The absorption felt like biting into a live wire.

Not the trace version from the asphalt. This was the full thing, the creature’s biological material flooding into him in one long sustained pull, and his hand went from red to white to something that had opinions about whether it was still a hand at all.

This was a terrible idea, he thought.

He kept his palm down anyway.

The system ran hard. He could feel it working the way you feel a muscle moving under skin, this deep internal industry, something being taken apart and rebuilt simultaneously while he was still using it. His forearm locked up. His shoulder followed. For about six seconds he was just a person kneeling on a side street in the dark with his hand on a dead lava monster and his teeth clamped shut and his eyes watering from heat that wasn’t entirely in the air anymore.

Then it released.

He pulled his hand back. Looked at it. The skin was intact. Slightly redder than usual. He flexed his fingers. Everything worked.

Huh.

Behind him, Musa said nothing. Which from Musa meant either he was processing something or he had passed out.

Tobi turned around.

Musa was upright. Barely. He was sitting with his back against a wall and his legs straight out in front of him and his face the color of old newspaper, but his eyes were open and focused and tracking.

"Did it work?" Musa said.

Tobi checked the system.

[DEVOUR COMPLETE: HEAT CLASS — MAGMA VARIANT]

[BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL: HIGH DENSITY]

[EVOLUTION POINTS EARNED: 47]

[TOTAL: 78/300]

[HEAT RESISTANCE: INITIATING — INTEGRATION TIME: 6-8 HOURS]

[WARNING: INSTABILITY PERIOD ACTIVE]

[NOTE: HOST MAY EXPERIENCE THERMAL DYSREGULATION DURING INTEGRATION]

Thermal dysregulation.

Great. What does that mean.

The system didn’t elaborate, which was on brand.

"It worked," he said.

Musa exhaled through his nose. "Good." He tilted his head back against the wall. "I can’t feel my hands again."

"I know."

"You’re going to carry me back aren’t you."

"Yes."

"I weigh sixty kilograms."

"You mentioned."

"Just making sure you remembered." Musa looked at the creature. At its cooled and motionless body. The lava surface had gone completely dark now, just dense black material that looked almost geological. "That’s it? It’s really dead?"

"Yes."

"It melted our wall."

"Yes."

Musa was quiet for a moment. "And you just." He gestured at the creature vaguely. "Absorbed it."

Tobi said nothing.

Musa looked at him. In the dark his expression was unreadable. Then he said, "Okay," and left it there.

Okay. No follow up questions. No demands for explanation. Just okay.

Tobi filed that away in a folder next to Chike’s I noticed things folder. He was collecting people who knew things about him and had decided to simply know them quietly, and it turned out that was a very specific kind of person and also exactly what he needed right now.

He crouched next to Musa. "Can you stand?"

"Probably not."

"Try."

Musa tried. Got about halfway and then his legs made their own opinion known and he sat back down hard. He looked at his hands. The tremor was still there.

"What does it take out of you," Tobi said. "When you use it."

"Everything." Musa turned his palms up. "It’s like. You know when you wring out a wet cloth? It’s like that. Except the cloth is me." He flexed his fingers slowly. "The big version is worse. That last one I did tonight, when it went three meters wide." He stopped. Started again. "I couldn’t feel where it ended. The ability. Like it was trying to keep going and I was the only thing stopping it."

"But you stopped it."

"Yeah." He looked at his empty palms. "I stopped it."

Tobi stood and got an arm under Musa’s and hauled him upright. Musa got his feet under him this time and stayed there, unsteady but standing. Sixty kilograms of fifteen year old who had pushed an ability past its limits twice in two days.

"My father would be very upset," Musa said quietly.

Tobi didn’t say anything.

They moved.

Getting back over the fence with an exhausted Musa was approximately as bad as expected.

Tobi went over first and caught Musa on the other side and they both ended up on the ground for a moment sorting themselves out. The campus was dark and quiet, the generator off, cooking fires banked down to coals. Four seventeen in the morning according to the system clock he hadn’t looked at until now.

He got Musa to the science block wall and sat him down against it.

"Stay here."

"Where are you going?"

"I’m not going anywhere. I’m sitting down."

He sat.

They were both quiet. The campus breathed around them. His new hearing sorted it all into layers the way it did now, the sleeping sounds of four hundred people, the perimeter guards moving, the generator cooling, Ada’s breathing in the east wing steady and small and warm.

Then something else.

A sound he hadn’t catalogued before. From the direction of the main hall. Footsteps, light, careful, the specific quality of someone moving through a space they knew and trying not to be heard.

He tracked it.

One of Gabriel’s people. The man from the eastern positions, medium height, the one who wore the red armband lower than everyone else like it was an afterthought. Moving through the main hall toward the east side of the campus.

Toward the medical building.

Tobi stood up.

"Stay here," he said to Musa.

"You keep saying that."

"Because you keep asking."

He moved across the dark grounds toward the medical building, keeping his footsteps quiet the way he’d learned to in the last two days. His new hearing tracked the other footsteps continuously, monitoring pace and direction.

The man stopped outside the medical building.

Just stopped. Stood there in the dark outside the east wing entrance.

Tobi came around the corner of the science block and saw him. Youngish, twenty five maybe, arms at his sides, just standing and looking at the east wing door with the specific patient attention of someone waiting for something.

Festus was on the other side of that door.

The man hadn’t tried to go in. Just looking. The way you look at something you’re mapping.

Tobi leaned against the science block wall in the shadow and watched him watch the door and thought about Gabriel’s voice saying three days maybe four and find out what the boy can do.

Fifty three seconds.

Then the man turned and walked back toward the main hall, easy and unhurried, like someone on a night walk.

Tobi watched him go.

Alright then.

He looked at the east wing door. At the thin strip of light under it where Festus’s lantern burned.

He thought about eighty five evolution points sitting in a threshold that stood at three hundred. About heat resistance integrating over six to eight hours. About what the next evolution would do to him and when it would happen and whether he’d make it to a safe location first or whether it would happen in front of someone whose trust he couldn’t afford to lose.

He thought about Ada’s gold thread running up toward the broken sky.

He thought about a man named Gabriel who had just had someone surveil the medical building at four in the morning.

Three days maybe four.

Fine, Tobi thought. I’ll be ready.

He went back to Musa.

Musa was asleep against the science block wall, hands in his lap, chin on his chest, the dark ability nowhere in sight. Out completely.

Tobi sat next to him and stayed awake while the city’s broken sky turned from black to grey and the second day finished what it had started.

Seventy eight points.

Two hundred and twenty two to go.

He looked at his hands. The redness had faded. They looked the same as they always had.

Same hands, he thought. Same person.

He kept telling himself that.