The equations hung in the air between them like accusations.
Wren had seen complex calculations before. He had built his reputation on solving problems that made seasoned engineers weep with frustration. But this, what his grandfather had left behind, was something else entirely. The mathematics twisted in ways that shouldn't have been possible, variables that referenced concepts Wren couldn't immediately identify, formulas that seemed to describe phenomena he had no framework for understanding.
"None of this makes sense," Wren said quietly, his crimson eyes tracking through the data streams.
"I know." Teagan pulled up another screen, this one showing electromagnetic readings that spiked and fell in patterns that defied conventional interpretation. "I've been trying to parse his work for the past six hours. Every time I think I understand one section, it leads to three more that contradict everything I thought I knew."
Wren stepped closer to the displays, his analytical mind attempting to find purchase on mathematics that kept slipping away from comprehension. His grandfather had always been brilliant, but this went beyond brilliance. This was the work of someone who had seen something, understood something, that existed outside the boundaries of accepted science.
"The atmospheric readings," Wren said, pointing to one of the data streams. "These numbers are impossible. The energy levels alone would require."
He trailed off. Would require what? He didn't know. That was the problem. Every conclusion he reached for dissolved before he could grasp it.
"Your grandfather tried to present this to the Council five years ago," Teagan said. "All seven families. They reviewed his findings for exactly forty-seven minutes before declaring him mentally unfit."
"Forty-seven minutes isn't enough time to understand even a fraction of this."
"No. It isn't." Teagan's voice carried something bitter now, an edge that Wren rarely heard. "But it was enough time for them to decide it was dangerous. Not the discovery itself. The implications. Whatever Raleigh found, whatever he calculated, it threatened something fundamental about the way the families maintain control."
Wren's fingers danced across the interface, pulling up timeline markers his grandfather had embedded in the calculations. Dates. Projections. Countdowns to something that wasn't labeled or explained. Just numbers ticking toward zero.
"He was predicting something," Wren said.
"Obviously."
"Something catastrophic."
"That's the assumption, yes." Teagan deactivated several of the displays with a wave of his hand. "But without understanding the underlying principles, we're just guessing. And guesses aren't enough. We need him. He's the only one who can explain what any of this actually means."
Wren turned to face his father fully. "They told everyone he was dead."
"They told everyone it was a mercy. That his mind had deteriorated beyond recovery." Teagan's jaw tightened. "But the government doesn't maintain maximum security medical facilities for corpses. He's in Verglas. Alive. Locked away where he can't spread his inconvenient truths."
"And you want an audience with him."
"I'm going to request one through proper channels. Petition the Council. Frame it as family business, a son's desire to speak with his father one final time before the end." The words were clinical but Wren heard the calculation beneath them. His father was already planning arguments, identifying which family members might be sympathetic, building a case that couldn't be easily dismissed.
"How long will that take?"
"Days at minimum. Possibly weeks if they decide to make me grovel for it." Teagan moved toward the door, his mind clearly already shifting to the political maneuvering ahead. "In the meantime, you need to maintain normal operations. Attend your meetings. File your reports. We can't afford to have anyone questioning why the Eno family is suddenly interested in a madman's ravings."
Wren nodded slowly, but his eyes had already returned to the floating displays. There was something here, some pattern his grandfather had buried in the chaos of incomprehensible mathematics. Something important enough to hide. Important enough to be declared insane over.
"Go," Teagan said from the doorway. "The infrastructure committee meeting. You're already late."
The door hissed shut behind his father.
Wren stood alone in Lab Seven, surrounded by calculations that refused to be understood, and felt something unfamiliar settle in his chest. Not frustration. He was used to frustration. This was different. This was the uncomfortable awareness that someone had been smarter than him, had seen further than him, and he was too far behind to even see the path they had taken.
He began closing down the displays systematically, his movements automatic while his mind continued to wrestle with fragments of his grandfather's work. The atmospheric data. The timeline projections. The energy readings that shouldn't exist according to every model of physics he had been taught.
Then he saw it.
A flicker at the edge of one of the displays, so brief he almost missed it. A data file that loaded for half a second before the system automatically closed it. Corrupted data, the interface helpfully informed him. Unable to process.
Wren's fingers froze over the controls.
Corrupted data didn't flicker into existence and then vanish. Corrupted data either loaded or it didn't. This had done both, which meant it wasn't actually corrupted. It was protected. Hidden behind a failure state that would make anyone else dismiss it as digital debris.
But Wren wasn't anyone else.
He pulled up the archive's root directory and began searching for anomalies. Files that reported incorrect sizes. Code that referenced memory addresses that shouldn't exist. The digital equivalent of false walls and hidden compartments. His grandfather had been a genius. Of course he would have hidden something deeper than the obvious layer.
It took twenty minutes of careful excavation, but he found it.
A string of numbers embedded in what appeared to be a corrupted atmospheric reading. To anyone else, it would have looked like random noise. Static. But Wren had spent his entire life seeing patterns where others saw chaos.
He isolated the sequence and ran it through every decryption method he could think of. Standard encryptions failed. Advanced algorithms found nothing. So he went back to basics, to the kind of simple ciphers that were too obvious to be considered secure anymore.
And there it was.
The numbers resolved into coordinates.
Wren felt his heart rate increase by exactly twelve beats per minute. He pulled up a geographic overlay and input the location.
Mainland. Pacific Northwest territory. Deep in what was officially designated as reclaimed wilderness, far from any Tier settlements or registered infrastructure.
Nothing on the official maps. No facilities. No structures. No reason for anyone to visit that location.
Which meant his grandfather had hidden something there.
Wren stood perfectly still for thirty seconds, his mind racing through possibilities. The smart decision would be to tell his father. Wait for the Council's response. Approach this methodically.
But methodical meant slow. And those countdown timers in his grandfather's calculations, whatever they were counting toward, didn't care about proper procedure.
He closed down the lab, wiped the activity logs to show only his father's session, and reactivated all security protocols. Then he walked out of Lab Seven like nothing had happened.
Twenty minutes later, he was moving through Eno Tower's executive level with the kind of purposeful calm that made people instinctively move out of his way. Nobody questioned him. Nobody ever questioned him. That was the advantage of being born relevant.
He found Chris in the security ready room, running through equipment checks with the methodical attention that made him worth keeping around. At twenty-seven, Chris had the build of someone who treated violence as a profession requiring constant practice. Where Wren was elegant precision, Chris was overwhelming force.
"Sir," Chris said, standing immediately. His expression shifted into professional alertness. "Is there a problem?"
"We're taking a trip."
"What kind of trip?"
"The kind that doesn't get logged in official reports."
Chris's expression didn't change but Wren saw the slight tension in his shoulders. "How unofficial are we talking?"
"Completely."
Most security personnel would have hesitated. Would have asked questions about authorization and procedure. But Chris had been with the Eno family since he was nineteen, pulled from military training because someone recognized that his test scores were being wasted on standard deployment. He understood that some orders came with built-in deniability.
"I'll prep the vehicle," he said.
They moved through the tower's private corridors, past laboratories where late afternoon research continued behind reinforced windows, past meeting rooms where family business was conducted in voices too low to carry. Nobody stopped them. Chris's presence legitimized anything Wren did, and Wren's authority made questioning him professionally suicidal.
The hangar was carved directly into Eno Tower's foundation, large enough to house twelve different aircraft ranging from compact grav-cars to long-range jets. Everything gleamed under harsh fluorescent lighting, maintained to specifications that would make most engineers uncomfortable with their own standards.
Wren headed directly for his personal jet, a sleek design he had modified himself to be faster and more efficient than standard models. It could cross continents in hours and do it quietly enough that most tracking systems would never register its passage unless they were actively searching for it.
The boarding ramp descended with a smooth whirrrrr.
"We're leaving Haven Island," Wren said as they climbed aboard.
Chris paused halfway up the ramp. "That requires flight clearance."
"I'm aware."
"They'll ask questions."
"And I'll answer them." Wren settled into the pilot's seat and began running pre-flight diagnostics. "Are you coming or not?"
"Yes sir." Chris took his position and began his own checklist. "Just making sure you know what you're doing."
"I always know what I'm doing."
The jet's engines hummed to life, starting low and building to a steady thrummmmm that Wren could feel in his bones. Above them, the hangar's roof panel slid open with a mechanical grinding sound, revealing a circle of sky that was beginning its transition toward evening.
"Tower Control, this is Eno Seven requesting departure clearance," Wren said into the comm system.
A pause. Then a voice crackled back, professional but uncertain. "Eno Seven, we don't have you scheduled for any flights today."
"Family business. Time sensitive."
Another pause, longer this time. Wren imagined the controller checking credentials, verifying authority, calculating whether questioning a direct family member was worth the potential consequences.
"Understood, Eno Seven. You're cleared for departure. Safe travels."
The jet lifted smoothly, rising through the hangar bay and into Haven Island's filtered atmosphere. Below them, the city sprawled in its perfect geometric patterns, people moving through their carefully constructed lives, unaware that somewhere beneath Eno Tower, calculations were counting down toward something none of them understood.
Wren guided the jet higher, passing through the dome's exit portal with a soft pop of equalized pressure. Then they were outside, in real air, under a real sky, and Haven Island was shrinking behind them.
The ocean stretched endlessly below, dark blue fading to black as the sun continued its descent. Wren input the coordinates and the navigation system calculated the route. Two hours and seventeen minutes at current speed.
Chris was watching him from the co-pilot's seat.
"You going to tell me where we're going?" he asked.
"When we get there."
"And if there's trouble?"
"Then you earn your salary."
Chris made a sound that might have been agreement or resignation. Wren appreciated that about him. The man knew when to push and when to accept that answers would come in their own time.
The mainland coastline appeared after forty minutes, a dark line against darkening sky. As they drew closer, Wren could see the sprawl of Tier Three settlements, cities that had been major centers once but were now just housing for the labor force that kept the world functioning. They looked gray from altitude. Utilitarian. Nothing like Haven Island's calculated perfection.
The navigation system guided them north, over forests that had returned to wilderness once automation made resource extraction obsolete. Down there, people lived simpler lives. Harder lives. But they probably didn't spend their nights trying to decode mathematics that their grandfather had been declared insane for understanding.
The coordinates resolved to a location deep in the forest, far from any official settlements. Wren brought the jet lower, scanning for somewhere to land. The trees were thick here, old growth that hadn't been cleared in decades.
Then he saw it.
A clearing that was just slightly too regular to be natural. Grass growing in patterns that suggested maintenance at some point. And at the center, partially hidden by vegetation, the outline of something that might have been a structure.
"There," Wren said.
Chris leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "That's not on any maps."
"No. It's not."
Wren guided the jet down, landing gear extending with a series of mechanical clunks. They touched down smoothly, grass compressing under the weight. Through the cockpit window, the structure was more visible now. Concrete walls covered in moss and climbing vines. Something that had been built and then deliberately forgotten.
Or hidden.
The engines wound down to silence. In their absence, forest sounds rushed in. Birds. Wind through leaves. The kind of alive quiet that Haven Island's parks could never replicate no matter how sophisticated their programming.
Wren stood and moved toward the exit hatch.
"Sir," Chris said, his hand moving to the weapon at his hip. "We should be careful."
"We should be quick." Wren hit the button and the hatch hissed open, admitting the smell of earth and growing things. "My grandfather hid these coordinates for a reason."
He descended the ramp without waiting. Behind him, Chris followed, because that was what he did.
The clearing was roughly fifty meters across, with the structure sitting at its center like a secret waiting five years to be discovered. As Wren approached, he could see that the door was sealed with technology that didn't match the weathered exterior. Biometric scanner. Quantum encryption. Equipment that was at most five years old.
Someone had been maintaining this place.
Wren pressed his hand to the scanner, not expecting anything.
Beep.
The lock disengaged with a heavy clunk.
The door swung open on hinges that moved smoothly despite their appearance of neglect. Beyond, darkness waited.
"He keyed it to family biometrics," Wren said quietly. "He knew one of us would find it eventually."
"Or wanted to make sure only family could," Chris observed, weapon drawn now, his body language shifting into professional alertness.
Wren found a light switch just inside the entrance. Lights flickered, hesitated, then flooded the space with cold white illumination.
His breath caught.
It was a laboratory. But not like anything on Haven Island. This was older, built by hand, equipment assembled from components collected over years. Workbenches covered in papers filled with his grandfather's precise handwriting. Chalkboards covered in equations that hurt to look at, mathematics that twisted away from understanding the moment Wren tried to focus on them.
And along every wall, calculations. Thousands of them. Building on each other, referencing each other, creating a web of understanding that Raleigh Eno had constructed alone in this hidden place while the world called him mad.
Wren walked deeper into the laboratory, his crimson eyes trying to catalog everything and failing. There was too much. Too many variables he didn't recognize. Too many conclusions that seemed to reference discoveries that hadn't been made yet or perhaps never would be because his grandfather had been locked away before he could share them.
On the central workbench, a single sheet of paper sat by itself, separated from the organized chaos surrounding it.
Wren picked it up.
The handwriting was his grandfather's but shakier, written quickly.
To whoever finds this, you're family. You're smart enough. And you're desperate enough.
The calculations make no sense yet. They will. But not until you've seen what I've seen.
The coordinates below will take you further. Go alone if you're brave. Go prepared if you're smart.
What's coming can't be stopped. But it can be survived.
Not here. Not on Earth. Not the way anyone thinks.
Trust the mathematics even when you don't understand them. Especially then.
Raleigh
Below the message, another set of coordinates.
Wren stared at the numbers, his mind automatically calculating distance and direction. Further north. Deeper into wilderness. Further from anything that appeared on official maps.
"Sir," Chris's voice came from behind him. "What is this place?"
Wren looked around the laboratory one more time. At the calculations that refused to be understood. At the equipment built to measure things he couldn't identify. At the work of a man who had discovered something so profound, so threatening, that the seven families had erased him rather than listen.
"I don't know," he said quietly. "But we're about to find out."
Outside, the sun had fully set. The forest was dark except for the light spilling from the laboratory door. And somewhere further north, deeper in wilderness that civilization had abandoned, his grandfather's final secret waited.
Wren folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
Grandpa, he thought. What did you discover?