Chapter 15: Day Two

Dawn on the second day smelled like burning.

Not the clean burning of cooking fires. The other kind. The kind that meant buildings and vehicles and things that weren’t supposed to burn. It came from the west mostly, carried on a wind that hadn’t existed yesterday, and Tobi’s new nose broke it down into layers whether he wanted it to or not. Concrete. Rubber. Something chemical from the direction of the industrial area. Underneath all of it, fainter, something biological that he identified and then immediately stopped thinking about.

He’d been awake since the two creature engagement at the northern fence.

That was four hours ago.

He hadn’t gone back to sleep because every time he closed his eyes his new hearing filled the darkness with the campus, all of it at once, every breath and shuffle and whispered conversation, and his brain didn’t know yet how to turn it down while he was unconscious. So he’d sat on the library steps and watched the sky lighten and let the information wash over him and tried to learn how to live inside it.

By the time actual dawn arrived he’d mapped the entire campus by sound alone.

Four hundred and sixty one people. He’d counted the breathing signatures over three hours, which was either impressive or deeply unsettling depending on how you looked at it. Nineteen people with obvious ability activity, the specific biological hum of something awakened and running. Three gate sites within eight hundred meters, all currently inactive but two of them carrying the residual pressure signature of something that had come through recently.

And Ada. Always Ada, that small rapid breathing island, forty meters away in the east wing, completely steady now, no gold thread visible, just a baby sleeping through the end of the world with the absolute confidence of someone who hadn’t been informed about it yet.

Musa sat down next to him without warning.

Tobi hadn’t heard him coming, which shouldn’t have been possible with his new hearing, and he turned sharply and Musa held both hands up.

"It’s just me," Musa said.

"I didn’t hear you."

Musa looked at him sideways. "I know. I’ve been practicing." He lowered his hands. The dark ability was gone, no visible sign of it, but there was something about the air immediately around Musa that Tobi’s new senses registered as slightly absent. Like Musa was borrowing a small piece of nothing and wearing it. "I figured out last night that if I push it outward I freeze things. But if I pull it inward it absorbs sound. Makes me quiet."

Tobi stared at him. "You figured that out last night."

"I had a lot of time after the southern fence. Couldn’t sleep." He shrugged. "Pain does that."

"You were in pain?"

Musa looked at him like he’d said something stupid. "I pushed my ability until my nose bled and I couldn’t feel my hands. Yes Tobi. I was in pain."

Fair point.

"How are the hands now?"

Musa flexed them. "Tingly. Like they fell asleep and are waking up badly." He paused. "How are your ribs?" 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Tobi blinked. "Better."

"Better how. Yesterday you were holding your left side every time you took a deep breath. Now you’re not."

He’d been watching that closely. Tobi noted it and filed it.

"Slept it off," he said.

Musa’s expression said he didn’t believe that at all and had made a decision to let it go for now. Which was its own kind of intelligence.

They sat in the early morning quiet and watched the campus wake up. People emerging from the main hall with the specific stiff movements of people who’d slept on floors. The cooking fire volunteers getting the morning pots going. A group of students moving through the grounds picking up debris with the industrious purposeful energy of people who needed to do something with their hands badly enough that they’d invented a task.

"My father hasn’t come in," Musa said.

He said it the same way he’d said it yesterday. Flat. Like a fact he was reciting. Like if he said it in a certain tone it wouldn’t be able to hurt him.

It was clearly hurting him.

Tobi didn’t say anything immediately. He thought about easy things he could say and discarded all of them.

"Bello Road hospital," he said finally. "That’s three kilometers northeast."

"I know how far it is."

"The Colonel sent two retrieval teams out at first light yesterday. Brought back sixty people."

"I know. I watched every group come in." Musa looked at his hands. "He wasn’t in any of them."

"That doesn’t mean—"

"I know what it doesn’t mean." His voice cracked slightly on the last word and he stopped and reset and when he spoke again it was flat again. "I’m not asking you to tell me he’s fine. I’m not an idiot." He paused. "I just needed to say it to someone."

Tobi looked at him.

Fifteen years old. Sitting on library steps at dawn on the second day of the apocalypse with an ability he’d had for less than twenty four hours that he’d already pushed to its absolute limit to save people he’d known for twelve hours.

"Okay," Tobi said. "I heard you."

Musa nodded once. Looked at the cooking fires.

They sat there until the smell of rice reached them and then they went and got some.

The Colonel called a full assembly at eight in the morning.

He stood on the steps of the main faculty building and four hundred and sixty something people stood in the courtyard and listened, and Tobi stood near the back and listened with them and also listened to the gate sites and the perimeter and the sounds of the city beyond the walls simultaneously because he couldn’t turn any of it off.

The Colonel’s voice carried well. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to.

"Day two," he said. "We’re still here. That matters."