The Reluctant Mechanic

The bell above the workshop door clanged like a dropped spanner, and Matthias Reinhardt looked up from the gearbox he was dissecting with the expression of a man who had already decided I was trouble.

"Wir sind geschlossen," he said. We're closed.

"I know." I stepped inside anyway. The air smelled of coffee, machine oil, and the faint sweetness of solder — a smell that hit me somewhere beneath the ribs. Ten years since I'd breathed it last. Ten years, and two weeks. "You don't close for Voss Industries, though. Not when they come begging."

His hands stilled. He was a big man — forearms like bridge cables, beard streaked grey, eyes that missed nothing despite the easy smile he usually wore. The smile wasn't there today.

"I don't work for Voss," he said. "Haven't for six years. Whatever you're selling, lad, take it back across the river."

"I'm not selling anything. I'm offering." I pulled the folded pages from my jacket — six of them, printed at an internet café in Neukölln because I didn't own a printer and didn't trust my flat not to be watched. "Your patent. The dual-chamber filtration system. Filed 2014, buried by your employers, and now sitting in a drawer while half of Kreuzberg breathes diesel fumes."

Matthias's jaw tightened. "You've done your homework."

"I've done more than that." I spread the pages across a workbench, shoving aside a tin of bolts. "I know why you left. You refused to sign off on the cheap seals on the Baltic pipeline. You said they'd fail in cold water. Reinhard Voss called you hysterical and had you escorted off site."

His face went very still. "That's not public."

"No. It isn't." I met his eyes and let the silence sit. I couldn't tell him the truth — that I'd watched him die of a heart attack in a hospital corridor in my first life, alone, three weeks after Elara's lawyers bled him dry in a lawsuit he never should have lost. That the guilt of doing nothing had sat on my chest alongside the cancer. "But I'm not here to talk about the past. I'm here about the future."

He crossed his arms. "Go on, then."

"Green hydrogen. Small-scale electrolysers for apartment blocks — modular, cheap, German-made. The tech exists; it's the integration that's missing. You've spent thirty years making machines work when everyone told you they couldn't. I need a partner who won't cut corners."

"And what are you bringing to this grand partnership? Besides insider gossip?"

I smiled, and for once it nearly reached my eyes. "Software. Control systems, predictive maintenance, the bit that makes a cheap electrolyser run like an expensive one. I can build it. I've already built the prototype — it's on a laptop in my flat, running a simulation that would make your old colleagues weep."

Matthias laughed — a low rumble, unwilling. "You've got nerve, I'll give you that. Who are you, exactly?"

"Kieran Voss."

The laugh died. He looked at me the way people looked at me in my first life, right at the end — like I was something contagious. "Reinhard's boy. The adopted one."

"Reinhard's cast-off," I said evenly. "Which is precisely why I'm standing in your workshop and not his boardroom. I'm not asking you to trust the family. I'm asking you to trust that I want to build something that outlives them."

He was quiet a long moment, studying the pages. Then he tapped a column of figures. "This efficiency rating. It's optimistic."

"It's achievable. I've run it four hundred times."

"Four hundred." He snorted. "And if I say yes? What's the money situation?"

"Twenty thousand euros to start. Mine, not borrowed — I sold a car I don't drive any more." I didn't add that the car had been a gift from Ilse on my twenty-first birthday, or that selling it had felt like cutting off a hand. "You keep your shop. We work evenings. If it fails, you've lost nothing but time."

Matthias rubbed his beard. Something shifted behind his eyes — the same thing I'd seen in the mirror these past two weeks. Hope, dragged out of storage, suspicious of the light.

"One condition," he said. "When we're big enough to matter, we don't sell out to a conglomerate. Not Voss, not anyone. We stay ours."

"Deal."

We shook on it, and his grip was warm and dry and real. For one absurd moment I wanted to tell him everything — the funeral, the diagnosis, the way his coffin had looked so small. I didn't. Some truths would get me locked up.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Then again. Then a third time, insistent as a wasp.

I knew before I looked. Ilse Voss had a talent for finding the exact moment a person felt safe.

**"Kieran. Family dinner, Friday, 19:00. The villa. Your father wishes to discuss your future. Do not embarrass me by declining. — Mutti"**

The word *Mutti* sat on the screen like a trap. She'd never once let me call her that to her face.

I remembered the last time she'd summoned me to that dining room. The white linen, the crystal, the way Elara had smiled at me over the rim of her glass as Reinhard read out the terms of my disinheritance — *for the good of the company*. I'd stood there with gravy cooling on my plate and understood, finally, that I had never been a son. I'd been a placeholder. A lesson for the real heir.

Friday. Four days.

Matthias was watching me. "Bad news?"

"Family."

"Ah." He said it like a man who knew exactly what family could cost. "You going?"

"I don't know yet."

But I did know. I was going to spend the next four days building a reason not to.