"I understand."
"Good."
Grant turned to the engineers. "Clear terminal nine. Give the kid his five minutes. I want everyone watching. I want them to remember this."
He pointed at the security guards. "Start a timer on the wall screen. The second it hits zero, escort him out. And someone get legal on the phone. I want the blacklist paperwork drafted before he sits down."
Briana Wells kept recording. Her phone captured everything: the notebook on the floor, the laughter, the threat, the boot on the page, the smile on Grant's face. She saved the video to three different cloud accounts before putting her phone back in her pocket.
Terrence walked to terminal nine. The screen glowed white against the dim ninth-floor lighting. The keyboard was cold under his fingertips. Around him, 40 engineers formed a half circle.
Some smirked. Some folded their arms. A few looked uncomfortable, but said nothing.
No one spoke for him.
Grant stood at the back with his arms crossed and that smile still fixed on his face.
"Start the clock," he said.
The timer appeared on the wall-mounted screen. Five minutes. Three hundred seconds. Red numbers counting down.
Terrence opened the notebook to a page near the middle. He placed it beside the keyboard. He cracked his knuckles once. He took one breath.
Then he started typing.
The first 30 seconds were silent except for the sound of typing. Terrence's fingers moved across the keyboard the way a pianist's move across keys: fast, precise, deliberate. No hesitation, no backtracking, no pausing to think. He typed like someone who had already solved the problem and was simply writing down the answer.
The engineers in the half circle shifted their weight. A few leaned forward.
One of them, a senior developer named Cole Bennett, squinted at the screen from eight feet away. His smirk faded. He took a step closer.
"What is he doing?" someone whispered.
"He's in the kernel," Cole said. His voice was different now, quieter. "He's writing directly into the kernel."
Grant Hollister stood at the back of the group. His arms were still crossed. His smile was still there, but his eyes had changed. They were watching the screen now, not the boy.
At the one-minute mark, Terrence opened a second terminal window. He ran a diagnostic that none of the engineers had thought to run, a recursive trace that followed the vulnerability not forward through the code, but backward to its origin point.
The trace completed in 11 seconds. A map of the infection path appeared on the screen. It was clean, simple, obvious once you saw it.
"That's impossible," Cole muttered. "We checked that path. We checked it 60 times."
Terrence did not look up. He kept typing.