So they did it. Ezra did it, and Julian stood back and kept his hands in his own pockets, which turned out to be harder than he expected. The boy popped the hood, latched the hood switch down with a bit of wire so the car would think it was closed, rolled the driver's window down so they could reach in without opening a door, and locked the car with the fob. He clipped the yellow multimeter with the cracked case between the negative cable and its post, set to amps, and only then lifted the cable free, so the car never lost power and every bit of current had to run through the meter.
"Point six amps," Ezra read. "That's high. But the modules aren't asleep yet."
"How long do they take?"
"On a Toyota, Pop says twenty minutes. Some Europeans, like an hour." He checked the clock on the wall, an old one with a Champion spark plugs logo. "We wait."
They waited. Yolanda brought out four glasses of sweet tea. Pop dozed a little, then didn't. At eighteen minutes, Ezra, getting impatient, reached to open the passenger door to look at the glovebox light, and Pop's good hand shot out and caught his wrist. Pop shook his head. Ezra looked at the meter — the number had jumped back up as the car woke at the touch of the handle — and groaned and put his forehead down on the fender.
"Now we start over," he said, muffled.
"Now we start over," Julian agreed, and something in his chest loosened that had been tight since Thursday, because this was not a prodigy, this was not some strange kid who knew things from nowhere. This was a boy who'd been taught by somebody, and who still made the mistake every apprentice made, and who had been caught by the wrist by the person who taught him.
Twenty-two minutes later, the meter settled at 0.31 amps. Three hundred and ten milliamps. Way too much; a sleeping car should sip under fifty. Ezra went to the under-dash fuse panel through the open window and began pulling fuses one at a time with Julian's plastic puller, watching the meter after each. On the eleventh fuse, the number fell to 0.02.
Ezra read the label on the panel cover. "Power outlet. The cigarette lighter one."
Julian reached in and pulled a cord from the center console: a cheap phone charger with a little blue LED, and spliced into it, a dash camera Hazel's mother's boyfriend had installed in August, wired to an outlet that stayed hot with the key off. Recording an empty parking lot all night, every night, until the battery gave up.
He sat down on an upturned bucket and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes with the back of his wrist.
Pop laughed too. Even Yolanda smiled, once, then put it away.
"I'll be at the meeting tomorrow," Julian said, when he could. "Ten a.m. Ms. Whitfield from Northgate. I'll bring the relay and the printouts. But I think you should be there. Both of you."