My son's. He's nine. Elijah paused. He made it for me yesterday. Eleanor looked at the man in front of her.
Really looked a man with the skill of a senior engineer working the graveyard shift mopping floors with a child's drawing propped where he could see it at 4 in the morning. She wanted to ask why. She could feel the question forming. Why is a man this good doing this job on this shift, but something in Elijah's face told her not to. Not yet.
Go home, Elellanar said quietly. Get some sleep. I want you in the main conference room at 9:00. Elijah's face tightened. Ma'am, 9 is he stopped himself.
9 was when he walked Theo to school. 9 was the whole reason he worked this shift. Is that a problem? No, ma'am, Elijah said. I'll be there.
He would just have to find someone to walk Theo and he already knew what it would cost him to owe that favor. At 9 the next morning, the second floor conference room was full. Dale Croft sat at the head of the long table with a cold coffee in front of him and his 12 engineers down both sides, laptops open, printed reports stacked. Elijah stood near the door in clean coveralls. Nobody had offered him a chair.
Across the room, Pria caught his eye for half a second and looked away. Elanor walked in last and didn't sit. She stood by the whiteboard and let the silence stretch for three full seconds. Elijah, she said, come up here. Show these people what you showed me at 4 this morning.
Elijah walked to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. His hand was steady. He drew the thermal sensor assembly from memory, the bracket, the connector block, the signal path. He drew the chain of failure, the heat fatigue, the cracked bracket, the drifting sensor, the false temperature spikes, the safety cut off that read a fire that wasn't there. He explained the repair.
The tab bonded across the crack. The connector locked back down. The room was completely silent. 12 engineers watched a man they'd called a janitor explain clearly and without a wasted word the thing their whole team had failed to solve in 72 hours. When he set the marker down, one of the senior engineers leaned forward.
You found this by touch? By touch first. Then I confirmed it with a meter, watching the heat reading spike where it shouldn't. Nobody spoke. Eleanor stepped forward.