Chapter 26 [YS: Twin brother]

Three weeks slipped by faster than I expected, mostly because there hadn't been a single spare hour in any of them.

Between school, workouts, and every free minute after that spent bent over the Maverick's engine bay, I found myself enjoying the actual work a lot more than I probably should have. I kept learning things instinctively as I went. I hadn't gotten any of this knowledge the moment I received the skill itself, but the second I actually thought about fixing something, a full step-by-step process would unfold in my head, clear as instructions printed on a page.

Georgie and I had fallen into a rhythm without really planning to, him handling the grunt work, hauling parts and holding lights while I did the actual diagnosing and fine work. I made a point of teaching him everything along the way, walking him through the why behind each step, not just the what. He actually seemed to take the explanations seriously, at least while we were both standing there in the garage together.

Georgie handled most of the sanding himself, and I stepped in to help whenever the mechanical side of things started coming together and he needed an extra set of hands.

I used Repair and Restore exactly twice that whole stretch, once on the head gasket the day its cooldown finally cleared. Using it saved me a full week of work, since I didn't have to pull the whole engine, crack it open, and ship it off to some specialty shop just to get it repaired properly. It saved a good chunk of money too.

The cost came due afterward, though. The moment the effect finished, exhaustion hit me so hard I couldn't move from the workbench for almost a full hour, just sitting there catching my breath. Lucky for me, Georgie was still at football practice during that stretch, so there was nobody around to ask questions I didn't want to answer.

That exhaustion told me something important. This skill wasn't free, not really, and I'd need to be careful about when and how often I actually leaned on it, since pushing it too far could clearly have consequences a lot more severe than an hour of sitting still. I made a mental note to experiment more carefully going forward, rather than reaching for it every time something got difficult.

The second use came ten days later, after a small accident during the frame work left a crack near the rear axle that neither of us had planned for. I managed to fix it quietly before Georgie even noticed anything had gone wrong in the first place. It wasn't a large crack, and I didn't bother restoring anything beyond the repair itself, but even that smaller use left me feeling like I'd just run ten miles flat out. I figured repairing was less intensive than restoring something which was kind of obvious.

Everything else, the fuel line, the starter, the brakes, the two of us handled together with our own hands, using a mix of tools borrowed from Herschel's garage and a few we'd bought ourselves. I only reached for the skill when it was genuinely necessary, saving it for whatever would have cost us the most time otherwise.

Where the skill really shined, though, was during the ordinary manual work. Hyper-Dexterity turned out to be almost absurdly overpowered once I actually understood what it let me do. My hands moved with a precision no person had any business having, steady enough to thread a bolt blind or file metal down to a tolerance that should have needed a machine shop.

It opened up ideas I hadn't considered before. In an era with no computer-guided precision tools, I effectively was the precision machine myself. Custom fabrication work that would have cost a small fortune in a modern shop, I could now manage with nothing but my own two hands and enough patience to see it through properly. It reminded me of the Japanese guy I'd seen once in a reel in my past life, someone who cut and shaped metal entirely by hand with the kind of precision most people would assume needed a machine. He was very famous.

By the end of the third week, the Maverick actually looked like a car again. It started now, clean and steady, no hesitation in the ignition. Fresh primer covered the rear wheel wells where the rust had eaten through, and the brakes finally bit the way brakes were supposed to.

It still needed paint and a proper detail before it was ready to sell, but for the first time since Herschel had towed it into our driveway, I let myself actually feel proud of what we'd built together. Between the two of us, we turned the piece of metal into an actual car.

Our part of the job was nearly finished. If we outsourced the paint work entirely, we'd still likely come in under budget, though the actual quotes I'd gotten so far made that option look a lot less appealing than I'd originally hoped.

Now only the paint job remained, and at first I wanted a professional shop to handle it. Appearance mattered more than people liked to admit, since a good paint job was often the very first thing that actually sold a car to somebody walking up to look at it. It also significantly increase the price of a car.

Then I heard what they were actually charging and nearly choked on the number. A thousand dollars for a standard, durable paint job. Three hundred for the cheap version that would fade and start chipping within a couple of years.

Neither option sat right with me. I wanted to build an actual reputation doing this, which meant giving customers something that would hold up, not something that looked decent for one season and then started peeling the first time it sat out in the sun too long.

I decided to handle the paint myself instead, and after a long lesson from the man behind the counter at the auto supply store, I ended up buying the most expensive option available, a urethane, or polyurethane, system that ran me three hundred dollars.

This was bleeding-edge technology for the era, quickly taking over the auto industry at the time. It ran as a two-stage system, a flat basecoat of color followed by a thick, glossy clearcoat layered on top. The downside was that it was highly toxic, which meant I had to be extremely careful and make sure Georgie fully understood exactly how serious I was about safety before we ever cracked a can open.

He listened without much argument, at least whenever we were actually in the garage together. Over the past few weeks, he'd gotten a clear enough picture of how much I actually knew about this stuff, and he'd mostly stopped questioning me whenever I laid out what needed doing.

Most of the remaining work was sanding, grinding down rust, and laying primer before the actual paint job could even begin. Georgie handled most of that side of things while I focused on the mechanical work, though we both ended up pitching in on both fronts, since I usually finished my part before he'd finished his. I still walked him through each step as we went, and he picked things up faster than I'd expected, especially once he actually got interested in what he was doing.

In the fourth week of owning the car, I finally laid down the paint on a quiet Sunday afternoon, working slow and careful the way the man at the counter had drilled into me. By the time I stepped back from it, the transformation felt almost unreal compared to where we'd started.

That evening, once the fumes had cleared enough to sit inside the garage without gagging, I brought up the next step with Georgie.

"We need to start looking for a buyer," I told him, wiping my hands on a rag. "Car's basically done. No point letting it sit around once the paint cures."

"I can ask around school," Georgie said, perking up at the idea. "Couple guys on the team got older brothers looking for a first car. I can get them to come take a look."

"Perfect, I will also get herschel to quote me a price" I said. "Spread the word. Just don't quote a price yet. I want to see it finished first before we start talking numbers. But our minimum is three thousand dollars."

This was the appraisal evaluation i got. It ended up costing us almost twelve hundred dollars total to get everything done, more than the parts and paint alone might have suggested on their own.

Georgie kicked in his own contribution of a hundred and fifty dollars toward the end, money he'd earned by picking up a few extra weekend jobs just like he'd promised he would. Between careful planning and a decent amount of luck, we hadn't wasted much of anything along the way, even though some part of me had spent the whole project quietly bracing for the worst case scenario regardless.

Most of that extra cost came down to tools, since we'd started this whole thing with only what was available to us in our garage. Over the course of the project we ended up buying a proper floor jack and a pair of jack stands, a torque wrench, a compression tester, a timing light, and a small spray gun to lay down the paint ourselves.

All told, that added up to roughly four hundred dollars, money I considered well spent given how much use we'd already gotten out of half of it before the Maverick was even finished.

"Copy that," Georgie said. This particular job, tracking down a buyer, was right up his alley.

_______

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Georgie and I turned fifteen. It ended up being a short, low-key family affair, nothing extravagant, just everyone gathered in the living room after dinner with cake and a small pile of gifts.

Mom made the cake herself, chocolate with more frosting than the recipe probably called for, exactly the way Georgie liked it. Missy handed me a card, covered edge to edge in glitter and crayon. Meemaw gave both of us a silver chain to wear around our necks.

"Your grandpa used to wear one just like it. A man always looks a little more charming with something unique. You boys ought to have one too," Meemaw said, reaching up to pinch both our cheeks at once. We both stepped back out of reach the second she let go, rubbing at our faces.

"Thanks, Meemaw," I said, turning the chain over in my hand.

Georgie took his without complaint at the table, though he leaned over to me later and muttered that it felt a little girly for his taste.

"Wear it or don't, that's your business, but it's silver, so keep it either way," I told him. "Meemaw bought it for us. Don't go disrespecting the gift."

"Fine," he grumbled, "but I'm blaming you if the guys at school say something."

Sheldon, predictably, gave neither of us anything at all.

"Gift-giving is an illogical and burdensome social convention," he announced from the couch, not even looking up from his notebook.

"Thanks for the thought, Sheldon," I said dryly, and he didn't catch the sarcasm at all.

At school, Helen gave me a harmonica, of all things. She said I worked entirely too much these days and needed some kind of actual hobby that had nothing to do with cars or books. I'd noticed it too, honestly, how much less time we'd actually been spending together lately. Nowadays i only spent like a few hours in school and went home around noon. But i loved working on cars.

She'd stopped by the garage once that week, but hadn't wanted to stick around long once she got a good look at my hands and face, both thoroughly blackened with grease and oil by that point. She wanted me to try picking up music instead, something that belonged entirely to me and had nothing to do with school or the car.

I thought her reasoning was solid enough, even if I wasn't particularly drawn to playing an instrument myself, despite loving music plenty as a listener. Still, I accepted the gift graciously, along with a warm hug that lasted a little longer than usual, which later evolved into an intense make out session and there was a little under the shirt action too. That was the best birthday gift for me. I I'd actually give harmonica an honest try.

_________

Dad surprised us both by taking us down to the DPS office the very next morning to get our learner's permits.

"Don't get used to driving anywhere without me in the car," Dad said, tossing me the keys to his truck in the driveway like it was nothing, though the grin on his face gave away how much he was enjoying this.

"Yes sir," I said, already climbing behind the wheel before he'd finished the sentence.

Georgie whooped from the passenger seat like we'd just won the lottery, and even Missy came running out onto the porch to watch, apparently unable to resist the spectacle of her brothers getting their permits even though it meant absolutely nothing for her chances of getting chauffeured around anytime soon.

"You still can't drive me anywhere," she called out, arms crossed.

"Not yet," I said. "But soon enough."

_______

In the middle of all this, Sheldon also managed to compile everything into a notebook we'd researched together, ever since we first got access to the computer, and we were planning to send the finished version off to NASA.

With the notebook finally polished into something resembling an actual academic paper, I decided it was worth protecting properly before we sent anything further out into the world.

I brought up the idea of filing for a patent and copyright with Dad one evening, since we'd need a parent's signature on some of the paperwork either way, and explained that if the recovery concept ever got picked up seriously by NASA or some private contractor down the line, we'd want our names legally tied to the work from the very start.

Dad took the idea completely seriously right away. He ended up telling me, in a rare moment of openness, about how unfair was this world, and how someone messed up his career. He didn't want anything like that happening to us if there was any way to prevent it.

The following week, the two of us sat down with an attorney he knew through a friend of his from the plant. The paperwork listed Sheldon and me as co-authors and co-inventors, splitting any future claim to the research evenly between the two of us.

It cost more than I'd expected out of pocket, filing the patent and hiring the lawyer was not cheap but Mom and Dad ended up covering most of it themselves. Dad tried to hide it, but I caught the wince on his face all the same when he wrote out the check, the number clearly stinging more than he wanted to let on in front of us.

The day the paint job finished, still tacky and drying under the shop light, I found myself lingering out in the garage far longer than I actually needed to, just looking at what we'd built over the past few weeks. The Maverick looked genuinely stunning now, nothing like the rusted-out shell Herschel had towed into our driveway.

Standing there in its presence, I felt the skill quietly responding on its own, offering to lock in the Durability Enhancement now that the project counted as finished. I agreed without hesitation. It didn't cost me anything at all, which told me this particular part of the skill only activated once a project was fully, properly complete.

I was finally starting to understand how the whole thing actually worked. It was a real advantage, no question, but not some reality-breaking, world-ending kind of power either. Grounded, practical, useful.

I also let the passive Efficiency Enhancement effect settle fully into the car, and I could feel, almost instinctively, that its performance had climbed across the board by a clean ten percent. It needed less fuel, ran smoother, pulled harder, braked tighter. Every metric nudged up together, like the whole car had been quietly upgraded into something better than it had any right to be.

I decided right then that I wouldn't lean on this too often going forward. Even without the exhaustion tied to Repair and Restore, there was something about handing a car this much of an edge for free that made me uneasy, mostly because I didn't want anyone getting suspicious about how a couple of fourteen-year-olds had managed to turn out work like this.

This first car, I figured, I could afford to pour everything into. Moving forward, though, I'd need to be a lot more careful about how much of myself I actually let show through in the work.