Chapter 5

Emeka didn't respond. His small finger, still with traces of dirt under the nails despite having washed his hands, gently touched the screen. The numbers changed: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Fibonacci. His old mathematics teacher had taught him that sequence when he still attended school."He's just pressing random buttons," someone scoffed. "This is going to end badly."But Aisha, who had a better view of the panel, noticed something different: the boy was not pressing buttons randomly. His movements were deliberate, calculated. There was a pattern in what he was doing.Chief Okoro also began to notice it. His mocking smile faded slightly when he saw the absolute concentration on Emeka's face. It wasn't the expression of someone lost and confused; it was the expression of someone solving a problem they understood."Wait a minute." Chief Okoro leaned forward. "You actually know what you're doing?"Emeka didn't answer. His eyes moved between different sections of the panel, identifying interwoven patterns. It wasn't just one sequence, but several working simultaneously: prime numbers in one column, Fibonacci in another, and something else in the third that took him a moment to recognize."Perfect squares," he murmured to himself. 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36.In his mind, Emeka returned to the afternoons in his old school when Mr. Adebayo would stay after class to teach him mathematical riddles. "Mathematics is the universal language, Emeka," he would say. "It doesn't matter where you come from or what clothes you wear. Numbers don't discriminate."That teacher had seen something special in him: he had filled out scholarship applications, he had spoken with private school principals. But then Chike's accident came, and all that had to take a backseat."Hey!" Chief Okoro's voice snapped him out of his thoughts. "I asked you a question. Do you know what you're doing, or are you just wasting my time?""I'm working on it, sir," Emeka replied without looking up from the panel.Chief Okoro let out a short, nervous laugh. For the first time since he had launched his cruel bet, he felt a small pang of uneasiness. Surely the boy couldn't... no, it was impossible. It was just a stroke of luck that he had identified some basic sequences.Emeka pressed a series of numbers in a specific order. The panel emitted a soft sound, different from the error beeps it had been making when the executives tried—it was a confirmation tone."What was that?" one of the employees asked."Nothing. Probably another error," Chief Okoro replied, although his voice sounded less confident than before.Aisha moved a little closer, fascinated. She had worked in that office long enough to recognize when Chief Okoro was nervous, and he was nervous now. His foot tapped the floor repeatedly—a tic that appeared only when something made him anxious.

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