Read Chapter 5: Memory Chip

The garage lights hummed low and blue in the pre-dawn dark. Elise had been at her station for three hours, chasing a ghost through the telemetry files, when she finally found what she was looking for—or rather, what was missing.

The tire degradation folder was incomplete. Three of the six compounds from yesterday's long-run simulations were there, their thermal curves mapped clean and precise. But the soft compound data—the data that would determine how long Julien could stretch a stint tomorrow—was gone. The folder structure showed a gap where the file should have been. Not a deletion. A removal.

Someone had taken the chip.

Elise pulled her headset off and let it clatter onto the desk. She stared at the file tree for another moment, running her fingers over the keyboard without pressing anything. It could be lost. Mechanics moved hardware around constantly. Memory chips got misplaced in the chaos of a race weekend—unplugged, pocketed, shuffled into the wrong bin. That happened.

But not to her files. She had labeled this one. She had checked it before leaving the garage at midnight. The data was there. And now it wasn't.

She stood and walked the perimeter of the engineering bay, her eyes scanning every surface, every open drawer, every bin labeled with a driver's name or a component system. The place was sterile, organized, and empty at this hour—just the night security guard making his rounds somewhere beyond the glass doors.

Riko's words from yesterday echoed in her skull: *Evidence may not matter in this team's power structure.*

She wasn't looking for evidence anymore. She was looking for a chip.

The mechanics' locker room sat behind the main garage, a narrow corridor lined with gray metal cabinets, each with a name stenciled in fading white paint. Elise had only been in here once, on her first day, when she'd been shown the fire safety equipment. The room smelled of rubber and sweat and the faint chemical tang of brake cleaner.

She started with the cabinets on the left. Dieter. Then Klein. Then a woman whose name she didn't recognize. She worked quickly, opening each door just enough to scan the contents, not disturbing anything, closing them as gently as she'd found them. Some were cluttered—rags, empty water bottles, spare gloves. Others were neat, tools lined up in foam cutouts like surgical instruments.

Halfway down the second row, she found it.

The locker belonged to a mechanic named Serge, a quiet man with a scarred eyebrow who worked the rear jack position during pit stops. Elise had spoken to him exactly twice. Both times he had nodded without making eye contact.

The chip sat in a clear plastic bag on the top shelf, tucked behind a spare fire-resistant balaclava. It was small, no bigger than her thumbnail—the exact model used for telemetry storage. The label on its side was worn, but she could still make out the handwritten code. Her code. She'd put that label on herself with a fine-tipped marker.

Elise stood perfectly still for a long moment. Inside the room, the only sound was the hum of the ventilation system.

Her first instinct was to grab it. To slide it into her pocket, walk it back to her station, and pretend she'd found it in the engineering bay. But she didn't move. She thought about the wrench in the wheel gun. The telemetry gaps. The way Dieter had pointed his finger at her in front of the whole crew.

If she took the chip now, whoever planted it would know it was missing. They'd close the trap. They'd accuse her of stealing equipment, and this time the evidence would be in her hands—damning no matter what she said.

She needed the data. But she needed to leave the chip where it was.

Elise pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the hall. Empty. She held her breath and lifted the chip from the bag with two fingers, careful not to smudge the surface. From her other pocket she produced a slim USB-C reader, the same one she used to transfer files between the simulator and her laptop. She slotted the chip in, connected it to her phone, and began to copy.

The transfer took twenty-three seconds. Each second felt like a minute, every hum of the ventilation system like footsteps approaching.

When the copy completed, she ejected the chip, wiped it clean with the hem of her shirt, and placed it back inside the bag. She positioned the bag exactly as she'd found it, tucked behind the balaclava. Then she closed the locker door, made sure the latch clicked, and walked back to her station without looking back.

Her hands were steady until she sat down. Then they weren't.

She pulled up the file on her phone. The data was all there—thermal curves, pressure readings, degradation rates across seventy laps of simulated running. It was clean, accurate, and exactly what she needed to calculate Julien's tire strategy for the race.

And it was the proof she needed of something else.

Elise sat in the dark engineering bay, the glow of her phone screen illuminating her face, and tried to make sense of what she'd found. If Serge had taken the chip on his own, he would have hidden it better. A plastic bag in a locker was lazy. It was careless. It was the kind of hiding place someone used when they wanted the item found by the wrong person.

Her stomach turned. She thought about the wrench. The wheel gun. The way Dieter had blamed her in front of everyone. The pattern was becoming clear, but the edges were still fuzzy—she was being framed, but she still didn't know by whom.

Marco was the obvious suspect. He controlled the data pipeline. He had access to every file the engineers produced. And he had the most to lose if Elise's scrutiny exposed whatever he was hiding. But Marco didn't work the pit crew. He didn't spend time in the mechanics' locker room. He would have needed an accomplice.

Serge had been handed the chip. That was the only explanation that made sense. Someone had given it to him with instructions to hide it, to make it look like theft—like incompetence. And when the data was discovered missing, someone would search. And someone would find.

Elise had just made sure that whoever searched would find nothing on her.

She saved the copied file to her personal drive, a shadow folder she'd created her second night in Monaco—hidden, encrypted, backed up to a cloud account she'd opened under a name no one on the team had ever heard. Then she reconnected the main system and ran a diagnostic to make sure her access had left no trace.

When she was done, she leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

Riko appeared an hour later, a cardboard tray of coffees in each hand, his eyes still heavy with sleep. He set one cup in front of Elise without a word and sat on the edge of the workbench across from her.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," he said.

"I found it," Elise said. She didn't elaborate.

Riko's expression didn't change, but his voice dropped half an octave. "Where?"

"Serge's locker."

Something flickered behind Riko's eyes. He looked toward the garage, as if he could see through the walls to where the mechanics were starting to arrive for the morning shift. "He's been with the team for eight years. Never put a foot wrong."

"Until now."

"Or he's being used." Riko took a long sip of his coffee. "Did you take it?"

"No. I copied it. The chip is still there."

Riko nodded slowly. "Good. If they search, they'll find it in his locker. But they'll be looking for it on you. You just made sure they won't find it."

"How many people have access to that locker room?"

"Everyone. We don't lock the doors during a race weekend. Too much coming and going." Riko paused. "But only a handful of people would know which locker was Serge's."

Elise thought about that. The mechanic's name was on the door in white paint, plain and legible. Anyone with eyes could see it.

"Whoever planted this," she said, "they're not trying to fire me. They're trying to destroy my credibility before the race. If I'm discredited, then when the data gaps get exposed, no one believes me about Marco."

Riko set his coffee down. "Then you need to be the one who exposes it first. Before they do."

"And say what?" Elise asked. "That I found the chip in a locker but decided to leave it? That I've been keeping copies of team data on a personal drive? I'll look exactly as guilty as they want me to look."

"Then don't tell them what you found. Tell them what you're missing."

Elise looked at the monitor, at the empty folder where the tire data should have been. The security cameras above the garage entrance winked red in the morning light, recording everything. Recording nothing that could help her.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Nadia, the head of aero: *Morning briefing in thirty. Dieter has prepared an incident report he wants to present to the team principal. It concerns you.*

Elise read the message twice. She understood what Nadia wasn't saying: Dieter was about to make his move.

She typed a response with steady fingers. *I'll be there. I have something to present too.*

Then she opened her encrypted drive and began to assemble a folder of her own.