Chapter 48: Modifications
The morning after Halloween, the city looked like itself again.
Simon was in the park at five fifteen with Meg running the warm-up lap, and by five forty they were on the grass working through the Wing Chun sequences.
She was good. Genuinely good — better than a month and a half of training had any right to produce. Some people had body intelligence: the ability to translate conceptual understanding into movement without excessive lag time. Meg had it. The cheer background helped — years of precision timing, spatial awareness, learning to execute under pressure — but the underlying aptitude was hers.
"Can I ask you something?" she said, between sequences.
"Sure."
"Is there a way to speed this up?"
Simon corrected her elbow position before answering. "One way. Sparring."
"Actual fighting?"
"Controlled sparring. With protective equipment. With me, at first." He demonstrated the transition she'd been slightly off on. "The forms are necessary — they build the mechanics. But mechanics without pressure testing are theory. You need to know what the techniques feel like when someone's actually resisting."
Meg's eyes lit up in the specific way they did when something shifted from abstract to actionable. "Can we start this weekend?"
"Suzy's school has the right equipment. We'll use her space."
"Is she going to be there?"
"Probably." Simon looked at her. "She's a better sparring partner for you than I am, at this stage. She knows how to apply the right amount of pressure without exceeding what you can process."
"And you?"
"I'd give you too much, too fast," Simon said. "Which would feel like a setback instead of a lesson. Suzy knows the calibration."
Meg nodded. She ran the sequence again — cleaner this time, the left side catching up to the right.
"One more thing," Simon said. "The first few sessions are going to hurt. Not seriously — the equipment handles the serious part — but you're going to use muscles in ways they haven't been used and find gaps in your form that the solo practice masked. That's normal and it's useful, but I want you to know in advance."
Meg looked at him steadily. "I became cheer captain by being the person who stayed late after everyone else had gone home," she said. "I know what working for something feels like. I'm okay with it."
Simon looked at her.
She meant it. He'd known she would.
"Saturday," he said. "Eight AM."
"Eight AM," she confirmed.
They drove their separate cars to school and arrived with fifteen minutes before first bell.
The campus energy was different — higher, the specific frequency of news that had arrived overnight and was still being processed. Several students near the main entrance were holding their phones with the expression of people who had received something they'd been waiting for.
Simon checked his email while walking.
Two messages.
The first was from UCLA's admissions office — an invitation to campus for a formal interview, scheduled for the third week of November.
The second was from Caltech — the same.
He pocketed his phone and walked to his locker.
By lunch, he knew Meg had heard from Stanford and Berkeley. Veronica had a response from Columbia. Wallace was still waiting on his first choices but had three backups confirm interest.
The college application season had officially shifted from waiting to moving.
After school, he drove to Dom's garage.
"Your parts came in," Dom said, without looking up from the Charger he was working on. He nodded toward a corner of the bay where several cardboard boxes were stacked.
Simon looked at them. "That's faster than I expected."
"Brian called in some favors with the supplier." Dom straightened up and wiped his hands. "He's been useful."
"He knows his way around a parts order," Simon agreed. He looked toward the grocery side of the property, where through the window he could see Brian and Mia at the counter in what appeared to be a comfortable conversation that had been going on for a while.
"You're okay with it," Simon said. Not a question.
"It's her choice," Dom said. "Always was." He looked at the window for a moment. "I just hope he knows what he's getting."
"I think he does," Simon said.
Dom made the sound he made when he'd decided something and wasn't going to debate it. "You need help with the install?"
"I can manage most of it," Simon said. "There's some chassis work that would go faster with two people."
"I'll be here."
Simon pulled on his work gloves, dug the specific components he needed from the boxes, and laid them out on the workbench in installation order.
The Mustang's modification plan had two tracks running simultaneously.
The first track was the performance build — the one he'd been working on with Brian's parts sourcing and Dom's shop resources. That was about the invitational in December: more power, better handling, a car that could compete.
The second track was what he was starting tonight, and it was different in character.
The weapons design knowledge he'd acquired from Laszlo had given him a comprehensive view of what was possible inside a vehicle's body — what could be concealed, how control systems integrated, what the engineering actually required versus what movies suggested it required. The gap between those two things was significant and useful.
He wasn't going to mount machine guns. Not yet, not realistically — the legal complications alone made it impractical in any timeline that involved also going to high school, and the agency would have opinions. But there was a tier of modification that was legally ambiguous at worst and practically very useful.
He started with the smoke system.
The components were standard: a fluid reservoir, a pump, a controlled heating element, output nozzles routed to exit points at the rear of the vehicle. The whole assembly fit inside a modified portion of the trunk space with room to spare. The control switch integrated into the center console as a second function on an existing button, which meant it was invisible to anyone who didn't know to look for it.
Time to install: ninety minutes.
Next: the spike strip deployer.
A compact mechanism mounted under the rear bumper, loaded with a coiled strip of hardened steel tacks. When triggered, a spring-loaded release mechanism deployed the strip across the road surface behind the car. Effective against pursuing vehicles with pneumatic tires, which covered the majority of practical scenarios.
The design was elegant. The install was fiddly — routing the trigger cable through the existing wire harness without creating a visible addition required patience and the right connectors.
Time to install: two hours.
He worked until seven thirty, at which point the light in the bay was getting insufficient and he needed to shower and get to the Buy More.
He stood back and looked at the car.
From the outside: a Mustang GT in progress. Nothing unusual.
From the inside: a car that could now do several things a stock Mustang couldn't, none of which were visible to anyone who hadn't put them there.
He stripped off his gloves, cleaned the workbench, and headed for the washroom.
Dom was still at the Charger when Simon came back through.
"Thanksgiving next week," Dom said.
Simon had gotten a call from his parents the previous weekend. The platform schedule was running long — an unexpected complication on the production side that would push the crew's return past the holiday. They'd be home for Christmas if things went well. Maybe.
"If you're around," Dom said, "come eat with us."
Simon thought about the alternative, which was an empty house and a grocery store deli turkey.
"Yeah," he said. "I'll be there."
"Good." Dom went back to the Charger. "Mia will make enough for ten people either way. Might as well use the space."
Simon took that as the invitation it was.
He said his goodbyes, drove to the Buy More, and found Chuck at the Nerd Herd desk with the particular focused calm of someone who had successfully completed an interview that day and was still processing the outcome.
Simon did his check-in — quiet, internal, the Intersect percentage advancing — and settled onto the stool beside the desk.
"How'd it go?" he said.
Chuck looked up. "I think it went well. The panel asked mostly operational questions — how I'd handle specific scenarios, how I'd manage conflict between departments." He paused. "Harry Tang wore a bolo tie."
"How'd that land?"
"The panel lead looked at it for about three seconds and then looked back at her notes," Chuck said. "Which tells you everything."
Simon smiled. "You're going to get it."
"I hope so," Chuck said.
"I know so," Simon said. "Different thing."
He went to work.
The evening was standard — customers, products, the normal rhythms of a retail floor on a Thursday. Simon helped a retired teacher choose a tablet for her grandchildren and spent fifteen minutes explaining to a man in his fifties that his television had not been hacked but had rather experienced a software update that had changed the menu layout.
At nine, he clocked out.
He drove home through the city with the windows down, because the November air in Los Angeles was finally doing what November was supposed to do — cooler, cleaner, with the particular quality that made the city feel more manageable after dark than it did in August.
He parked the Mustang, went inside, and sat at his desk.
He opened the legal pad from the previous night.
Below the equipment lists, he wrote a new section: Next phase — vehicle.
The spike strip and smoke system were installed. The next items on the list required sourcing components he didn't have yet, and some of them required suppliers he didn't have relationships with yet.
He started mapping out who those suppliers might be.
It was methodical work — cross-referencing the design database in his head against the commercial landscape of what was available without special licensing.
He worked for an hour.
Then he closed the pad, turned off the desk lamp, and went to bed.
The invitational was six weeks out. The college interviews were three weeks out. The Mustang needed another three months of performance work. And somewhere in the gap between all of those timelines, the agency was going to call again with something that required him to stop whatever he was doing and go deal with it.
He was getting better at holding all of it at once.
He went to sleep.
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