Not enough to short. Just enough to corrode a single pin on the encoder feedback line. And that pin was telling the drive’s gate driver a lie: that the voltage had collapsed.

“The motor is fine. The drive is fine,” Kazuo said, pulling a can of contact cleaner and a brass brush from his tool pouch. “It’s the cable.”

“Swap the drive,” Miho suggested, already reaching for her radio to summon a spare from the stockroom. “We’ll be back up in forty minutes.”

Below it, in tiny, almost illegible script: Listen past the code.

Line Seven lurched forward. Bottles spun. Filler heads descended. The tanker’s valve opened with a pneumatic sigh.

Kazuo wiped the brass brush on his pants. “No code is a killer. It’s just a scream. Your job is to find out what’s hurting it.”

The clock was the real enemy. A tanker of preheated fruit pulp was waiting at the blending station. Downstream, a fleet of empty glass bottles sat like an army waiting for orders. Every minute of downtime cost ¥38,000.