**Earth: Day 30, Hour 14**
Nassiri gave me a bunk in the coordination post and access to his compiled intelligence — thirty days of carefully documented observations about creature behavior, gate patterns, mana saturation progression, and human casualties. It was, objectively, excellent work. Someone in this organization thought systematically and had built a systematic record.
I read it in forty minutes. The Stone's photographic processing meant I'd have perfect recall of all of it indefinitely.
What I was looking for wasn't in the main reports.
It was in the incident log — a running record of anomalous events that didn't fit existing categories, maintained by someone who clearly found it professionally important to document the things that didn't make sense rather than just the things that did. The entries were brief and clinical. Most of them were creature behavior anomalies.
Three of them were about people.
*Day 14: Civilian, female, approximately 30. Reported seeing "halos" around creatures at range. Not explained by visual artifacts. Vision normal in standard testing. Incident closed, referred to medical.*
*Day 19: Military, male, specialist rank. Demonstrated ability to predict Hound patrol direction change 8-12 seconds before it occurred, over three consecutive observed incidents. No explanation provided. Currently under informal observation.*
*Day 27: Civilian, male, approximately 20. Found in collapsed building structure after 11 hours. Uninjured. Building showed extensive structural stress consistent with repeated impact by something very dense. He claims he did not know what happened. Medical cleared him. Structural assessment team disagrees about whether the impacts could have been self-generated.*
I closed the incident log.
Early mana sensitivity. The mana saturation had reached 0.07% — still low, still well below the threshold where normal humans would be consciously manipulating ambient energy. But for the small percentage of humans with inherently high mana affinity — the people who, on Avulum, would have been identified as apprentices in their first week — the rising saturation wasn't a slow change. It was a waking up.
They wouldn't know what was happening to them. There was no framework, no vocabulary. On Avulum, mana sensitivity manifested in an environment where the phenomenon was understood and supported. Here it was manifesting in a war zone, in people who had been told for their entire lives that magic wasn't real, and the cognitive dissonance was producing exactly the behaviors the incident log described: denial, concealment, confusion.
The specialist who predicted Hound direction changes was running some form of Air-aspect pressure reading without knowing it. The woman seeing halos was processing Light-aspect information without a framework to interpret it. The young man in the collapsed building was doing something with Earth-aspect that he didn't have words for and that had either saved his life or produced a deeply confusing eleven hours.
They were hiding it.
Of course they were hiding it. In a crisis environment, unexplained abilities were liabilities. They'd be pulled from operations, subjected to testing, treated as anomalies. The smart move, from a survival-and-continue-functioning standpoint, was to keep it quiet and hope it went away.
It wasn't going to go away. The mana saturation was rising. By Day 45 it would be at 0.15%. By Day 60, 0.25%. The sensitives were going to develop faster than they could conceal.
Nassiri found me in the common area at Hour 14, running a parallel analysis of the gate root system data I'd collected during the morning.
"You read the files," he said.
"Yes."
"The incident log."
"Yes."
He sat down across from me. He had the particular quality of someone who had been waiting to have a conversation and had been waiting long enough to want it over with. "The three entries."
"You wrote them," I said. Not a guess — the clinical precision of the language matched his operational briefings.
"Yes." He was quiet for a moment. "Yara sees heat signatures at range that our thermal equipment can't detect at the same distances. She's been doing it since Day 12. She has not told anyone except me." He met my eyes. "I have not filed a formal report."
"Because formal reports would result in her removal from operations."
"She's my best field commander." He said it simply, without apology. "And whatever she's doing has saved lives. Four confirmed occasions where she identified a threat location before our equipment flagged it." He paused. "I don't know what it is. I know it works. I've been trying to decide what to do about it."
I thought about how to say what needed to be said.
"It's going to accelerate," I said. "The mana saturation is rising. By the time Earth levels out — which will take years at minimum — there will be thousands of people manifesting abilities like Yara's. Eventually millions. Some of them will figure it out on their own. Most of them will be confused and frightened and making decisions about capabilities they don't understand."
He looked at me steadily. "And you understand it."
"Yes."
"Because you've been somewhere that already has this."
"Yes."
"And you came back with it already developed."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a long moment. "Is Yara in danger."
"Not from the ability itself. The danger is from not knowing what she's doing — she could push past safe thresholds without knowing there are thresholds. She could stabilize on an incomplete technique that creates long-term physiological complications." I paused. "The young man in the collapsed building is a more urgent case. Whatever he did, he did it under extreme stress with no framework and significant output. He's either fine or he's carrying structural damage he can't feel yet."
"He's assigned to perimeter monitoring," Nassiri said. "Southeast sector."
"I need to talk to him." I looked at Nassiri. "And Yara. And your Day 19 specialist, if he's still in-sector. I'm not pulling them from operations. I'm giving them a framework so they don't accidentally hurt themselves or other people."
A long pause.
"You're going to teach them," Nassiri said.
"I'm going to give them enough structure to be safe. What they do with it beyond that is their choice."
He thought about this with the deliberateness of someone who had learned that decisions made in haste in this environment tended to have the specific kind of consequences you couldn't take back.
"Tomorrow morning," he said finally. "I'll have all three of them available at Hour 7. One hour. If I'm not satisfied they're safe to continue operations after that conversation, we revisit the approach."
"Agreed."
He stood. "The port district. You said you needed to study the gates first."
"I do."
"How long."
"Give me until this evening. I'll have an assessment."
He nodded and left. I sat with the parallel analysis and the incident log and the question that had been sitting in the back of my processing since I landed: the Vassal-Link residual was still active, broadcasting a degraded signal from whatever architecture the fifteen percent intact encoding was running in. Somewhere on Earth, a Tower monitoring station was receiving that signal. It had been receiving it since I transited.
I had been on the ground for eight hours.
In eight hours, had anyone come looking?
Not yet. But the fact that I hadn't been approached didn't mean I hadn't been detected.
I added this to the running list of things I needed to solve before they solved themselves badly.