"Ethan." "How old are you, Ethan?" "19." And Joker made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"73 mechanics couldn't fix that bike. Youngest one before you was 31. Had 15 years of experience and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford." He paused.
"He lasted 4 days before he drove away at 3:00 in the morning and never came back. Left his entire toolbox sitting on the floor." "What happened to him?" Ethan asked.
Joker glanced sideways at him. "We don't know. Never heard from him again." He let that sit in the air between them for a moment before adding casually, "The bike does that to people."
Ethan said nothing. "You scared?" Joker asked. "Yes," Ethan said, "but not of the bike."
Joker stopped walking. Ethan stopped, too. The older man turned and looked at him fully for the first time, studying him with the same careful attention a man might give to a piece of machinery he's deciding whether to trust. "Then what are you scared of?"
"Failing," Ethan said simply. "That's the only thing I've got left to be scared of." Something shifted in Joker's expression. Something that might have been the very earliest, most reluctant beginning of respect.
He turned and kept walking, and Ethan fell into step beside him. "You eat today?" Joker asked. "Yesterday."
"We'll get you something. Then you'll see the bike." They fed him in a long room that smelled like motor oil and old leather and coffee that had been sitting on a burner since sometime before noon. Someone put a plate of food in front of him without ceremony and he ate without speaking, aware of the eyes watching him from every corner of the room.
Men who were pretending to do other things, playing cards, cleaning parts, reading, but who were actually watching the kid at the table to see how he held himself, whether he'd earned the right to sit among them. He ate everything on the plate. He drank two cups of coffee. He said thank you to the man who brought it and the man looked slightly startled as if gratitude were a foreign language spoken rarely in this building.
When he was done, Joker appeared again in the doorway. "Ready?" Ethan stood up. "Yeah."