Location:Seven Peaks — Formation Hall, Command Center
Date/Time:TC1856.01.19 (Morning)
Coop had asked for forty-eight hours. He used forty-one.
Raven found him in the Formation Hall at dawn, the lattice burning behind his cybernetic eyes at a frequency she could see without instruments. He'd pulled apart three recording crystals and wired them into Silas's detection array, creating something that looked like a spider's web made of light and smelled faintly of burnt copper. Silas's workbench was covered in notes — not formation diagrams but equations. Pages of them. The handwriting got worse toward the bottom of each page, the letters tilting as the hours wore on.
"You need to eat," she said.
"I need you to look at this." He didn't look up. His hands were moving across the display controls with the focused efficiency of an eighty-four-year-old Cognitect whose lattice had been processing data for forty-one hours and had found something that food couldn't wait for. "Sit down."
