The morning sun caught the crystalline spires of Haven Island like light through a prism, scattering rainbows across the perpetual shimmer of the protective dome. From the mainland, it looked like a dream suspended over the Pacific, all gleaming metal and impossible geometry, a monument to what humanity could build when it stopped pretending equality mattered.
Whoooosh.
The mag-lev trains hummed their constant song, sleek silver serpents weaving through transparent tubes that connected the island's seven districts. Inside the carriages, Tier One citizens sat in climate-controlled comfort, their clothing embedded with micro-threads that adjusted temperature and color according to mood and social function. A woman in flowing azure silk that rippled like water didn't look up from her holoscreen as the train shhhhed past the outer residential zones where Tier Two families lived in their assigned sectors. Comfortable enough, privileged enough, but always aware of the invisible walls that kept them from the inner sanctums.
Down on the streets, if they could be called streets, the morning traffic had begun its choreographed dance. Vehicles didn't touch pavement here. They didn't need to. The grav-cars floated three feet above the magnetically charged roads, their engines producing nothing more than a soft hmmmmm that blended into the island's ambient symphony. A sleek obsidian model banked left at an intersection, its occupants visible through tinted windows, and the pedestrians on the sidewalk didn't spare it a glance. On Haven Island, wealth was so commonplace it had ceased to be remarkable.
What was remarkable stood at the edge of Founder's Plaza, where the massive holographic displays broadcast the day's governmental announcements to anyone who cared to look.
Wren Eno stood perfectly still, a point of absolute calm in the flowing crowd, and watched his own face flicker across the fifty-foot screen.
"The youngest lead innovator in Eno Industries' history," the announcer's voice echoed across the plaza, smooth and professionally enthusiastic. "At twenty-two, Wren Eno has already filed seventeen patents, including the revolutionary nano-filtration system that has reduced the island's water consumption by thirty-eight percent."
The holographic Wren smiled politely, a carefully practiced expression that suggested humility without weakness. The real Wren, standing below in a tailored charcoal suit that made his pale skin seem almost luminescent, felt nothing as he watched himself lie with his face.
He turned away from the display and continued walking.
The plaza stretched out before him like a garden of steel and light. Fountains of liquid mercury rose and fell in perfect arcs, their surfaces catching reflections of the people who passed. Spheres of contained plasma floated at eye level, drift, drift, drifting in preset patterns that some artist had programmed to represent the harmony of the seven families. Children, the sons and daughters of government officials, reached out to touch them as they walked past with their attendants. The spheres would chime softly, a different note for each family. C sharp for Chamberlain. E flat for Everheart. B natural for his own bloodline.
Ting ting ting.
A group of Tier Two workers were cleaning the pathway ahead, their uniforms a muted gray that marked them as essential but unremarkable. They moved with efficiency born of practice, their cleaning drones humming zhzhzhzh as they purified every surface to sterile perfection. When they saw Wren approaching, they stepped aside immediately, pressing themselves against the decorative pillars that lined the walkway.
He didn't acknowledge them. It wasn't cruelty. It was simply the way of things.
At six foot two, Wren moved through the world like a blade cutting silk. His build was lean, deceptively slender, the kind of frame that made people underestimate the coiled strength beneath his expensive clothes. But those who trained with him in the family's private gymnasium knew better. They had felt the precision of his strikes, the calculated brutality of someone who approached physical combat the same way he approached engineering problems. Identify the weakness. Exploit it. End it.
His crimson eyes, a genetic marker that ran strong in the main Eno line, swept across the plaza with mechanical efficiency. Cataloging. Analyzing. A woman in Stark family colors was arguing with her holoscreen near the northern fountain. Two Greer representatives were conducting business on a bench, their voices low and urgent. A Novar courier was rushing toward the government complex, his grav-case bobbing behind him like an obedient pet.
Nothing unusual. Nothing that required his attention.
He reached the edge of the plaza where it opened onto the Promenade of Unity, a laughable name for a street that existed solely to remind everyone of the hierarchy they lived under. Here, the buildings rose like titans, each one a testament to the family that owned it. The Chamberlain tower twisted into the sky like a DNA helix, all glass and ambition. The Sterling headquarters sat broad and imposing, more fortress than office. And there, gleaming with a thousand tiny lights embedded in its surface, stood Eno Tower.
Home. Or the closest thing to it.
Wren's personal grav-car was waiting at the designated pickup zone, its door sliding open with a soft whooomph as it recognized his bio-signature. The interior smelled of leather and ozone, that peculiar scent of expensive technology and filtered air. He settled into the seat and the vehicle lifted smoothly, joining the flow of morning traffic without requiring any input from him. The AI knew where he needed to be.
Through the window, he watched Haven Island pass by in fragments. A café where Tier One socialites sipped synthetic coffee that cost more than a Tier Three family earned in a month. A park where holographic trees swayed in a breeze that didn't exist, their leaves programmed to change color with the seasons even though the dome kept the temperature at a constant seventy-two degrees. A medical center where age was treated like a disease and death was something that happened to other people, to those who couldn't afford the treatments.
The car banked left, rising higher, and suddenly the view expanded to show the island in its entirety.
It was breathtaking in the way that beautiful lies often were.
Seven districts arranged in a perfect heptagon, each one color-coded in lights that glowed brighter as evening approached. The government complex sat at the center like a jewel in a crown, its architecture a blend of all seven family styles, a forced unity that somehow worked. Beyond the inner districts lay the Tier Two sectors, less glamorous but still pristine, still maintained to standards that would make mainland cities weep with envy. And at the very edges, where the dome met the sea, the industrial zones hummed with the machinery that kept paradise running.
Wren had designed three of those machines himself. His father had designed twelve. His grandfather, nine. The Eno family had built this island, quite literally, from the ocean floor up. Ninety years of engineering, of innovation, of proving that genius could be inherited along with name and title.
The car began its descent toward Eno Tower's private landing platform, and Wren allowed himself a moment of something that might have been pride. Below him, the tower's surface rippled with data streams, lines of code and energy readings displayed for anyone who cared to look. Transparency through exhibition. Let them see what we build. Let them know we are essential.
Kssshhh.
The car settled onto the platform and the door opened to reveal his father's assistant, a severe woman named Petra whose efficiency was matched only by her complete lack of warmth.
"Mister Eno," she said, her voice clipped. "Your father is waiting in Lab Seven. He says it's urgent."
Wren stepped out of the car and straightened his jacket. "Everything is urgent with him."
"He specified that this actually was, sir."
There was something in her tone, a hairline fracture in her usual composure. Wren's analytical mind cataloged it immediately. Filed it under concerns for later examination.
"Very well."
He followed her into the tower, through corridors that pulsed with soft blue light, past laboratories where teams of researchers worked on projects they would never fully understand were just components of larger designs. The Eno family didn't believe in letting anyone see the complete picture. Compartmentalization. Control. The two pillars that had kept them relevant even as other families had surpassed them in raw political power.
Lab Seven was in the sublevels, deep enough that the dome's ambient light didn't reach, deep enough that the humming of the island's foundational systems became a physical presence you could feel in your bones. Thrummm thrummm thrummm. The heartbeat of Haven Island, steady and eternal.
Or so everyone believed.
The lab doors recognized Wren and slid open with a hissss of pressurized air. Inside, the space was organized chaos, holoscreens floating at a dozen different heights, each one displaying streams of data that shifted too quickly for normal human eyes to follow. But Wren's eyes weren't normal. He could parse information at speeds that had gotten him tested for cognitive enhancements more than once. All natural, the tests had confirmed. Just better.
His father, Teagan Eno, stood at the center of the lab like a conductor before an orchestra, his hands moving through holographic displays with practiced grace. At forty-nine, he still moved like a younger man, his body kept fit by necessity rather than vanity. In their family, weakness was inefficiency, and inefficiency was unacceptable.
"Father."
Teagan didn't look up. "Close the door. Lock it. And activate the Faraday field."
Wren's eyes narrowed fractionally but he complied, moving to the control panel and entering the necessary commands. The air seemed to tighten as the electromagnetic field activated around the lab, cutting them off from every network, every surveillance system, every piece of technology that might be listening. When he finished, the silence felt heavier than before.
"This had better be genuinely urgent," Wren said. "I have the infrastructure committee meeting in an hour."
"Cancel it."
"Excuse me?"
Teagan finally turned to face him, and Wren felt something cold settle in his stomach. His father's face was composed, calm, but his eyes held something Wren had rarely seen there.
Fear.
"I need you to access the deep archives," Teagan said quietly. "Sublevel Nine. Vault Eighty-Eight."
Wren blinked. "That's grandfather's vault. It's been sealed since he died."
"Since he was sealed away, you mean."
The correction hung in the air between them, sharp and dangerous.
"I don't understand."
"No," Teagan agreed. "You don't. But you will." He gestured to one of the holoscreens and it flared to life, showing lines of mathematical equations that Wren recognized as atmospheric calculations. "Your grandfather wasn't mad, Wren. He was right. And we're running out of time to do anything about it."
Outside, beyond the locked door and the Faraday field and the layers of security that protected the Eno family's secrets, Haven Island continued its perfect dance. People went about their lives, comfortable in their tiers, secure in the knowledge that the seven families would continue to guide humanity toward an ever brighter future.
They had no idea that the brightest minds among them had already calculated the date of their extinction.
And in Lab Seven, deep beneath the gleaming surface of paradise, a young genius with crimson eyes began to understand that his inheritance was not just brilliance and name.
It was the weight of a world that didn't know it was dying.