The rest of the afternoon passed the way dangerous things sometimes did.

Quietly.

Gabriel’s people integrated into the campus with a smoothness that should have been reassuring and wasn’t. They followed instructions. They took their assigned positions on the perimeter rotation without complaint. They ate the same food as everyone else and slept in the same spaces and said the right things to the right people and within four hours several of them had made friends in the way that people make friends when they’re scared and surrounded by strangers.

Tobi watched all of it from various positions around the grounds and said nothing.

Sade found him near the eastern fence at five in the afternoon. She stood beside him and looked at the same thing he was looking at, which was one of Gabriel’s awakened people, the woman who cooked things with her hands, laughing with Taiwo near the cooking fires.

"You think they’re a problem," Sade said.

"I think Gabriel is a problem."

"Not the same thing."

"No," he agreed. "It’s not."

She was quiet for a moment. "He agreed too fast at the warehouse."

"Yes."

"And the round count. Offering that."

"Yes."

She crossed her arms. "So what do we do."

"Nothing yet. We watch." He looked at her. "Don’t tell anyone else. Not even Remi."

Sade’s expression said she found that slightly offensive. "I know how to keep my mouth shut."

"I know. I’m saying it anyway."

She looked at Gabriel’s woman laughing with Taiwo. "Taiwo’s going to be upset if she turns out to be a problem."

"I know that too."

Sade shook her head slowly. "You’re eighteen," she said, not like the Colonel said it, not like Gabriel said it. Like it was something she was genuinely still processing. "Why do you feel like you’re not."

He didn’t have a good answer for that so he didn’t give one.

Musa found him at six.

He didn’t say anything. He just appeared at Tobi’s side near the library steps with his hands in his pockets and his jaw doing the thing jaws do when someone has been holding something in for too long and is about to stop holding it.

Tobi waited.

"There was a retrieval team that went out this afternoon," Musa said finally. "Northeast. Toward Bello Road."

"I know. Colonel sent them at three."

"They came back twenty minutes ago." His voice was very flat. "I watched them come through the gate. I counted everyone." He stopped. "He wasn’t with them."

Tobi looked at him.

Musa’s face was doing something complicated and losing the fight with it. His jaw was tight and his eyes were bright and he was fifteen years old and his father worked night shifts at a hospital three kilometers away and the retrieval team had come back without him.

"Musa—"

"Don’t." His voice cracked on the word and he stopped and reset and when he spoke again it was quieter. "Don’t tell me it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t tell me they might have missed him. I know all of that and it doesn’t." He stopped again. Pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. "It doesn’t help."

Tobi sat down on the step.

After a moment Musa sat down too.

They sat there and the campus moved around them and the cooking fires sent smoke up into the broken sky and somewhere a group of children were playing a game that involved a lot of shrieking and running and the sound of it was very alive.

"I’m scared," Musa said. Very quietly. Like the words cost something.

"I know."

"I keep thinking about the things on the road last night. The ones at the southern fence." His voice dropped further. "What if he was outside when the first gates opened. He would have been walking to work. He walks to work, he doesn’t take buses, he says the exercise is good for him and my mum used to argue with him about it every morning—" He stopped.

The brightness in his eyes spilled over.

He didn’t wipe it. Just let it happen, sitting there on the library steps with his hands in his lap, crying in the specific way of someone who has finally stopped spending energy on not crying and has nothing left for anything except the actual feeling.

Tobi didn’t say anything.

He didn’t put his arm around him or tell him it was going to be okay. He just sat there, present, which was the thing that was actually needed, and let Musa cry until Musa was done.

It took a few minutes.

When it wound down Musa wiped his face with both hands and took a long shaky breath and looked at the sky.

"I’m going to find him," he said. Not impulsive. Not dramatic. Just decided. "When I’m strong enough to go out further. I’m going to go to the hospital and I’m going to find him."

Tobi looked at him. At this fifteen year old who had pushed an ability he’d had for less than a day until his nose bled to save a group of strangers.

"Okay," he said.

Musa looked at him. "That’s it? Okay?"

"You’re not strong enough yet. When you are, we’ll go." He held Musa’s gaze. "Together."

Musa stared at him for a moment.

Then he looked away and nodded once and said nothing else, which meant it had landed, which meant it was enough.

The gate opened at seven forty-three in the evening.

Tobi heard it before the perimeter alarm went off. The specific tearing frequency of it, west side, close, maybe eighty meters from the wall. He was on his feet and moving before Amara started shouting across the grounds.

Not a minor gate.

His senses told him that before he reached the west wall. The pressure signature of it was bigger than anything since the resonance creature at the engineering block, a deep structural pressure that he felt in his teeth and his sternum simultaneously, and his new cellular architecture registered it and said this is significant and his brain translated that into language which was: run faster.

He hit the west wall with Festus and two of the Colonel’s perimeter team and looked through the gap.

The gate was tall. Taller than the others, four meters at least, the light at its edges deep orange this time, almost amber, and the heat rolling off it was immediate and mean. Through it he could see a single shape, large, moving toward the threshold with the slow certainty of something that had never needed to hurry.

"What the hell is that," one of the perimeter team said.

It came through.

Quadrupedal, low to the ground, roughly the mass of a small truck, with a surface that looked like cooling lava, dark with orange running through the cracks of it, actual heat radiating off the body in visible waves. Where its feet touched the road the asphalt softened.

Tobi’s system ran fast.

[ENTITY: HEAT CLASS — MAGMA VARIANT]

[THREAT LEVEL: SEVERE]

[HOST RESISTANCE: INSUFFICIENT]

[STRUCTURAL DENSITY: INADEQUATE FOR DIRECT CONTACT]

[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ENGAGE DIRECTLY]

Do not engage directly.

The creature moved toward the wall.

"Get everyone back from the western buildings," Tobi said to the perimeter team. "Now. Shout it."

They shouted it.

Festus looked at the creature. At Tobi. "Tell me you have something."

"I’m working on it."

"Work faster."

The creature reached the wall.

It didn’t smash through it. It pressed against it, that lava surface making contact with the concrete, and where it touched the wall started to soften, slowly, concrete going plastic and then liquid at the contact points, orange spreading from them outward like ink dropped in water.

"Oh that is not good," Remi said from somewhere behind Tobi. "That is genuinely not good, why is the wall melting, who authorized the wall melting—"

"Remi," Tobi said sharply.

"I’m here, I’m here, what do you need—"

The wall section buckled.

A two meter chunk of it went soft and folded outward and the creature stepped through with the patience of a river wearing through stone, and it was inside the campus, and there were four hundred and sixty people behind Tobi in various states of running away or standing frozen because fear does both.

Tobi ran at it.

Not at its body. At its feet.

The ground around it was hot, the asphalt going soft, and his boots sank slightly with each step and the heat coming up through the soles was immediate and serious. He could smell his own shoes. He kept moving.

He couldn’t absorb this thing while it was alive. He couldn’t touch it while it was alive. He needed someone to do something to it before it turned toward the main hall and he needed that to happen in the next ten seconds.

"Chike," he shouted.

Chike was at the eastern edge of the grounds, too far, he wasn’t going to reach in time.

The creature turned toward the noise of the crowd.

Toward the main hall.

Toward the people.

"Hey," Tobi shouted at it. Right at it. Directly at its too-hot body. "Hey, over here, come on—"

It ignored him completely.

It took one step toward the main hall.

Gabriel stepped out from the crowd.

Tobi saw it happen in slow motion. Gabriel walking forward, past the running people, past the frozen ones, moving toward the creature with his hands at his sides and that warm pleasant expression completely gone for the first time, replaced by something focused and cold and very, very awake.

He raised one hand.

The air between Gabriel’s hand and the creature did something that Tobi had no category for. It compressed. Not visibly. He felt it with his new senses before he saw the effect, a pressure that built in the space between them over three seconds and then released.

The creature stopped.

Not froze. Stopped, the way something stops when something more fundamental than its body has been interrupted. The orange cracks in its surface dimmed. The heat rolling off it dropped by half in about two seconds. It stood there making a low sound that was either pain or confusion and then it turned away from the crowd, turned away from the main hall, and moved back through the broken wall section.

Back through the gate.

The gate closed.

Silence.

Gabriel lowered his hand.

He turned around and the warm expression was back, easy and immediate, like putting on a coat. He looked at the crowd of stunned people and then at Tobi and he smiled.

"Good timing," he said pleasantly.

Tobi looked at him.

At the hand that had done something unclassified to the air.

At the warm smile.

Be careful.

"Yeah," Tobi said. "Good timing."

[GABRIEL — ABILITY SIGNATURE: NEWLY CLASSIFIED]

[CLASS: DOMINION TYPE]

[FUNCTION: UNKNOWN — PARTIAL OBSERVATION ONLY]

[NOTE: HOST SHOULD TREAT THIS INDIVIDUAL AS A PRIORITY THREAT.]

[NOTE: HE WANTED YOU TO SEE THAT.]

He wanted you to see that. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Tobi looked at Gabriel’s warm eyes across the cooling ground.

Two days in.

He had a divine entity interested in Ada, a dominion-class ability user who had just performed for an audience of four hundred and sixty people, and twenty evolution points standing between him and whatever came next.

The crowd was already moving toward Gabriel.

Thanking him.

Of course they were.