"So you're saying," Lena said carefully, "that this twelve-year-old might be doing something no expert on earth thought to try."
"I'm saying," Ray said, his voice dropping to almost a whisper, "that if he's doing what I think he's doing β mapping eleven wheels by ear and leaving the twelfth for last β then he knows something about this safe that Henrik Sloane's own blueprints never told anyone."
He looked straight into the camera.
"Grant should be worried."
Chapter 18: Wheels Four and Five
By the fourth wheel, Eli's hands had learned the Obsidian's language, and the work went faster.
It was like learning a person's laugh, he thought β at first every laugh sounds the same, and then one day you can pick your mother's laugh out of a crowded restaurant. The safe's chorus was still there, the remaining wheels turning in their indifferent unison, but now he could hear the shape of each silence before he found it, the way you can hear a room's shape in the dark.
Wheel four announced itself almost at once. He swept the dial and felt the drag begin at eighty, deepen through the eighties like a road going downhill, and at ninety-one the lever dropped with a click he felt in his molars. A generous gate, this one β Sloane allowing himself a little mercy, or a little vanity. Eli bracketed it out of discipline: ninety tight, ninety-two tight, ninety-one the place where the safe exhaled. He set it and felt it hold, and wrote 91 in the notebook under the 8, and the column of numbers was starting to look like a small ladder he was climbing.
The clock read 41:18.
Nineteen minutes gone. Four wheels home. Somewhere behind him the hive had gone quiet in a new way β not the restless buzz of before, but a held-breath stillness, the sound of a thousand people trying not to make a sound. Even the crane camera had stopped whirring. It hung over the stage like a held thought.
Wheel five was a fighter.
He swept once and felt nothing. He swept again, slower, and felt nothing, and the old doubt flickered β what if the notebook was wrong, what if the mirror principle was a story his grandfather had gotten wrong, what if he was a fool on a stage in front of forty million people. He breathed it down. Four counts in. Six counts out. The lock doesn't hurry. Neither do you.
Third sweep. There β at twenty-eight, the faintest thickening, gone before he could be sure. He went back, narrowed the sweep to a span of ten numbers, then five, then three, moving the dial in increments so small his fingertip barely seemed to move. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one.
Thirty-three.
Click.
It was the faintest yet, a whisper of a whisper, and for a heartbeat he didn't trust it. He bracketed it twice to be sure: thirty-two tight, thirty-four tight, thirty-three the loosening, the yes. He set it. It held. He wrote 33 in the notebook, and his hand was steady now, the numbers small and neat as soldiers.
Five down.
The clock read 34:07.
Twenty-six minutes gone, and he was nearly halfway through the wheels with more than half his time left. The arithmetic was kind now, undeniably kind, and this time he let himself feel it for one bright second β a flare of something like joy, quickly banked, because joy made the hands hurry and hurried hands lied.
He pulled the earpieces out and rolled his neck, and looked up at the great screen out of the corner of his eye, and that was when he saw Mercer.
Cole Mercer had moved. He no longer stood at the edge of the stage with his arms crossed. He stood near the timekeeper's table now, close enough to read the clock without the screen, and he was watching the timer the way a hawk watches a field β utterly still, utterly intent, as if by staring hard enough he could make the numbers fall faster. His jaw was tight. When the clock ticked to 34:00, something in Mercer's shoulders dropped a fraction, and Eli understood: the head of Grant's security was counting down Eli's time like it was his own money running out.
Because it was. Five hundred million dollars of Grant's money, and Mercer was the man paid to protect it.
Grant himself had retreated to the wings. Eli could see him there in the half-dark, the microphone dangling forgotten in his hand, Paige Donovan leaning in to say something urgent in his ear. Grant wasn't listening to her. He was watching the boy. The theatrical smile was gone entirely now, and what was left on Wallace Grant's face was something Eli had never seen there in any of the footage: the expression of a man watching the tide come in toward a castle he'd built too close to the water.
In the front row, Chloe caught Eli's eye and grinned β quick, fierce, unmistakable β and mouthed something that looked like keep going.