Tobi glanced at Sade. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Sade’s expression said she had opinions about this that she was filing for later.

"Deal," Tobi said.

Gabriel extended his hand again.

Tobi shook it again.

The be careful note in his senses didn’t drop by a single frequency.

Getting fourteen Red Line members and eight campus team members back through two kilometers of broken city with four loaded carts was not a simple logistical situation.

It took forty minutes, two creature encounters, and one moment where Remi and one of Gabriel’s men nearly came to blows over who was walking point, which Sade resolved by walking point herself without asking anyone’s opinion.

The first creature encounter was three of the small clicking ones near an overturned bus. Tobi, Taiwo, and two of Gabriel’s awakened people handled it in under a minute. The two Red Line members were good. Precise, coordinated, no wasted movement. The woman with the hot ability signature, it turned out, could superheat the air around her hands, not enough to project flame, but enough that anything she grabbed cooked from the contact point outward.

She grabbed one of the clicking creatures by what passed for its neck.

The sound it made was very specific and very final.

"Nice," Taiwo said.

The woman looked at her. Something passed between them that was the beginning of mutual respect.

The second encounter was a single bipedal creature that came out of a collapsed building entrance and went straight for the carts, which suggested it was responding to smell, which was new information. Gabriel’s man with the pistol drew and fired once and the shot was accurate and the creature went down and everyone on both sides looked at the pistol with a recalibrated understanding of what it meant to have one.

Remi leaned over to Tobi while they kept moving. "How many rounds does he have," he said very quietly.

"I don’t know," Tobi said. "But he’ll know we’re wondering."

"So we should stop wondering loudly."

"Correct."

Remi looked at the pistol. "I hate that thing."

"I know."

"A gun in the apocalypse is like." He thought about it. "It’s like having the only phone charger in a room full of people with dead phones."

Tobi looked at him.

"Everyone’s very aware of it," Remi said. "And very polite."

Tobi almost laughed. It surprised him. The almost-laugh arrived before he could stop it and he pressed his lips together and kept walking.

The Colonel’s face when fourteen strangers walked through the campus gate behind Tobi’s team did not change at all.

That was impressive.

He came to the gate himself when Amara flagged him, looked at Gabriel, looked at the red armbands, looked at the pistol, looked at Tobi with an expression that said this is going to be a long conversation and we are going to have it properly.

"Colonel," Tobi said. "This is Gabriel. Red Line group, thirty one members, four blocks south. I told him you’d hear what he has to say."

The Colonel looked at Gabriel.

Gabriel extended his hand with the warm smile.

The Colonel shook it with the face of a man who had shaken the hands of people he didn’t trust on four continents. "Come to the command table," he said. "Your people wait here."

"My people—"

"Wait here," the Colonel said. Same volume. Same finality he used on everyone.

Gabriel’s smile didn’t move. "Of course," he said.

Tobi started to follow and the Colonel looked at him briefly. Come too. He’d learned to read the Colonel’s minimal signals in about twelve hours which probably said something.

At the command table, with Amara and Dele and Dr. Okafor present, Gabriel sat down across from the Colonel and they looked at each other for a moment with the specific attention of two people recognizing that the person across from them was not simple.

"Thirty one people," the Colonel said. "What abilities do you have?"

"Eight awakened. Varied types. One firearm, forty rounds remaining." Gabriel said the round count himself, unprompted, and Tobi noted that. Offering information before it could be extracted was a negotiating technique. It said I’m being transparent while controlling exactly what transparent meant. "We’ve been operating out of a hardware store on Oduduwa Street. Good walls. Limited food."

"How did you organize so quickly?"

"I’m good at organizing people." Simple. No elaboration.

"What did you do before."

Gabriel smiled. "Private security consulting."

The Colonel’s expression didn’t change. "What kind."

"The kind that involves moving valuable things safely between places that don’t want to give them up and places that need them." He let that sit. "I’ve worked in eight countries. I know how systems fail and how they hold. I know what a community needs to survive the first week." He paused. "You’ve done well here. Better than most would. But you’re going to hit scaling problems."

"Such as."

"Four hundred and sixty people is past the Dunbar threshold for informal management. You need a second tier of organization or you’ll start losing coherence. People will splinter into subgroups. Subgroups will prioritize themselves." He tilted his head. "You probably already see it starting."

The Colonel was quiet for a moment.

Tobi watched them both and thought about the be careful note his senses were still running and thought about Gabriel’s two people hidden at the corner of the warehouse and thought about forty rounds remaining offered up like a gift.

"What do you want," the Colonel said.

"To survive," Gabriel said. "Same as you." He paused. "I want my people to have walls and supply access and medical support. In exchange, eight awakened individuals and my organizational experience." He spread his hands. "I’m not asking for command. I’m asking for inclusion."

The Colonel looked at the map. At the gate markers. At the supply notes in Amara’s precise handwriting.

"Your people stay disarmed within the campus," the Colonel said. "Weapons are held at the gate and returned for external operations only."

Gabriel’s jaw tightened fractionally. "That’s—"

"Non-negotiable," the Colonel said.

A beat.

"The firearm?" Gabriel said.

"Held at the gate. Accessible within two minutes if needed." The Colonel met his eyes. "I have four hundred and sixty people, Gabriel. Many of them are children and elderly and a woman who gave birth two days ago. A firearm discharged inside this campus in a moment of poor judgment ends badly for everyone."

Gabriel looked at him for a long moment.

Then he nodded. "Agreed."

"Your eight awakened join the perimeter rotation. Standard shifts." The Colonel paused. "Your organizational experience, I’ll use where I see fit. That means I decide where, not you."

"And my people’s welfare—"

"Same as everyone else here." The Colonel’s voice was flat. "Same food. Same medical access. Same protection." He paused. "Same expectations."

Gabriel looked around the command table. At Amara who was writing everything down. At Dele who was watching Gabriel like a man memorizing a face. At Tobi, who was standing to the Colonel’s left and hadn’t said a word.

"Alright," Gabriel said.

They shook hands across the table.

Tobi watched Gabriel’s face while he shook the Colonel’s hand. The warmth in it. The ease. The complete and total absence of anything that showed what was actually behind it.

He thought about be careful.

He thought about fourteen people in a warehouse who had drilled into perfect positioning in thirty six hours.

He thought about forty rounds remaining, offered up freely.

He thought about a man called Gabriel who consulted on moving valuable things between places that didn’t want to give them up.

He filed all of it and said nothing.

His mother found him at the library steps an hour later.

She sat down beside him with two plates of rice and handed him one and they ate in silence for a moment. The campus was louder now, the Red Line people filtering through the gate, Amara processing them, children from both groups eyeing each other across the courtyard with the specific assessment of children everywhere.

"The new people," his mother said.

"Red Line. Thirty one of them."

"Their leader."

"Gabriel."

She was quiet for a moment. "Chike told me about the warehouse."

"Chike talks too much."

"Chike is a nurse. We talk." She ate a spoonful of rice. "What do you think of him."

Tobi looked across the courtyard at Gabriel, who was standing near the gate talking to two of his people, calm and easy and pleasant, the same face he’d had in the warehouse.

"I think he’s smart," Tobi said.

"That’s not what I asked."

He looked at his plate.

"I think he agreed too easily," he said.

His mother nodded slowly. Like he’d confirmed something she’d already arrived at herself.

"Watch him," she said simply.

"Already am."

She handed him more rice without asking if he wanted it.

He ate it.

Across the courtyard Ada started crying from the east wing, that full-lunged indignant sound, and his mother smiled without meaning to, the smile arriving before she could decide about it.

"She’s so loud," his mother said. Fondly. The way you say something is so loud when what you mean is thank God.

"Yeah," Tobi said.

They sat there in the afternoon sun that was just afternoon sun, no divine light in it, no gold thread, just ordinary warm Lagos light that had nothing to do with the end of the world, and for a few minutes it was almost okay.

Then his hearing found something.

Gabriel. Forty meters away. Speaking to one of his people in a low voice, below normal hearing range, below the threshold of anyone without Tobi’s new senses.

"Three days," Gabriel said. "Maybe four. Let them relax."

The other person said something Tobi couldn’t fully resolve.

"The boy," Gabriel said. "Find out what he can do."

Then he laughed at something, still quiet, and moved away and the conversation was over.

Tobi sat very still.

His plate was warm in his hands. His mother was beside him. Ada was crying her loud healthy cry forty meters away.

The boy.

Three days. Maybe four.

He put a spoonful of rice in his mouth and chewed and swallowed and kept his face the way the Colonel kept his face, which was doing nothing, which was its own kind of skill.

"Mom," he said.

"Mm."

"Don’t trust Gabriel."

She looked at him.

"Don’t let him near Ada," he said.

She held his gaze for a moment. She didn’t ask how he knew. She was a woman who had raised him alone through seventeen years of difficult things and she had learned, somewhere in all of it, when to ask questions and when to simply file the answer and act on it.

"Okay," she said.

They finished their rice.

Across the courtyard Gabriel laughed at something one of his people said, warm and easy, and looked up for just a moment and found Tobi’s eyes across the distance with an accuracy that shouldn’t have been possible.

He smiled.

Tobi looked back at his empty plate.

Three days. Maybe four.

Fine.