“Overlap,” Maya whispered.

The problem was a single, stubborn short. A 3.3V rail was kissing the ground plane somewhere in the dense jungle of the south-east quadrant, near the main processor’s memory bus. Every time they powered up, a tiny puff of acrid smoke rose from C442, a decoupling capacitor that wasn’t even supposed to be warm.

Dev looked at Maya. “You just diagnosed a short that didn’t exist in any netlist, any schematic, any continuity test. You diagnosed a ghost .”

Dev leaned in. On the boardview, the two planes showed as overlapping translucent shapes, creating a muddy brownish color. He’d always assumed that was a rendering artifact.

Maya Lin knew the boardview file better than she knew her own apartment floor plan. The file’s name was a mouthful: nb8511-pcb-mb-v4.brd . It was the last hope for a failed prototype of a neural-interface wearable, a project codenamed "Echo Weave." The original designer had vanished six months ago, leaving behind a labyrinthine motherboard and a single, cryptic boardview file with no schematic diagram to match.