Sloane had loved the joke. And Grant had paid forty million dollars to be the punchline.
Eli looked up at the booth.
Wallace Grant was gone.
Chapter 28: The Aftermath
They found Wallace Grant in the green room, sitting in a folding chair with his head in his hands.
It took the cameras eleven seconds to find him, and that was eleven seconds too long for Paige Donovan, who could be heard off-mic saying something short and profane. When the lights hit him, Grant looked up, and the whole world saw his face β not the theatrical smirk of the Sky Ballroom gala, not the talk-show grin, but the raw, unlit face of a man who had just watched a twelve-year-old dismantle him on live television. Fifty-eight years old. Forty billion dollars. Beaten by arithmetic.
Eli was still on the stage. The chant had faded into a roar of pure noise, and security was holding back a surge of people, and then the roar changed pitch β because Wallace Grant had walked out of the wings.
He'd come back. Nobody had expected that, least of all Paige Donovan, who was caught on camera with her hand half-raised like she could still stop him. Grant crossed the stage the way a man crosses a room where everyone is watching him fall, and stopped in front of the boy with the folio.
The arena went quiet enough to hear the spotlights hum.
Grant looked down at Eli. Eli looked up at Grant. And then the billionaire β the man who had unveiled the Obsidian like a king displaying a crown, who had laughed on a talk show and said "send me your best" β put out his hand.
Eli took it. Grant held on. The handshake went long β five seconds, ten, the photographers going wild β and Grant leaned down so only Eli could hear, and said, "Your grandfather taught you well, son."
It wasn't condescension. That was the thing Eli would remember. It was surrender, and it was honest, and it cost the man more than the money.
"Thank you, sir," Eli said. "He'd have liked your safe. He really would have."
Something flickered in Grant's face then β surprise, or the beginning of grief, or maybe just the first honest thing he'd felt all month. He squeezed Eli's hand once, nodded, and walked off the stage, and the crowd let him go in something like silence, which was kinder than applause would have been.
Then Mercer was there β Cole Mercer, ex-Secret Service, the man who had patted Eli down like a suspect and spent the whole hour watching the timer like it owed him money β Mercer walked out of the wings, crossed the stage, and stopped in front of the boy.
Everyone expected him to say something. Mercer said nothing at all. He drew himself up, heels together, and saluted.
A twelve-year-old Black boy from Bronzeville, saluted by a Secret Service man on live television. The image would be on every front page in the country by morning.
Then Chloe was there, pushing through the security line like it was made of paper, her robotics-club lanyard bouncing, tears all over her face and the biggest grin Eli had ever seen. She threw her arms around him β hard, the way Tiana hugged β and shouted into his shoulder, loud enough for the nearest microphone: "You did it! You actually did it, you beautiful genius!"
"I did the arithmetic," Eli said, dazed, hugging her back. "It was just β the tail was nine, Chloe. Ninety-nine minus nine."
"Shut up," she said fondly, and hugged him harder.
And then his mother was there. Carla Porter had made it down from the family section through a crowd that parted for her like water β a woman who worked two jobs and slept four hours and had signed the waiver that morning with shaking hands. She didn't say a word. She just gathered her son into her arms, stethoscope and folio and all, and held him the way she had held him when he was seven and his father didn't come home from the construction site. Eli buried his face in her shoulder and let himself be twelve for exactly thirty seconds.
"You did it, baby," she whispered into his hair. "You did it."
Tiana arrived a minute later, having run down four flights of stairs with her phone still recording, and threw herself at both of them hard enough to nearly topple the trio. "Forty million people," she gasped. "Eli. Forty million. You're trending in, like, nine countries."
The cameras drank it all in. This was better than the safe. This was the story.
In the green room, Grant stood up. He straightened his tie with hands that were almost steady. He looked at the monitor, at the boy and his mother, at his own daughter with her arms around both of them, and something in his face did the complicated arithmetic of a man who has lost half a billion dollars and is trying to decide what kind of man he is going to be about it.