The workshop smelled like hot quartz and the particular sweetness of rune-oil that had been heated past its recommended operating temperature.
Wikk knew it was wrong the way he knew most things, not through reasoning but through the vibration that travelled up through the test bench and into his forearms when he held the engine casing during a run. The Mark VIII prototype sat on the bench like a sleeping animal, compact, the housing panels removed to expose the internal architecture: rotor assembly, compression chamber, the oscillation dampener that his grandfather had redesigned seven times across three decades and that Wikk had rebuilt twice in four months because the drawings in the notebook were precise and the drawings were wrong and the drawings being wrong was the most useful thing about them.
