— The screen flickered. Jenna grabbed his arm.
Marcus leaned back, grinning. “We just outsmarted General Motors.”
She put it in gear and rolled onto the runway. “Next time,” she said, “we’re flashing a 200-shot nitrous tune.”
On the screen, — the old, pirated copy he’d found on a dead forum from 2008. The interface looked like a spreadsheet designed by a sleep-deprived engineer: sliders for fuel trim, spark advance, VE tables, rev limiter. One wrong click, and the $7,000 engine in front of him would turn into a paperweight.
The fuel pump relay clicked. The cooling fans cycled on and off. The laptop fan roared. For three minutes, the only sound was the generator and the distant cry of hawks.
“You sure about this?” Jenna asked from the driver’s seat. She’d built the car with him. 5.7L LS1, ported 243 heads, a CamMotion cam that loped like a wounded animal at idle. But it ran rich—sputtering at 4,000 RPM, fouling plugs every weekend.
