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Adrian Voss met Ethan's eyes and felt the ground shift beneath him.
It lasted half a second. Then he buried it, straightened his posture, and spoke with the composed authority of a man who'd been running rooms since before this kid could walk.
"Mr. Mercer. My colleagues from the press and I have arrived, as requested."
He gestured at the testing ground around them.
"This is your chosen venue. Perhaps you could direct us to the actual setting for the verification meeting?"
Ethan didn't look up from the console. He was still calibrating something, his fingers moving across the display with the focused efficiency of someone who had more important things to do than make conversation.
He jerked his chin toward the far side of the testing ground.
Adrian's eye twitched.
The entire press corps turned to look where Ethan had indicated, and the collective silence that followed was the specific kind that precedes either laughter or violence.
A few rows of mismatched stools, clearly dragged from various corners of the facility. A folding table that looked like it had been borrowed from a break room. No backdrop. No podium. No projection screen. No branding.
Anyone who knew what they were looking at would call it a verification meeting. Anyone who didn't would assume a group of retirees had gathered in an abandoned warehouse to play cards.
At the back of the reporter pack, Ryan Calloway shook his head and bit back a grin.
The first press conference had been two stools and a workbench in a rented factory. Now, for the biggest media event of the year, with the entire Republic watching, Ethan had provided crooked stools and a folding table in a military testing ground.
Consistency, at least, was not something anyone could accuse him of lacking.
"This is absurd! Every person here is a professional journalist. You expect us to sit on these?"
"Mercer, go rearrange this immediately. Leather seats, at minimum. This is a nationally televised event, not a campfire."
"Be a good sport and fix this. When we write our coverage, we might go a little easier on you."
The reporters spoke with the casual entitlement of people who believed their coverage controlled this boy's fate. In their calculation, Ethan was about to be publicly humiliated. He needed them on his side, or at least not actively hostile. Which meant he should be accommodating, grateful, maybe a little pathetic.
Ethan didn't lift his head.
"If you don't like it, leave. Nobody's keeping you here."
The brevity of the response, delivered without eye contact, without apology, without the faintest trace of concern for their opinion, hit the reporters like a bucket of cold water.
Several of them opened their mouths to argue. Adrian cut them off.
"Enough. The meeting won't take long. Sit down."
His tone wasn't friendly. It was the voice of a man who'd spent a hundred thousand marks on transportation and driven an hour across the city, and was not going to watch the whole thing derailed by an argument about furniture.
The reporters shut up and sat down.
The seating arrangement sorted itself by the unspoken hierarchy of media influence. Nationally famous anchors and top-tier online personalities claimed the front rows. Provincial reporters took the middle. Municipal journalists and freelancers were pushed to the back.
Ryan Calloway, as a recently unemployed reporter from a city television station with no institutional backing and a reputation that rose and fell with Ethan's, ended up in the last row. Corner seat. Worst angle. Furthest from the stage.
He didn't complain. He'd sat in worse places.
Ethan, who'd been watching the seating arrangement play out while pretending to work on the console, looked up.
His eyes scanned the rows until they found Ryan, tucked into the back corner like an afterthought.
"Ryan. What are you doing back there?"
Ryan looked up.
"Come sit in the front row."
The testing ground went quiet.
Then Ethan turned to the reporters occupying the premium seats and his voice dropped several degrees.
"You. All of you in the front row. Move to the back."
The explosion was immediate.
"Mercer, this is outrageous!"
"Who do you think you are? We're not moving anywhere!"
"Try and make us. We have every right to sit where we please."
A few of them crossed their arms and settled deeper into their stools with the stubborn defiance of people who were accustomed to being the ones who decided where they sat and who sat beside them.
Ethan watched them for a moment. Then, very calmly:
"This is a classified research facility. I am the acting director for the duration of my residency, by order of Dr. Edmund Hargrove. The soldiers in this room answer to me."
He tilted his head slightly.
"You're welcome to test what happens when you act like squatters on military property. I can tell you in advance that it's considerably less comfortable than moving to the back row."
Three soldiers stepped forward from the perimeter. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. Their presence communicated everything necessary about the chain of command and where the reporters fell within it.
The front-row journalists looked at the soldiers. Looked at each other. Looked at the exits. And then, with the reluctant shuffling of people who'd just discovered they were not, in fact, the most powerful people in the room, they gathered their equipment and relocated to the last row.
Ryan walked to the front, sat down, and set up his camera with steady hands and a face that betrayed nothing.
But inside, he was thinking about the first press conference. Two stools. One camera. A factory that smelled like instant noodles. And the same kid, with the same unshakeable certainty, telling the world to watch.
Behind him, the displaced reporters fumed.
"What's so special about him? He's only front row because he's Mercer's pet."
"After today, when Mercer's reputation is finished, Calloway goes down with him."
"A reporter with no standards who'll do anything for fame. We should write to every outlet in the Republic and have him blacklisted."
"Agreed."
"Seconded."
Ryan heard every word. He didn't turn around.
He'd heard worse. And in about ten minutes, every person whispering behind him was going to eat those words with a side of humble pie.
With the seating settled, Ethan wiped his hands on a rag, set down his tools, and walked to the front of the testing ground.
He picked up a microphone from the folding table, tapped it once to check the connection, and addressed the room.
"Welcome to the verification meeting. I appreciate everyone making the trip."
"As you all know, the purpose of today's gathering is to resolve a dispute. Specifically: who invented controllable nuclear fusion technology?"
He turned to Adrian.
"Voss Industries claims that I plagiarized research their company spent over a decade developing. Is that correct, Mr. Voss?"
Adrian rose from his seat. His expression was perfectly calibrated. Righteous. Wounded. The face of a man whose life's work had been stolen and who was bravely seeking justice.
"That is correct."
He addressed the cameras.
"Voss Industries devoted more than ten years to full-scale research and development in the field of nuclear fusion. Countless researchers contributed their expertise, their careers, and in some cases their health to this project."
His voice cracked, just slightly. Just enough.
"We were on the verge of releasing this technology to benefit all of humanity when it was plagiarized. Stolen. Taken from us by someone who presented our work as his own."
He paused. Let his eyes glisten.
"As the head of Voss Industries, I have a responsibility to those researchers. I cannot allow their sacrifice to go unrecognized. And I cannot allow the theft of their work to go unchallenged."
Ethan watched this performance with the open appreciation of a man at the theater.
"Incredible. If the Oscars had a category for corporate press conferences, you'd sweep it."
A few reporters in the back stifled laughs. Most didn't.
The crowd was firmly on Adrian's side. The emotional performance had landed exactly as intended. The reporters who'd been dragged across the city, forced to sit on bad stools, and ordered around by a teenager were more than ready to watch him get taken apart.
"This is despicable! If Voss Industries doesn't get justice today, who will ever invest in scientific research again?"
"A national disgrace! Having this kind of scandal play out in front of international media!"
"I say skip the meeting and refer this directly to the courts. No leniency just because he's a minor!"
The hostility in the room was a living thing. Thick. Directed. Every camera pointed at Ethan like the barrel of a gun