Derek found himself with something he hadn't had in months.
Time.
The North Compton redevelopment no longer required his constant presence. Construction schedules were locked in, supply chains stabilized, and the political noise had settled into a predictable hum. Reality Quest had passed what analysts were calling the point of no return—seven hundred million downloads worldwide, with server expansion now a routine logistical exercise rather than a crisis.
For the first time since everything had begun, the machine was running without him standing over it.
So Derek stayed home.
Not the penthouse floor of Blackfire's headquarters this time, but the quiet, temporary house he had been using while paperwork for his Bel Air purchase finalized. The rooms were sparse, deliberately so. No art. No unnecessary furniture. Just space, silence, and a wide desk near a window that overlooked the city.
It was there, late at night, that he opened a folder he hadn't touched in years.
Project Wraith.
The name meant nothing to anyone but him.
In another life, it had been dismissed as impractical, unrealistic, too expensive, too ambitious. A thought experiment that never made it past paper and theory. Derek had been younger then, poorer, without leverage or authority. Ideas without backing were just fantasies.
Now, he had backing.
But he wasn't rushing.
Wraith, as it existed now, was nothing more than a collection of handwritten notes, sketches, and diagrams—some precise, others almost philosophical. There were no blueprints, no dimensions finalized, no manufacturing tolerances. Certainly no engineers working on it, no facilities being prepared, no capital allocated.
That was intentional.
Once an idea entered the real world—once money touched it—it stopped being yours alone.
Derek wasn't ready for that yet.
The core concept was simple in theory and brutally complex in execution: a body armor system that prioritized survivability without sacrificing mobility. Not a tank. Not a spectacle. Something that could be worn without announcing itself, that didn't rely on sheer thickness or intimidation.
Protection through intelligence, not mass.
He flipped through the pages slowly.
Multilayer graphene appeared again and again in his notes, never as a miracle solution, always as a supporting element. In Derek's mind, graphene wasn't armor—it was structure. A reinforcing lattice. A way to redirect and disperse force laterally rather than absorb it head-on. Layered, oriented, bonded in configurations that existed only in theory for now.
He was painfully aware of its real-world limitations. Brittleness under certain stresses. Manufacturing scalability issues. Cost. Every drawback was noted, circled, underlined. This wasn't blind optimism. It was disciplined restraint.
Graphene was a component, not an answer.
The more speculative material appeared deeper in the folder.
A non-Newtonian, diamond-based composite—or something close enough to deserve the name.
Derek paused there longer.
This was the part that would have gotten him laughed out of a room if he'd presented it prematurely. The idea was extrapolated, not proven: a diamond-like carbon lattice suspended or integrated into a shear-thickening medium. Flexible under normal movement. Almost cloth-like when unstressed. But under sudden force—ballistic impact, sharp trauma, extreme pressure—it would lock, harden, resist.
Not magic. Physics, pushed to its edge.
He didn't pretend it existed. He didn't know how to synthesize it. He didn't even know if it was possible at scale. The notes were filled with question marks, references to unrelated research, margins crowded with phrases like theoretically viable and requires breakthrough.
Wraith was not engineering yet.
It was intention.
Two versions were sketched conceptually.
The first was passive: no motors, no power source. Just material science doing the work. Protection without amplification. Something that could be worn under clothing if refined enough.
The second was marked simply as powered variant.
No schematics. No systems defined. Just a note:
Strength amplification—fivefold target. Feasibility unknown.
That page had more unanswered questions than statements.
Derek leaned back, fingers steepled, eyes unfocused.
He wasn't building a weapon.
Not yet.
He was designing a boundary.
Everything he had built so far—Raven, Blackfire, Reality Quest—operated in spaces governed by rules, contracts, regulations, and public narratives. Wraith didn't belong there. It belonged in a different category entirely. One that demanded absolute control and absolute silence.
That was why it stayed on paper.
For now.
He closed the folder and slid it into a locked drawer, the kind that didn't connect to any network and didn't announce itself electronically. Only then did he turn to the rest of the evening's business.
The real world still moved.
Documents waited on his desk—final approvals for the Bel Air property. A ranch-style home, four bedrooms, expansive but understated. Five million dollars. No spectacle. No statement. Just privacy, space, and distance from glass towers and constant eyes.
He signed where required, methodical and calm.
Another folder detailed aircraft acquisitions. Corporate jets first—practical, flexible, assigned to Raven and Blackfire operations. Tools, not toys. Then the outlier.
An Airbus A380.
Not leased. Ordered.
Retrofitted on paper for now: reinforced structure, bullet-resistant glass, hardened electronics, EMP shielding. A flying command center, not a luxury bauble. Conference room. Office. Living quarters designed for endurance, not excess.
It would take time. Years, possibly. Derek wasn't in a hurry.
Mobility was power.
And power, like Wraith, was best developed quietly.
As the city lights flickered outside his window, Derek allowed himself a rare moment of stillness. Not satisfaction—he didn't indulge in that—but alignment. The sense that the pieces were moving in the right order.
Project Wraith would wait.
When it emerged, it would do so into a world that was finally ready to understand why it existed.
Until then, paper was enough.