother, to eight years of a story that had just changed its ending. "I'm sorry, Danny. I'm sorry it took me this long." Nobody in the crowd said a word.