It turned over a second time, and on the third turn, forty years of silence broke.
The V12 roared to life.
It did not cough. It did not stutter. It came alive all at once, deep and full and furious, a sound like the engine had been holding its breath for three days and finally let it go. The noise hit the garage walls and rolled back, and you could feel it in your chest, in your teeth, in the floor under your feet: twelve cylinders perfectly in time, singing the exact note Samuel Carter had tuned them to forty years before.
For one frozen second, nobody moved. Then the garage exploded.
The household staff burst into cheers. Someone screamed with joy. Phones shot into the air. Nathan Reed jumped off his crate with both fists raised, the forgotten countdown still glowing in his hand: more than seven minutes left on the clock. The boy had needed less than eight.
Theo did not celebrate. He stood very still over the engine, one hand resting lightly on the frame, his head bowed, feeling the steady pulse of it travel up through his palm. His eyes were wet, and he was not listening to the cheering at all. He was listening to the engine. It was running clean. It was running true. It was running exactly the way the notebook said it should.
"I listened, Dad," he whispered, too quiet for anyone to hear. "I listened."
Harrison Wells stood frozen, one hand pressed over his mouth, staring at the car he had been told was beyond saving, now thundering like it had rolled out of the factory yesterday. Three days, forty experts, a fortune spent, and a housekeeper's son had brought it back from the dead in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
Walter Hayes was crying openly now, not bothering to hide it, smiling through the tears at a sound he thought he would never hear again: the unmistakable signature of an old friend.
And Garrett Boyd stood alone in the middle of it—pale, silent, the cruel words dead in his throat. He had bet everything that the boy would fail. The roar of that engine was the sound of his certainty collapsing.