Arjun looked at the manual with new eyes. The greasy fingerprints were no longer dirt. They were signatures. The handwritten notes in the margins weren’t vandalism—they were a conversation across decades. The sketch of the check valve, the calculation for blow-in plate pressure drop, the faded warning about “don’t trust the OEM torque spec on the fuel nozzle—use 85 ft-lbs instead”—all of it was tribal knowledge, fossilized in paper.

"Do it," Meera said.

Years later, when he became the senior engineer, he would place that same manual on the desk of each new recruit. And he would say the same words:

At 2:00 AM, the grid dispatcher called. They needed a rapid start. The ambient temperature was 42°C, humidity was crushing, and the fuel gas composition had been erratic all week—classic conditions for a flameout or a dreaded combustor acoustics event.

Tonight, the Brick faced its greatest challenge.