Instead, she asked what Maya wanted next. "I want to get back to Saturday,"Maya said. "And I want them to know what he did. Those are two different jobs. Both are mine."Denise studied her. "One of them is yours with Camille. The other belongs to a process that has to listen to everyone. Don't carry either by yourself. After dinner, Maya opened her laptop and waited for the shared backup folder to load. Camille joined the call from her bedroom and held up her notebook to the camera. On one page, she'd written a list of all the parts they had to replace.
On another, she'd made a larger heading, things we know. The remote folder showed the first seconds of their best trial, then the second trial, then several short files from the last demonstration. The files stopped before the moment Maya needed most. A narrow gray bar at the bottom of the screen said that the most recent segment was pending synchronization from a device. Maya looked at the blue-cased phone phone in her backpack.
She could try again on her home wireless network, but the device was almost out of power and she didn't want to damage a half-written file. She plugged it into the wall first and left the screen awake. The little progress wheel turned twice, paused, and turned again. Maybe tomorrow, Camille said through the laptop speakers. Maybe.
Camille leaned closer. Even if the video doesn't exist, we know what happened. We do. Then don't let him make you doubt it. Maya looked at the broken machine on the towel.
She hadn't doubted what she had seen. What frightened her was how easily a room could be persuaded that it had seen something else. On the phone, the progress wheel froze. A warning appeared. Network transfer interrupted.
There was one local file below it, unfinished and without a thumbnail. Its time label began with the minute when Beacon had hit the floor. Maya moved her cursor toward it, but a message from Dr. King arrived first. The event director wanted both teams written accounts by 9 the next morning. Easton had already submitted his.
He described the destruction as an emergency safety intervention. Maya read the sentence twice in the quiet kitchen. The broken wheel cast a small shadow across her notebook. She knew one recording might change what the officials believed. But whatever happened with that unfinished file, she would have to keep working long enough to prove what Beacon was built to do.
By 8 the next morning, somebody had put a photograph of Beacon on the school message board with a caption that said, "Bed Southside's unsafe science experiment finally got what it deserved."The picture showed the broken frame. It didn't show Easton's hands. Maya stood at her locker reading it on Camille's phone. Students flowed past them toward first period, carrying breakfast sandwiches and unfinished assignments.
Two boys wearing North Point hoodies had stopped near the trophy cabinet to talk about the accident as though that they'd been appointed witnesses. One said the robot had almost jumped into the crowd. The other said Easton had probably saved a little kid's life. There weren't any little kids in that demonstration bay, Camille said. They don't need there to have been, Maya replied.
They need a story that's easier to tell. She did not repost the photograph to argue. That would only spread it farther. Instead, she took a screenshot of the caption, noted the time and account name, and put the phone away. She felt her anger settle somewhere low, like a stone she could carry but not put down.
Their adviser met them at the engineering lab before home room. Dr. King had already made an incident folder with separate sections for their statements, photographs, the safety checklist, and correspondence from the event. The other school statement was not in it. He refused to share anything the director had not authorized them to see. That's not me siding with North Point, he said.
It's me keeping our own work clean. Camille placed Maya's notebook beside the folder. We have the settings from 341. We can show our power off command. We can show that we wrote down a power off command.
Dr. King said if the controller is damaged, what other trace do we have? Front camera. Maya said then felt the absence like a missing tooth. If somebody returns it. Dr. King opened the equipment sign out sheet.
A front-facing black phone had been checked out to Southside on Tuesday morning. In the return column, somebody had scribbled a question mark. The director's staff hadn't recovered it. He suggested they photographed the abandoned clamp and asked which volunteers had been responsible for collecting equipment. Maya wanted him to say that Easton must have taken it.
He didn't. They spent 40 minutes reconstructing the demonstration. Camille reproduced the sensor commands on an offline laptop. Maya matched the test log to each notebook entry. The final command to the drive m had been stop acknowledged by the controller at 341 and 26 seconds.
The status light photographed 2 minutes earlier showed a perfectly ordinary functioning machine. Those details didn't prove the moment of destruction. They made Easton's emergency story less plausible, and plausibility was something a fair review had to examine. Before lunch, a notice arrived from Elaine Park, the competition director. She wanted separate interviews with both teams and an independent safety review of the damaged robot.
Till then, Southside could work on parts in its school lab, but could not bring the rebuilt machine back onto the civic center's course. Camille read the notice and looked at Maya. We're being treated like the ones who smashed it. We're being treated like people whose equipment, somebody says, was unsafe. Does that make it better?
No. Maya folded the page. It tells us what we have to answer. They walked to the lab rather than the cafeteria. The chemistry room next door hummed with a projector, and the smell of hot glue drifted under the workshop door.
On the large table, Beacon's damaged chassis waited beside three bins labeled salvage, replace, and unknown. Maya always liked that third bin. It kept them from pretending every problem already had an answer. The motor driver was visibly cracked. The h one wheel hub had broken through the layer of plastic that held its bearing.
The central frame could be straightened, but doing it too quickly might make a new axle sit crooked. The front camera survived the fall. The cheap controller that told the wheels what to do had not. Camille ran a finger above, not on the fractured chip. We have spare sensors.
We have wire. We have exactly zero compatible controllers. Maya checked their inventory sheet again. The parts bank might. The one that closes at 5.
If they have a board, it'll be older. Our code won't just run. Then we changed the code. Camille Du gave her a tired look. I love that you said that like it's one line in a notebook.
Maya almost laughed. We need to ask what they have before we argue about how long it takes. During the same period, the school media club requested a statement from Maya. A student reporter named Hannah stood in the doorway holding a notebook asking why Southside's robot had been destroyed and whether North Point's captain was responsible. Maya liked Hannah.
They had spent an entire semester in the same algebra class. That made refusing harder. I can tell you our machine was damaged during an open demonstration, Maya said. We reported what we saw. There's an investigation.
Can I say you blame Easton? Hannah asked. You can say he was holding it when it hit the floor. I'm not giving you a motive I can't establish. Hannah tapped her pen against her notebook.