The glass of the gallery was cool against his forehead when he leaned toward it, just for a second, just long enough to feel the chill bleed through. He thought of the press already assembling in the media room downstairs, the analysts sharpening their knives, the competitors who would smell blood before noon. If Hale walked away, the stock would crater by Friday. Four thousand jobs. His name. His father's name, which he had spent forty years trying to make mean something.
He thought of the girl. The thought came uninvited, and he tried to shove it away. That skinny kid at the fence, her notebook full of scratchings. *She thinks she knows something.* He had laughed at her. Had security walk her off. The memory of her eyes — steady, unafraid — pricked him like a needle.
What had she said, exactly? Something about the tower, the timing. He had cut her off before she could finish, the way he cut off everyone who didn't arrive with a title. Now her words came back to him in fragments, irritating and insistent, like a song heard once and never quite forgotten.
Down in the garage, a commotion started. Shouting near the loading doors. Hawthorne opened his mouth to ask what was happening when the elevator at the end of the gallery chimed.
Security rushed in first. Then, between two guards, came a girl with scraped-up sneakers and a backpack worn to threads. Zara Williams. Her hair was pulled back, her face set with a calm that looked wrong on someone thirteen years old.
"Sir, she climbed the freight dock fence — she had a pass code —" the guard stammered. "We don't know how she got the code —"
"She's on the visitor list from last month," another guard said. "Never got removed. I'm sorry, sir, we'll —"
"Wait." Hawthorne raised a hand. The gallery went silent except for the hum of the air conditioning. He descended the short stair to the gallery floor, his shoes clicking on the polished concrete, and walked until he stood three feet from the girl. Twenty stories of contempt rose in his throat. But something in her face stopped the words before they formed.
"What do you want?" he asked.
Zara looked past him, through the glass, at the dead car. "I know what's wrong with it."
The engineers in the gallery stared. One of them — a junior — actually laughed, a short nervous bark that died the instant Vasquez turned her head.
Hawthorne let out a slow breath. "You know what's wrong." He turned to Vasquez. "Do you hear this? The child from the fence is here to save us."
Vasquez said nothing. Her eyes were on Zara, not Hawthorne.
"Listen," Zara said, her voice level, "I've been watching that car for five months. I know every sound it makes. And I know what killed it." She held up the notebook — the same worn notebook the guards had taken from her the day before. Someone had returned it. "It's in here. All of it. The tower, the timing, everything."
"Mr. Hawthorne," the guard said, "want me to remove her?"
Hawthorne studied the girl. She was thirteen, homeless, standing in a room full of the smartest engineers on the planet, and she did not flinch. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small-town garage flickered — his father's hands, grease under the nails, the smell of motor oil. *Rich, pay attention, the car is talking to you.* His father had said that about a wheezing pickup with a hundred thousand miles on it, and nine-year-old Rich had listened, and fixed it.
When had he stopped listening?
He laughed then, but the laugh sounded hollow even to him. "You have sixty seconds of my time, girl. Not one more."
Zara didn't smile. She stepped forward until she was close enough that he could see the determination burning in her eyes like a struck match.
"Give me a minute," she said.
And something in Richard Hawthorne — something that had been armored for forty years — cracked, just a hairline.
"Let her down to the garage," he said quietly.
Vasquez's head snapped toward him. "Richard —"
"Let. Her. Down."
Chapter 10
Sixty Seconds
The garage bay fell silent when Zara walked in.
Twenty engineers, some of them with advanced degrees and six-figure salaries, watched a thirteen-year-old girl in a faded jacket circle the dead prototype like a doctor examining a patient. The work lights hummed overhead, casting hard white pools on the concrete. Someone's radio crackled and was quickly silenced. The smell of ozone and hot metal hung in the air, thick enough to taste.