Then he nods and pushes his chair back, turning toward the whiteboard. “Okay, playtime’s over. I need your assistance with a sensor calibration problem that’s throwing the readings off for the launch segment of Vortex Rise.”
Leon groans. “That’ll take all day to fix.”
“Then we’d better crack on with it,” Theo says.
Fifteen
By the time the sky outside the glass windows turns indigo, we’ve gone through three pots of coffee, polished off all our takeout, and reviewed every sensor-alignment file in the system.
Theo has barely moved all day, except to scribble increasingly desperate equations across the whiteboard and pace a well-worn path between his laptop and the display screen.
My internal clock has long since given up trying to figure out what time it is, but my eyes are currently staging a protest. I’ve run test after test, but the calibration issue still won’t cooperate. At this point, the code might as well be hieroglyphs.
Leon gave up an hour ago. Theo sent him back to the hotel after he fell asleep on the conference table and started snoring like a chainsaw.
“I wish I could join him,” Theo admits as we watch his retreating form wave to us from outside the conference room as he heads to the elevators. “I’ve been awake for forty hours straight.”
I press my palm to my forehead, a spike of genuine alarm cutting through my own fatigue. “Theo!” I scold.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he says, trying and failing to hide a yawn. “There’s too much riding on this project for me to take a break.”
“Is the king waiting for the correct coding so he can declare Parliament open?”
“Well no . . .”
“Will this code cure a disease we haven’t found a treatment for yet?”
“No,” he says softly.
“Then it doesn’t matter as much as you think it does,” I say, my voice gentling. “Theo, this is an amusement ride. It’s an extracurricular activity. It’s something people do on a Saturday for a three-minute hit of adrenaline.”
I leave out the part about our jobs being on the line. I’m sure it’s already looming in the back of his mind.
“It does matter. The project’s steel order is due this week. The fabrication team can’t start cutting track sections until they get the final load data from us.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Every day we’re late costs us a fortune. And if we miss the supplier’s production window, we’re talking a ten-week delay and a few million pounds down the drain.”
So much for me trying to downplay the glitch. “Crap.”
“You can say that again. Mr. Harris has been on my back about keeping Vortex on schedule. It’s already five million pounds over budget.” His tone is even. “If this latest issue isn’t resolved, he’ll make sure everyone who’s involved in the project feels the consequences. I can’t let that happen.”
And from the picture that’s been painted of thelovelyMr. Harris, I wouldn’t put it past him to fire everyone and start with a new team purely out of spite.
I take a deep breath, trying to steady my own nerves, then I reach out and place a hand on Theo’s arm. His muscles are corded with tension. “We’ll figure it out,” I say, keeping my voice steady. “We’ve already combed through three-quarters of the data. The answer has to be buried in the last stack.”
“You always sound so certain.”
“Because I am.” I slide my chair closer to his, my focus shifting back to the graphs glowing on his screen. “Look... I noticed this earlier, but I didn’t want to say anything until I was certain.” I point to a line pulsing faintly across the display, a tiny jagged spike in an otherwise smooth curve. “Do you see what I do? There’s a variance here. It’s small, but it’s consistent across the last three tests.”
He leans in beside me, our shoulders brushing. “You think it’s the sensor offset we’ve been chasing?”
“I do.” I hope my voice sounds as confident as I’m pretending to be. Inside, my stomach is performing a slow-motion somersault. If this doesn’t work, I’m not just wrong—I’m the person who gave him false hope at his absolute breaking point.
He studies the screen, the gears in his head beginning to turn. “If the baseline input is drifting,” he says slowly, his voice dropping into that deep, gravelly range that makes my skin prickle, “the feedback loop won’t sync with the encoder data. That would explain why the launch timing is mismatched.”
He turns to me. “Run the correction.”
I adjust the parameters, cross my fingers and toes, and hit Enter.The system chugs for what seems like the longest second of my life. When the recalibration finishes, thejagged, chaotic traces on the graph suddenly snap into place, realigning into a beautiful, perfect symmetry.
I jump to my feet and throw my arms around Theo in a frantic celebratory hug. He stiffens, but then his arms wrap around me, pulling me in tight. He’s solid and warm, and the tension in his back feels like it’s finally starting to fracture. He doesn’t let go. He just continues to stare over my shoulder at the screen, a long, shaky breath escaping him. “You found it.”
