A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd. Someone near the front said something Zeke couldn't hear, but the people around them laughed harder. Zeke didn't move.
"Don't be shy," Vance said, his voice carrying the way voices carry when they're used to microphones in boardrooms. "$500 million. That's enough to buy your whole neighborhood, isn't it?"
More laughter. A few people shifted uncomfortably, but the cameras were rolling, and the moment had its own momentum now.
"Come on. Show us what you've got."
Zeke's jaw tightened. He looked at the vault. He looked at the crowd. He looked at his sneakers, the crease across the left toe. And for a moment, something crossed his face that wasn't embarrassment, exactly. It was older than embarrassment: it was the specific exhaustion of being underestimated so many times that the underestimation has stopped surprising you, which is its own kind of wound, quieter and deeper.
He almost left. He shifted his weight backward, his body beginning the physics of turning away. And then he looked at the vault again. Something in his eyes changed.
He walked forward. The crowd parted—not out of respect, but out of curiosity, the way crowds part for spectacle. Zeke moved through them with his backpack on his shoulders and his hands loose at his sides until he was standing at the base of the titanium platform, looking up at six feet of matte black steel. Vance looked down at him from the steps. "You have sixty seconds."
"I know," Zeke said quietly. It was the first thing he'd said.
Vance blinked. Something about the lack of deference registered faintly, like a distant alarm. The crowd went quiet in a different way. Zeke set his backpack down and unzipped the front pocket. He didn't pull out tools; he pulled out his notebook. He opened it to a page near the middle, scanned it for four seconds, then closed it and put it away.
He looked at the vault. He raised his right hand. The sixty-second countdown had started somewhere behind him. A Vance associate was reading it aloud: "49... 48..."
The crowd had stopped murmuring. Someone near the front had their phone up, recording, the little red dot burning.