One equation was wrong. Someone had made sure it stayed that way.
Physicist Veronica Ostrowska discovers an impossible pattern hidden in eleven years of gravitational-wave data. Every test says it is noise. Every repetition says otherwise.
Her search leads to Hedwig Landauer, a forgotten mathematician who changed a single sign in 1937—and left behind a trail designed for someone willing to check her work.
Inside an isolated German facility, Tobias Reut has spent his life protecting a secret that his own body can detect. Now his sixteen-year-old sister has been selected to pay its next cost.
With a critical demonstration approaching, Veronica and Tobias must decide what can be proved, what must be exposed, and whether discovering the truth will save a life—or make the underlying danger available to everyone.
Conserved Quantity is a literary science thriller about hidden knowledge, institutional complicity, and the terrible difference between what the laws of nature require and what people choose to do.