He stopped in front of the Obsidian. It towered over him, nine feet of black steel, twelve wheels gleaming dully in the light. Somewhere behind him, the announcer's voice faded into the hush.
He was twelve years old, and very small, and the whole world was watching.
And he had never been more ready for anything in his life.
Chapter 13: Sixty Minutes
The rules were read aloud twice, once for the room and once for the cameras, which seemed to Eli like the same thing wearing two different suits.
A man in a gray suit with a voice built for weddings and funerals stood at the edge of the stage and read from a laminated card. Sixty minutes. One attempt. No electronic devices of any kind. A stethoscope was permitted, the man said, because a stethoscope was not electronic, and he said it in the careful way of someone who had argued about it for ten days with lawyers. The challenger would work under observation at all times. Tampering with the timekeeping, the stage, or the safe itself would void the attempt. Any questions.
Eli shook his head. His mouth had gone dry somewhere between the elevator ride and the spotlights, and he did not trust it to make sound.
The notary stamped the paper with a seal that went thunk like a tiny coffin lid, and smiled at him the way adults smile at children in hospitals.
The cameras were everywhere. Red lights, black lenses, a crane that swung over the audience like the neck of some patient dinosaur. Somewhere out in the dark beyond the stage lights sat his mother, and Tiana, and Chloe, and forty million people Eli would never meet, and the thought of them all watching his hands made his fingers feel too big for his body, clumsy as oars.
Then Mercer stepped forward.
Cole Mercer moved the way a glacier moves, unhurried and impossible to argue with. He carried a wand, one of those security wands from airports, and he patted Eli down with exaggerated care, the whole thing performed for the crowd like a magician showing his hands were empty. Shoulders. Sleeves. Waistband. Ankles. He turned Eli's pockets inside out. He lifted the brass magnifier on its cord, examined it, held it to the light, handed it back.
"No electronics," Mercer said, not unkindly. "You understand."
"Yes, sir."
"The stethoscope." Mercer held out a hand.
Eli's stomach dropped, but he handed it over. Mercer examined it too, earpieces, tubing, the round flat bell, flexing the tube between his fingers like he expected to find a wire. There was no wire. There was only brass and rubber and twelve years of grandfather's hands, and Mercer handed it back and said, "Clean," to no one in particular, and the crowd applauded the way crowds applaud things they don't understand.
It was supposed to rattle him. Chloe had warned him at the museum café: Mercer will try to get in your head. But standing there under the lights, Eli felt something cool and quiet settle over him instead, like the moment in Mo's shop when the air conditioner kicked on.
He looped the stethoscope around his neck. The earpieces were cold against his collarbones. The bell rested against his sternum, and through it he could feel his own heart hammering, which seemed funny and wrong, like a lock trying to listen to itself.
Breathe, he told himself, the way Otis used to tell him. The lock doesn't hurry. Neither do you.
The Obsidian stood nine feet tall in the center of the stage, black as a held breath. Twelve wheels ran down its face like vertebrae, each one numbered 0 to 99 in pale engraving that caught the spotlight. A single spindle. A single dial under Eli's right hand, cool brass, knurled at the edge. He had imagined this moment a hundred times in the last ten days, in bed, in the shower, walking to school, and none of the imaginings had included the smell of the stage: hot dust and ozone and lemon oil.
Sixty minutes, the man in the gray suit had said. One attempt.
Eli stepped up to the safe and laid his fingertips on the dial. The metal was cooler than he expected, almost cold, and perfectly still, the way deep water is still. Somewhere behind him Grant said something to the audience that made them laugh, a bright theatrical sound, but it reached Eli the way sound reaches a diver, muffled and far away and unimportant.
He fitted the stethoscope's earpieces into his ears. The world went soft at the edges. He pressed the bell to the safe's black flank, just left of the wheel column, where the spindle ran closest to the surface, where the notebook said the sound would be truest.
His own heartbeat. The sigh of the building's air. The faint tick of cooling metal.
And beneath it all, waiting, twelve small silences.