William stepped closer. "You built this?"
"Yeah."
"With what?"
Malik gestured around. "Whatever I could find."
William stared at the setup: crude, imperfect, and yet functional. He could tell, because he had spent years around engineers—real ones, people with degrees, labs, teams—and even they didn't always think like this.
"You understand what you're doing here?" William asked.
Malik hesitated. "I think so."
William looked at him. "No," he said quietly. "You really don't."
Malik frowned slightly. "What do you mean?"
William took a slow breath. "You're not just fixing things," he said. "You're building systems. Solving problems from the ground up."
Malik looked down at the device, then back at him. "I'm just trying to make stuff work," he said.
William shook his head. "That's not 'just' anything."
The room went quiet again. Outside, the sound of a passing car drifted faintly through the air. The heat pressed against the metal walls, making them creak softly.
William reached into his pocket. Malik tensed slightly; he already knew what was coming. But this time, William didn't pull out money. He pulled out a simple white card. He held it out.
"My name's William Harrington," he said. "I run a company."
Malik looked at the card, then at him. "I figured," he said.
William almost smiled. "Keep it," he said.
Malik took the card slowly, turning it over in his fingers. The letters were clean, sharp, different from anything in his world. "What do you want?" Malik asked.
William paused. That question again: simple, direct, hard to answer.
"I want to understand how you do what you do," he said.
Malik studied him for a moment, trying to decide if that was true. "Why?" he asked.
William didn't answer right away, because the truth wasn't something he usually said out loud. "Because I think you're worth understanding," he said finally.
The words hung in the air: quiet, heavy.