Lucas nodded once and turned to leave the group to their work.
But as he walked away, the system threw another fault directly in front of Grace—the same warning, cycling back exactly as before. Something in her composure finally broke.
"Fix my jet," she said loudly enough for the whole hangar to hear, "and I will pay you $1 million."
A few technicians laughed under their breath, assuming it was nothing more than an angry outburst aimed at nobody in particular.
Lucas stopped walking. He did not argue, and he did not smile. He simply turned back and asked one question of his own: whether Grace would let him see the complete maintenance log if he found the cause. She agreed without fully considering what she was agreeing to.
Lucas removed his watch, rolled up his sleeves, and stepped toward the aircraft that three specialists had already failed to understand.
Lucas did not reach for the expensive modules first. He asked Jason to run the diagnostic sequence again, exactly as it had been run before, and this time he simply watched. He stood back from the aircraft with his arms folded, paying attention not to the error codes themselves, but to the precise moment each warning appeared on the screen. A pattern began to form in his mind long before he touched a single wire. He noticed that the warnings clustered around the instant a particular equipment group received electrical load, and that the data readings on the shared bus began to drift the moment that load came online.
He asked whether the avionics bay had been opened during the most recent maintenance cycle. Jason confirmed that it had. Connor, standing at the edge of the group, shifted his weight and said nothing, though the color had started to leave his face.