The world went very simple very fast.

He ran.

Hit the medical building door hard enough that it swung and cracked against the wall and he was down the corridor before it swung back, his new hearing already ahead of him, already in the east wing, already finding the sounds and finding the wrong one, which was the absence, which was the specific terrible silence where small rapid breathing was supposed to be.

He came through the east wing door.

His mother was bent over the cot with both hands moving, her face doing the thing it did when she needed everything she had and couldn’t spare anything for anything else. Folake was against the far wall making a sound that Tobi felt in his chest like a physical blow, this low broken sound that had no words in it, and two other nurses were moving around the cot and the whole room smelled like fear.

Tobi crossed to his mother.

"What happened," he said.

"She just stopped." His mother’s hands didn’t stop moving. Her voice was controlled in the way that costs something enormous. "Folake tried to wake her. Two minutes ago. I’ve been working since."

He looked at Ada.

Twelve hours old. Smaller than anything had a right to be. His mother’s hands moving over her with thirty years behind every motion and it still felt like not enough, it felt like nothing could be enough, it felt like the universe was a place where a child born in the first night of the apocalypse could simply stop breathing at two in the morning and nobody could do a damn thing about it.

He stood there.

He had predator class sensory enhancement and minor structural density and a machete in his hand and he was completely, absolutely, furiously useless.

His hands were shaking.

He looked at them. These hands that had killed twelve creatures tonight. That had pressed against dead monsters in the dark to pull something out of them. Shaking because of a child the size of a forearm lying on a cot.

He looked at Ada.

His system pulsed.

[ANOMALY DETECTED]

[ENTITY: HUMAN INFANT]

[DIVINE MARKING: CONFIRMED — ACTIVE]

[STATUS: CRITICAL]

[NOTE: MARKING IS PULLING.]

Pulling.

He looked at Ada and something happened with his new senses, not sight exactly, something next to sight, something that lived in the space between what eyes do and what the rest of the body does, and he half-saw it. A thread. Thin and gold, running from Ada’s chest upward through the ceiling toward the broken sky.

Pulling her toward something.

"No," he said out loud. To the thread. To the sky. To whatever was on the other side of it. "No. Absolutely not. She is twelve hours old, you do not get her, back the hell off—"

Ada screamed.

Not a cry. A full-lunged furious newborn scream, the kind that says I am here and I am angry about the temperature and someone had better do something about it immediately.

The room stopped.

His mother stepped back from the cot and put both hands over her mouth and her shoulders did something they hadn’t done since before the sky broke open, this single shuddering drop, and she made a sound behind her hands that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob or was probably both.

Folake crossed the room. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

She crossed it so fast she knocked a tray off a side table and didn’t notice and gathered Ada up against her chest and Ada screamed louder, indignant and alive and absolutely furious about the world she’d been born into, and Folake was crying openly and laughing at the same time, tears running down her face, saying something in Yoruba that Tobi didn’t catch but understood anyway.

One of the nurses sat down on the floor and started crying.

The other one started laughing and couldn’t stop.

Chike appeared in the doorway. He looked at Ada screaming. At Folake crying and laughing. At the nurse on the floor. His face went through five emotions in about two seconds and landed on something that looked a lot like joy and also a lot like exhaustion and he leaned against the doorframe and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth.

"She’s okay," he said to nobody. "She’s actually okay."

Tobi’s legs sat him down on the nearest cot without asking his permission.

He sat there with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging and Ada screaming her way back into the world and he felt something in his chest unlock that he hadn’t known was locked, something he’d been carrying since the moment Chike’s face appeared around the corner of the science block.

His mother sat beside him.

She didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then she put her hand over his and held it still because it was still shaking and he let her.

"She scared the hell out of me," he said.

"She scared the hell out of all of us." His mother’s voice was not entirely steady. For a woman who held everything together through everything that was enormous. "Her breathing had been irregular since the delivery. I should have caught it sooner."

"You caught it."

"I should have—"

"Mom." He looked at her. "You caught it."

She pressed her lips together. Nodded once. Looked at Folake and Ada, Ada still screaming but calming now, that particular brand of newborn fury winding down by degrees into something almost peaceful.

They sat together and didn’t say anything for a while and that was exactly right.

Tobi looked at the ceiling.

At the place where he’d half seen the gold thread.

It was gone now.

Or it was still there and he just couldn’t see it anymore.

He didn’t know which one was worse.

His new hearing found something at the northern fence. Tearing sound. The specific signature of a gate opening. Then footsteps, bipedal class, two of them, moving toward the campus.

He stood up.

His mother looked up at him. Her eyes moved across his face the way they always had, reading him, cataloguing him, finding the things he hadn’t said.

"What happened to you tonight," she said quietly. "Something’s different."

He looked at her.

"I’m still me," he said.

She studied him for three long seconds.

"Tobi." Her voice was low. Private. "Whatever is changing. Whatever this is doing to you." She paused. "You come back to me. You understand? Whatever you become. You come back."

He felt that in his chest harder than any hit he’d taken all night.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

He picked up the machete.

He went out into the campus and the night opened up around him completely differently than it ever had before. Every sound a coordinate. Every smell a layer of information. The two creatures at the northern fence visible to his senses two hundred meters before he reached them.

He found them in the dark before they found the fence.

The fight lasted forty seconds.

He absorbed both of them after.

When it was done he stood over the second body and his hands weren’t shaking anymore and something in him noted that fact with a feeling that was complicated and not entirely comfortable.

He checked the system.

[2 KILLS RECORDED]

[EVOLUTION POINTS: 14/300]

[PREDATOR INSTINCT RESPONSE: DETECTED DURING ENGAGEMENT]

[HOST SUPPRESSION: SUCCESSFUL]

[NOTE: THIS WILL BECOME HARDER TO SUPPRESS AS EVOLUTION CONTINUES.]

Harder to suppress.

He read it twice.

Then he looked at his hands in the dark, these hands that had stopped shaking, and thought about his mother’s voice saying you come back to me and thought about Ada’s gold thread running toward the broken sky and thought about something ancient that had called him interesting.

He closed the prompt.

He went back to the campus