Both would cost reputation. The only question was how much of each the company was willing to absorb.
Evelyn said neither. She said it simply, without raising her voice, the way her father used to end certain discussions.
Cameron looked at her for a moment longer than necessary, then wrote something in his notebook. Mason heard the entire exchange through the ventilation grate in the ceiling of the lower workshop.
He was sitting on an overturned crate holding a cup of coffee that had gone cold, looking upward at nothing in particular. When the voices above went quiet and the meeting ended, he stayed where he was for a long time.
Then he said, very quietly to no one, "Tertiary pressure valve, secondary seal ring. They've never read the original drawing." Luna asked him that evening, while he read to her from a picture book about machines, why gears needed each other.
He paused longer than the question required. Then he said, "Because alone, a gear is just metal."
"When they mesh together, that's when they create motion." Luna considered this with great seriousness, adjusted her grip on Cog, and was asleep within 4 minutes. Mason sat beside her for a while after her breathing slowed, then carried the book to the kitchen table, turned to a blank page at the back, and began to draw.
Not slowly, not uncertainly, his hand moved across the paper with the speed and precision of someone transcribing something they already knew by heart. The lines were fine and technical and absolutely exact.
He worked until midnight without looking up. At 2:00 in the morning, he drove back to the facility.
His level two access card worked on the building entry. He was registered for overnight maintenance rotation, and the card did not distinguish between basement level access and upper workshop access.
The GT7 bay had a yellow tape line across the entry and a sign that read, "Engineers only." Mason stepped over the tape without breaking stride. He did not bring unusual tools.
He opened his standard issue kit on the floor beside the car and began from the outside in, removing panels in an order that was not documented anywhere in the current maintenance protocol because the current maintenance protocol was three generations removed from the original design logic. He worked from memory, not the uncertain memory of someone trying to recall a procedure, but the memory of someone who wrote the procedure in the first place.
The tertiary pressure valve housing came apart in his hands the way it was meant to. He found the secondary micro seal ring, a component so small and so specific that it was not listed in any version of the parts manifest that currently existed in the company's inventory system because Mason had added it by hand to the physical assembly before the first test run and had never formally documented it, intending to do so later.
Later had not come. He replaced the seal with a component from a cross-referenced part number he had memorized, reassembled the housing in reverse sequence, and ran a manual pressure check using the analog gauge on the wall, a gauge that most of the current engineering staff did not know how to read because it predated the digital diagnostic system by 15 years.