He woke to gray light and the smell of pancakes β the good kind, with the crispy edges β and for one blessed second he forgot. Then he remembered, and the stone was back, and something else underneath it, bright and hard and unmovable.
He sat up. The notebook slid off his chest. The stethoscope waited in his bag by the door, wrapped in its cloth.
Dawn came up over Bronzeville, orange and beautiful.
"Tomorrow, Grandpa," Eli whispered. Except it wasn't tomorrow anymore.
It was today.
Chapter 12: The Morning
The morning came up bright and hard, the kind of October blue that made the whole city look rinsed clean. The radiators ticked their morning song, and somewhere down the block a bus sighed to a stop.
Eli ate his mother's pancakes and couldn't have said afterward what they tasted like. He dressed in the clothes they'd laid out the night before β dark pants, white shirt, good shoes that pinched β and Carla left his tie a little crooked on purpose, because perfect would have been a lie.
"You look handsome," she said, and her voice only cracked a little.
Mo came to drive them, wearing a suit Eli had never seen, and opened the car door for Carla like she was a queen.
"You ready, lock whisperer?" Mo said.
"No," Eli said honestly. "But I'm going anyway."
"That's the whole job," Mo said.
The car moved through Bronzeville, and people came out onto their stoops to wave. Somebody had hung a bedsheet from a window: GO ELI β BRONZEVILLE'S FINEST. Tiana climbed in on her corner, phone already recording, uninvited, the way she'd done since they were seven.
"You look like a tiny accountant," she announced.
"I feel like a tiny accountant."
"Good. Accountants are terrifying. Own it."
Eli laughed for the first time that morning.
---
Grant Tower rose out of the Loop like a black chess piece, and the street in front of it was already a carnival.
Barricades. News vans stacked three deep. A crowd behind the barriers, hundreds strong, signs reading #OPENTHEOBSIDIAN. A jumbotron looped the video on repeat: Eli's hands, the bank safe, eleven minutes.
Mo pulled into the service entrance around back, where Cole Mercer waited with two of his people. Mercer looked Eli up and down the way you'd size up a locked door.
"Mr. Porter," he said. "Right on time. Let's get you inside."
The service corridors were brushed steel and low humming light. Eli's shoes squeaked. Carla's hand found his, and he held on.
They came up through the back of the stage β and the roar hit them like a wave.
The atrium had become an arena. Rows of seats, every one full. Balconies packed shoulder to shoulder. Camera platforms like siege towers. The noise was a physical thing β it pressed against his chest, it rang in his teeth.
And there, at center stage, under a cone of white spotlights, stood the Obsidian.
Nine feet tall. Black as a held breath. Twelve wheels ran down its face in a dull silver row, each numbered 0 to 99, each one waiting. It didn't look like a safe. It looked like a monument to the idea that some things were not for opening.
Eli's stomach dropped through the floor. His hands went cold. Sixty million people. A hundred to the twelfth power.
What had he been thinking?
Then his bag shifted against his hip β Otis's stethoscope inside, heavy and familiar β and his breathing slowed.
"There he is."
Wallace Grant waited at the curtain, beaming. He took Eli's hand in both of his β the grip a fraction too hard, held exactly long enough for the photographers. His smirk never moved.
He leaned down and murmured, for Eli alone: "Don't cry when it doesn't open, kid."
Up close, Grant's eyes were tired. Eli thought about pretzels, and about Chloe saying he's wrong.
"I won't," Eli said, steady as a metronome.
Something flickered in Grant's face. Then the smirk snapped back into place, and he turned toward the stage, and the roar beyond the curtain doubled.
In the wings, half-hidden by a drape, Chloe Grant caught Eli's eye.
She was dressed for the cameras, but she'd smudged her eyeliner deliberately β a small private rebellion. She looked at him across the noise and the lights, raised both hands, and gave him two thumbs up, hard and fierce.
Eli nodded. He hitched his bag higher on his shoulder. The notebook was in there. The pencil. The stethoscope.
Mercer touched his shoulder. "It's time, son."
Eli stepped past the curtain and out onto the stage.
The spotlights found him like searchlights. The roar crested β thousands of voices rising as one β and then, as he walked toward the black monolith at center stage, something strange happened.
The crowd noise fell away.
Not all at once. In layers, like water draining β the balconies first, then the floor seats, then the camera platforms β until the great atrium was so quiet Eli could hear his own shoes on the stage boards. His own breath. The blood moving in his ears.