The thermal dysregulation started at dawn.

He was sitting against the science block wall watching the sky go grey when his left hand got warm.

Not room temperature warm. Not slightly-elevated warm. The kind of warm that had something to say about it, a deep internal heat radiating outward from somewhere below the skin, and within about thirty seconds his entire left arm was at a temperature that had no business being on a living person.

He looked at it.

It looked fine.

Thermal dysregulation, the system had said.

Right.

He flexed his fingers. Everything worked. The heat was uncomfortable but not painful. More like holding his hand over a stove than putting it into one.

Then it stopped.

Just switched off. His arm went back to normal in about ten seconds.

He stared at it.

Okay.

Then his right foot went cold. Not cold like the morning air. Cold like he’d stepped into water. Through the boot. He looked down. Dry ground. Normal everything.

Oh. So it’s going to be like that.

The integration was going to spend the next six to eight hours doing whatever it wanted with his temperature regulation while he tried to run a campus, monitor Gabriel, protect Ada, and not let anyone notice that his body was occasionally doing things that bodies did not normally do.

Fine, he thought. Fine. This is fine.

Musa woke up twenty minutes later, straightened, looked at Tobi, looked at the sky, and said "Did I sleep outside."

"Yes."

"On the ground."

"Against the wall."

Musa assessed this information. "My back hurts."

"You weigh sixty kilograms. I wasn’t carrying you to a cot."

"Fair." He stood up slowly, testing his hands. The tremor was mostly gone. The colour was back in his face. He looked more or less functional, which for someone who had blown out a three meter dark ability disc twice in two days was actually remarkable. "My ability is back. Mostly."

"Good."

"The big version isn’t. That’s going to take a while."

"Don’t use the big version."

"I wasn’t planning to announce it to the next monster and ask it to wait."

There it was. Tobi almost smiled. Two days ago Musa had been a fifteen year old sitting on steps asking about his father in a flat voice. Now he was making sarcasm about monster scheduling. The apocalypse was doing something to people. Not always bad things.

"Eat something," Tobi said. "Then I need you watching something for me."

"Watching what."

"I’ll tell you after you eat."

The Colonel’s morning briefing was at six.

Tobi’s left arm went hot again halfway through it.

He kept his expression neutral and his arm at his side and listened to the Colonel outline the day’s operations while the heat built steadily under his skin. Supply team to the secondary warehouse three blocks north. Medical rotation changes. New gate site reported by the eastern perimeter team overnight, different signature from previous ones, currently dormant.

Gabriel was at the briefing.

The Colonel had started including him, which was either pragmatic or a mistake, and Tobi wasn’t sure which yet. Gabriel listened to everything with his warm attentive expression and asked two smart questions and made one observation about supply chain efficiency that was genuinely useful, and by the time the briefing ended four more people trusted him than had trusted him at the start of it.

Tobi watched him do it.

Sixty kilograms, he thought randomly.

No. Wait. That was Musa.

Stay focused.

His arm cooled down. His right foot went cold.

He walked normally.

After the briefing Gabriel fell into step beside him, easy and unhurried, like it had just happened that way.

"Good work last night," Gabriel said. "The creature at the western gate."

Tobi glanced at him. "Musa did most of it."

"The boy with the darkness ability."

"Yes." 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"Useful." Gabriel said it the way you might say good weather. A neutral assessment. "How old is he?"

"Old enough."

Gabriel smiled. "I meant no offense. I’m trying to understand what resources the campus actually has. The Colonel has his roster, but rosters don’t tell you what people are actually capable of."

"The Colonel’s roster is accurate."

"Of course it is." He glanced sideways at Tobi. "And yours?"

Tobi looked at him.

"Your assessment," Gabriel said pleasantly. "Of what the campus has. You’ve been here longer than me. You’ve seen people under pressure." He paused. "I think you see things clearly."

He’s trying to find out what I know about everyone.

Not subtle. But not meant to be subtle. It was the kind of question that assumed you’d answer it because you’d want to seem cooperative, and if you didn’t answer it you’d seem like you had something to hide, and either way he learned something.

"I think the Colonel’s roster is accurate," Tobi said again.

Gabriel absorbed that without losing the smile. "Fair enough."

They reached the junction between the main hall and the science block and Gabriel peeled off toward the supply tables with a nod.

Tobi watched him go.

Two days left, he thought. Maybe three.

The east wing surveillance was Musa’s job now.

He didn’t frame it that way. He told Musa he needed someone to track the movement patterns of Gabriel’s people around the medical building. Who went near it. When. How long they stayed.

Musa had listened to this and said, "You want me to spy on them."

"I want you to observe movement patterns."

"That’s spying."

"That’s accurate."

Musa had thought about it for three seconds. "Okay." No further questions. He went and found a position near the library steps that gave him line of sight to the east wing entrance and the path leading to it, and he sat there with the casual look of someone doing nothing in particular, which was actually quite good for someone fifteen.

Tobi did three things between six and ten in the morning.

He went to the new gate site with Sade and Ayo and assessed it. Dormant, like the Colonel said, but the ground around it had a quality that his new senses couldn’t classify yet. Not heat. Not vibration. Something else. He filed it.

He found the man who had stood outside the east wing at four in the morning. His name was Bode. He was twenty three, quiet, had an ability that produced a faint electromagnetic field, low intensity, low range. Not a combat ability. Good for detecting things.

Detecting things.

Like the specific biological signature of something divinely marked.

Tobi ate breakfast near the cooking fires and watched Bode move through the campus and thought about all of this and his right arm went cold and then hot in the same three minutes which was new and interesting.

Integration, he thought. Working on it.

At ten Chike found him.

"Your mother wants you," Chike said.

"Is Ada—"

"Ada is fine. Your mother wants you."

His mother was in the east wing at the supply table she’d set up along the back wall. She was doing inventory, which meant her hands were busy and her face was in professional mode, which meant what she had to say was going to be delivered efficiently and without drama.

"Sit," she said without looking up.

He sat.

She finished counting something, wrote a number, and then turned to face him with both hands on the table.

"One of Gabriel’s people asked to join the medical rotation this morning," she said.

"Which one."

"Young man. Bode."

Tobi kept his face neutral. "What did you say."

"I said I’d think about it." She looked at him steadily. "So I’m thinking about it. Out loud. With you."

He looked at the table. At her handwriting in the inventory log. Thirty years of nursing in that handwriting, precise and fast.

"Don’t let him in," he said.

She nodded once. That was enough. "The Colonel asked me about you this morning as well."

"What did he ask."

"Whether the changes I’d noticed in you were concerning." She paused. "Medically."

He looked at her.

"I told him you were progressing normally," she said. Her voice was completely even. "That the physical changes were consistent with an ability developing under sustained stress."

"That’s not—"

"I know it’s not entirely accurate." She picked up her pen. "That’s why I’m telling you." She looked at him in the way that had been looking at him for eighteen years and finding things he’d tried to hide every single time. "Are you alright."

His left arm had gone hot again. He could feel it at the edge of his sleeve. Not visible. But present.

"Integration period," he said. "Six to eight hours. It’s fine."

"Integration of what."

"The creature last night."

She looked at him for a long moment. "You absorbed something from it."

"Yes."

"You absorbed a heat class creature."

"Trace amounts first. Then the full thing."

She set her pen down very carefully. "Tobi."

"It’s fine."

"Your body is currently running two different temperatures simultaneously and you’re calling it fine."

He blinked. "You can tell that."

"You’re sitting here trying to look normal and your left arm is radiating heat I can feel from here." She folded her hands. "I am a nurse. I’ve been a nurse for thirty years. You cannot hide a fever from me, let alone whatever this is."

He looked at his arm.

Right.

"Six to eight hours," he said. "It’ll regulate."

She studied him with the expression she used when she had decided something and was deciding whether to say it.

"When does the next evolution happen," she said quietly.

He looked at her.

She held his gaze.

"I don’t know exactly," he said. "I have points. I need more. When I have enough it—" he stopped.

"It changes you."

"It changes me. Yes."

"More than the last one."

"Probably."

His mother was quiet for a moment. Ada made a small sound from her cot in the corner and they both glanced at her and she settled back into sleep and they both looked back at each other.

"I need you to tell me before it happens," his mother said. "Wherever you go to do it. Whatever it does to you." She paused. "I need to know."

He thought about the engineering block wall at two in the morning. About biting his own knuckle. About four minutes of his skeleton making decisions without consulting him.

"Okay," he said.

"Promise me."

"I promise."

She picked her pen back up. Turned back to the inventory. Done. That was the conversation, complete and filed.

He stood to leave.

"Your arm," she said without looking up. "Put it in cold water for ten minutes. It won’t fix the integration but it’ll bring the surface temperature down."

He looked at his arm. "So nobody notices."

"So nobody notices," she confirmed.

He went and found cold water.

Musa’s report at noon was seven instances of Gabriel’s people near the east wing in four hours. Four of them Bode. Three of them a woman Tobi hadn’t fully clocked yet, small, fast on her feet, ability signature faint.

Seven.

In four hours.

He thought about that while the thermal dysregulation did what it did, his body running hot cold hot cold like something being calibrated, and he thought about two days maybe three, and he thought about Ada’s gold thread and the system’s note that said something has been marked.

He thought about Gabriel stopping a heat class creature with one hand and wanting everyone to see it.

He thought about seventy eight points.

Not enough, he thought. Not yet.

He needed to hit the new gate site tonight.

Whatever that different signature was, whatever came through it when it opened, he needed to fight it and absorb it and get the points and get the evolution done before Gabriel finished counting days.

He looked at Musa.

"Tonight," he said.

Musa looked at him. "The new gate."

"Yes."

"The one with the different signature that even you couldn’t classify."

"Yes."

Musa was quiet for a moment.

"What time," he said.