**Earth: Day 34, Hour 7**
The session at Hour 7 had seven people in it.
Yara, the Day 19 specialist, and Dani I'd briefed on Day 32. The four new ones had come to me — referred by the three, specifically, without my asking. Word of mouth moving through Nassiri's organization faster than I'd expected.
The new four: a logistics coordinator who had been rerouting supply convoys based on feelings that were turning out to be accurate route assessments; a field medic who had been keeping patients alive past the point where the medical logic said they should stop; a teenage girl from Zone Seven who Nassiri's people had flagged after she accurately predicted a Hound patrol incursion fourteen minutes before it arrived; and a man in his forties who simply showed up, said his name was Osman, said he hadn't been sleeping because every time he closed his eyes he saw heat signatures through walls, and asked if I could make it stop.
I couldn't make it stop. I told him this immediately, because false hope in this context was worse than the alternative.
What I could do was give him the framework.
"Magic is not what you've been told it is," I said. "It's not mystical. It's not supernatural. It follows laws — specific, consistent, physical laws that are as reliable as thermodynamics and that you've been living your entire lives with the incorrect assumption that they didn't apply to you." I looked around the room. "They always applied to you. You just didn't have enough ambient energy in your environment for the application to become perceptible. That's changing."
I spent forty minutes on basic principle.
Not techniques. Not control. The principle: mana was a particle with mass and wave behavior simultaneously. Your body was a system that could interact with it. The interaction was bounded by the same constraints as any other physical interaction — conservation of energy, pressure gradients, information theory. When you perceived something others couldn't, you were processing physical information others weren't receiving. When you moved something without touching it, you were applying physical force through a mechanism that didn't require physical contact. When you felt walls through a building, you were processing vibration data your nervous system had learned to handle at higher resolution than standard human physiology usually achieves.
None of it was magic. All of it was physics.
The medic asked: "What are the limits."
"Your current mana output is limited by your body's baseline mana production, which is low right now because the ambient saturation hasn't risen high enough to support significant storage. You're running on thin reserves. Which means the danger isn't excess — it's depletion. When you feel exhausted doing something you couldn't do before, stop. Whatever you're doing, stop. Depletion beyond a threshold is hard to recover from and permanent depletion is—" I paused. "Permanent."
The logistics coordinator: "How do we get better at this."
"Practice," I said. "Specifically, controlled small-scale practice. Pick the simplest thing your ability allows you to do — the most basic version of the perception or the effect — and do it until it's boring. I mean that literally. Until it produces no surprise whatsoever. Then do the slightly less simple version." I looked around the room. "Do not try to scale. Do not test limits. The limit-testing comes much later, when you have enough reserve capacity that hitting a limit doesn't damage you."
Osman: "Is there more of us."
"Yes," I said. "There are more of you. I don't know how many. The percentage of people in any given population who manifest sensitivity when ambient mana rises is approximately three to four percent." I did the math visibly. "In this city, at current population estimates — somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand people."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Twelve to fifteen thousand people in this city alone, experiencing something they didn't understand, with no framework, no vocabulary, most of them hiding it for the same reasons Yara had been hiding it.
"We need to find them," Yara said. She said it with the flat certainty of someone who had just made a decision rather than a suggestion.
"Yes," I said. "We do."
"How."
I thought about this. About the incident log Nassiri had been keeping. About the intake workers in the zones, who saw everyone and had been watching for thirty-three days and knew which patterns were anomalous. About the fact that in a city of survivors who had spent a month developing situational awareness as a survival skill, unusual behavior was actually harder to hide than it would normally be — people noticed. They just didn't know what to call what they'd noticed.
"You tell people," I said. "Not everyone. But the people you trust — the ones running intake, the ones doing long-term care, the ones who've been watching. You tell them what to look for and you tell them it's okay. That there's a reason and it won't hurt them and there's someone they can talk to."
"And you're that someone," the medic said.