Ethan stood there for a long moment, processing the sheer scale of what Marcus had just said, and something complicated moved across his young face. Not the pure joy anyone might expect from a 17-year-old boy who'd just become a multi-millionaire in the span of a single afternoon, but something quieter, more thoughtful, like the number itself hadn't quite caught up to him yet. "Can I ask you something?" Ethan said. "Anything?"
"Why'd you actually let me try this morning at the gate? Everybody else wanted to send me away. Reaper wanted to send me away. He glanced at Reaper, who had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. "What made you say yes?"
Marcus considered the question seriously the way he considered most things weighing it before he answered. "Because you were the only person who came through that gate all week, who didn't try to sell me on how impossible this was before you'd even looked at it." He shook his head slowly. Three specialists walk through here talking about degrees and equipment and reputation. You walk through asking if you could just look.
There's a difference between a person who wants to be believed and a person who just wants to understand something. You were the second kind. I don't know why that mattered to me as much as it did. But it did.
Ethan didn't have an answer for that. Not right away. And the quiet that settled between them wasn't awkward. It was the particular comfortable silence of two people who'd just been through something together that neither of them would ever be able to fully explain to anyone who hadn't been standing in that garage. It was Dutch who finally broke it, clearing his throat, glancing at his watch like the habit of tracking time hadn't quite worn off yet, even though the countdown was finally mercifully over.
So, Dutch said, looking between Marcus and Ethan, "What happens now?" Marcus looked at the Black Phantom, whole and silent, and finally truly fixed, and then at the 17-year-old boy who'd walked in off a dirt road outside Flagstaff and changed everything in the space of a single afternoon. "Now," Marcus said slowly, "I think we figure out what a $5.9 million future looks like for a kid who just proved every expert in this state wrong." Ethan looked down at his own hands, still faintly stained with grease and sweat. And when he looked back up, there was something in his expression that none of them expected.
Not excitement about the money, not relief that the ordeal was over, but the beginning of a question. He clearly hadn't finished thinking through yet. "Actually," Ethan said slowly. "I think I might already know what I want to do with it, but it's not what you'd expect."
"Not what I'd expect," Marcus repeated slowly. kid, you just watched a courtroom almost take away the thing I built my whole life around after everything today. And I don't think there's much left that could have surprised me. Ethan almost smiled at that, but the expression didn't quite reach his eyes. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hours he'd spent bent over an engine and everything to do with something he was clearly working up the nerve to say. "Can we sit down somewhere?"