Raymond was 13, all arms and legs and quiet intensity. He had heard the engineers talking in the corridor on his way to the staff room. Not the words, exactly—just the frustration in them. The particular tone of people who were running out of ideas, but not running out of invoice hours.
Raymond stopped walking. He stood in the corridor for a moment, head tilted slightly to the left, the way he always did when something had caught the part of his brain that didn't switch off.
Then he walked to the garage.
He stood at the entrance for a full minute, just looking. The Ferrari sat in the center of the space under the kind of lighting that made everything look surgical: laptops open on portable stands, cables running from diagnostic ports, four men in expensive branded workwear standing around the car with the body language of people pretending to have a plan.
Nobody noticed Raymond. He walked to the car, crouched beside the engine bay, and listened.
One of the engineers, a heavy-set man named Patterson who had driven in from Detroit that morning, looked up and frowned. "Hey, kid, this is a restricted area."
Raymond didn't look at him. "Can you start it for me?"
"Excuse me?"
"The engine. Can you try to start it? I just want to hear it."
Patterson looked at his colleagues. One of them almost smiled. The other two looked at the ceiling. "Kid, we have been running full system diagnostics for four days. We have equipment in this room that costs more than most people's houses. I don't think—"
"Please," Raymond said quietly, without looking up.
Something about the way he said it made Patterson pause. He glanced at the others. Then, with the expression of a man who has decided to humor something simply to prove a point, he leaned into the car and turned the key.