Ivory pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves. She opened her backpack. She set her composition notebook on the edge of the mahogany table, right next to a crystal water pitcher that cost more than her monthly rent.
"I'll need to go downstairs," she said, "to the South Building. I need to be in front of the machine."
Pemberton stood. "Then let's go."
The entire room moved. 14 people filed into the elevator, rode it down to the basement level, walked through the steel double doors, and stepped onto the factory floor.
The fluorescent lights hummed. The air smelled like old grease and cold metal. The disabled SD9 unit sat in the center of the floor like a patient on an operating table. Ivory walked straight to it, no hesitation. She'd been here before, in the dark after midnight with her mother's key card. She knew this machine better than anyone in the room; she just hadn't been allowed to say so until now.
Dr. Prescott stood in the back. She hadn't spoken a word since arriving, but she watched Ivory's hands as the young woman approached the machine. The way her fingers moved across the housing: confident, precise, no wasted motion. Prescott leaned toward Pemberton and murmured, quiet enough that only he could hear, "Watch her hands. She already knows what's wrong. She's known for weeks."
Ivory set her magnification lamp on the workbench, opened her notebook to a page marked with a bent paper clip, and looked up at the room: 14 faces staring at her, most of them skeptical, some of them hostile, one of them smiling like this was entertainment.
She didn't speak to the room. She spoke to the machine.
"All right," she said. "Let's show them."
Ivory started with the part nobody else had opened. Every consultant, every engineer, every diagnostic team that had touched the SD9 focused on the same things: firmware, sensors, hydraulics—the obvious suspects, the things you check when you went to engineering school and learned to follow the flowchart. Ivory didn't follow flowcharts; she followed the machine.