"No." Harrington's voice was a blade. "She finishes. When she makes one mistake, it is over."
But Whitney was not making mistakes. She was moving through the model like water through a cracked dam, finding every gap, every weakness, every assumption that had been left unchecked because no one on Harrington's team had thought to question them. Or maybe they had, and they'd been too afraid to speak up. Pages 9 through 12 went faster. Whitney's rhythm was locked in now. Scan, identify, correct, move. She filled the second whiteboard, started on the third.
Her handwriting stayed small and precise. Her breathing stayed even. The marker squeaked against the board in a rhythm that had become the only sound in the room. The livestream had crossed 1 million viewers. The hashtag had spawned three others. #mathgenius, #thewaitresswhoknew, #harringtonexposed. News outlets were picking it up. A CNN anchor tweeted, "Is anyone else watching this livestream? This waitress is dismantling a billionaire's entire model in real time." Harrington sat down.
He didn't announce it. He didn't make a statement. He just sat. The fight was draining out of him, and everyone in the room could see it, the way you can see a balloon losing air, slowly, silently, until there's nothing left but wrinkled skin. Whitney reached page 13, then 14, then 15. She was more than halfway through, and she hadn't been wrong once. The clock on the wall read 42 minutes.
Harrington had given her 45. Three minutes left. Four pages to go. Whitney looked at the clock, looked at the board, and kept writing. Page 16. Two minutes left. Whitney's marker moved across the third whiteboard, filling the last empty space in the upper corner. She was almost through. Almost done. And then she stopped. Not a pause, a full stop. The kind where your hand freezes, and your eyes narrow, and something cold slides down your spine.
She stepped back from the board, looked at the projection, looked at her own corrections, then looked at page 16 again. Something was wrong. Not with her math, with the problem itself. She turned to Harrington. "Where did the data on page 16 come from?" Harrington raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean? It came from the model, the same as every other page."
"No." Whitney shook her head slowly. "It didn't. The variant structure on this page doesn't match the rest of the model. The base parameters are different. The boundary conditions are incompatible with pages 14 and 15." She pointed at a line of numbers near the bottom of the projection.