Faith was a minor with no family. She entered the foster system: three homes in two years, none of them good. When she turned 18, she aged out: no home, no money, no diploma.
But she had two things nobody could take from her. The first was Elton's canvas tool roll. She'd hidden it the night before the auction, tucked it inside her jacket, and walked out. It held his personal set of precision instruments: wrenches, calipers, feeler gauges—each one worn smooth by decades of use, each one still perfectly calibrated.
The second was his philosophy: A machine don't care who you are. It only cares if you're right.
Faith held onto that sentence the way other people hold onto prayers: through shelters, through hunger, through winters spent in a van with no heat, through every person who looked at her and saw nothing worth seeing. She kept reading. She kept practicing. She kept listening. Because people lied, people judged, people decided what you were worth based on your skin, your address, your clothes—but machines never lied. An engine doesn't know if you're rich or poor, black or white, housed or homeless. It only responds to one thing: whether you're right.
And Faith Brooks was right about that jet.
Day 50.
The CA-90 was still sitting in Hangar 3 like a museum exhibit: beautiful, useless, bleeding money every hour it stayed on the ground. Preston Caldwell had stopped sleeping. You could see it in his face: the gray skin, the coffee-stained teeth, the tie that wasn't quite straight anymore.
Sixteen days until the Pentagon delegation arrived. Sixteen days until the $500 million contract review that would either make his company untouchable or expose it as a fraud.
He called an emergency all-hands meeting in the main hangar. Everyone came: every engineer, every mechanic, every department head. Even Colleen Archer showed up, a freelance tech journalist who'd been circling the story for weeks, smelling blood in the water.
Preston stood on a raised platform in front of the grounded jet. He didn't waste time on pleasantries.
"50 days, 50 mechanics, $8 million, and this aircraft still can't hold an idle for 2 minutes." He let that hang in the air. "The next team that fails, you're done. Not reassigned, not suspended—done. I'll personally walk you to the parking lot."