A thirteen-year-old homeless girl had identified the likely cause almost immediately.
Elena turned toward Zara.
“How did you know?”
Zara held up her notebook.
“Because I watched what happened before the car broke. Everyone else was looking at what happened afterward.”
The room fell silent.
Hawthorne slowly approached her.
“What’s your name?”
“Zara Williams, sir.”
“Where did you learn engineering?”
“My dad taught me some things. The rest I learned from books.”
Hawthorne looked down at her worn shoes and trembling hands.
For the first time, he seemed to understand the cruelty of his earlier words.
“Zara,” he said quietly, “I owe you an apology.”
But before he could continue, Dr. Vasquez called out from the diagnostic station.
“Richard, there’s something else.”
Everyone turned.
Elena was examining the original system logs.
“The shielding connection didn’t simply wear out,” she said. “Someone disconnected it during the last maintenance inspection.”
Hawthorne’s face tightened.
“What?”
Elena pointed toward the records.
“And the maintenance authorization came from an executive account.”
Zara looked at the screen, then slowly opened her notebook to a page she had kept hidden.
“I think I know who did it,” she whispered.
Hawthorne stared at her.
“How could you possibly know?”
Zara turned the notebook around.
On the page was a sketch of a man standing beside the prototype’s rear access panel three nights earlier.
Beneath the drawing, she had written the time, the date, and the license plate of the car he drove away in.
Elena leaned forward.
Her face went pale.
Because the license plate belonged to someone inside Technocore’s executive leadership.
And suddenly, Zara wasn’t just the homeless girl who had saved a $10 million hypercar.
She was the only witness to a conspiracy that could bring down Richard Hawthorne’s entire empire.