The new gate site was in a parking lot.

Pre-apocalypse it had belonged to a shopping complex two blocks east of the campus. The complex itself was partially collapsed, one wing of it folded inward like a crushed can, but the parking lot had survived mostly intact. Wide open space. Cracked asphalt. A few skeletal cars sitting where their owners had left them two days ago when the sky broke open and leaving your car became irrelevant.

The gate was in the northeast corner.

Still dormant when they arrived at eleven. The residual signature Tobi had clocked that morning was stronger here, up close, and his senses still couldn’t name it. Not heat. Not vibration. Not the pressure quality of the creatures that attacked minds. Something else. Something that sat at the edge of every category and didn’t fit any of them.

Musa crouched next to him behind a gutted sedan and looked at the northeast corner with his head slightly tilted.

"I can feel it," Musa said quietly.

"What does it feel like."

Musa thought about it. "Like standing near something that’s pretending to be nothing."

Tobi looked at him.

"I don’t know how else to say it," Musa said. "It’s there but it’s hiding the fact that it’s there. Which means it’s smart enough to understand the concept of hiding."

Great, Tobi thought. Smart ones.

He looked at the gate site. The air in the corner had a quality to it that was almost visible, a shimmer that wasn’t quite there when you looked directly at it but existed at the edges of vision.

He checked his system.

[GATE SITE: ACTIVE — DORMANT STATE]

[ENTITY CLASS: UNCLASSIFIED]

[SIGNATURE: UNKNOWN — POSSIBLE ADAPTIVE TYPE]

[HEAT RESISTANCE INTEGRATION: 89%] 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

[EVOLUTION POINTS: 78/300]

[NOTE: HOST THERMAL REGULATION STABILIZING]

Adaptive type.

He stared at that for a moment.

Adaptive.

Like him.

He didn’t know what that meant for the fight. He didn’t know what it meant for the absorption. He filed his uncertainty and watched the corner.

"How long do we wait," Musa said.

"Until it opens or until I decide it’s not opening tonight."

"How long is that."

"I don’t know."

Musa accepted this and settled into the particular stillness he had when he was conserving energy. For a fifteen year old he was remarkably good at waiting. Tobi suspected the streets had taught him that the way they taught everyone things, quietly and without asking permission.

Twenty minutes passed.

Then the gate opened.

Not with the tearing sound of the previous gates. No red light. No orange. The air in the corner simply folded. That was the only word for it. Like a piece of paper being creased, reality bending along a line that shouldn’t have existed, and through the fold came darkness, not the absolute darkness of Musa’s ability but a layered darkness, deep and textured, with movement inside it.

They came out in a group.

Five of them.

Roughly humanoid again but different from the bipedal class. Leaner. Lower to the ground. Moving in a loose formation with the specific unhurried coordination of things that had done this before. Their surfaces were strange, shifting, the way a surface shifts when it’s reflecting something that isn’t there. Adaptive coloring. They were partially transparent against the dark parking lot, not invisible, just wrong, the eye sliding off them the way it slid off the gate shimmer.

They blend, Tobi thought.

Immediately the system pulsed.

[ENTITY CLASS: PHANTOM TYPE — ADAPTIVE CAMOUFLAGE]

[THREAT LEVEL: ELEVATED]

[HOST SENSORY ENHANCEMENT: PARTIALLY EFFECTIVE]

[NOTE: VISUAL CAMOUFLAGE REDUCED BUT NOT ELIMINATED BY PREDATOR STAGE SENSES]

[NOTE: ENTITY MOVEMENT DETECTABLE VIA SOUND AND SCENT SIGNATURES]

[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT RELY ON VISUAL TRACKING]

Don’t rely on visual tracking.

He looked at Musa. "Close your eyes."

Musa looked at him. "What."

"Close your eyes and listen. Tell me what you hear."

Musa looked at the five partially transparent shapes moving through the parking lot. His jaw tightened. Then he closed his eyes.

Ten seconds.

"Five of them," Musa said quietly. "Moving in a pattern. The two on the left are slightly ahead. The one in the center is slowest. There’s a sound from them like." He paused. "Like static. Very low."

"Can you track them with your eyes closed."

"Yes."

Good. "Keep them closed. When I tell you, hit the center one. Biggest dark disc you can manage without going past your limit."

"How will I know where—"

"I’ll tell you the moment. Trust the sound."

Musa’s hands came up slowly, the dark ability building above his palms. His eyes stayed shut.

Tobi watched the five shapes move through the lot with his hearing and his nose, the visual camouflage a distraction he stopped trying to use. Sound. Scent. The faint displacement of air. His new senses laid them out like a map, not perfect, not sharp, but enough.

He moved.

Not toward the group. Sideways along the line of cars, staying low, moving with the specific quiet he’d been developing over two days of night operations. The phantom types didn’t react. Either they hadn’t clocked him yet or they were waiting to see what he’d do.

Smart ones, he thought again.

He got to the far side of the lot and positioned himself with the crashed sedan between him and the group. Forty meters from Musa.

"Ready," he said. Barely above a breath. His new hearing told him Musa had caught it.

The center entity slowed.

Its head, such as it was, turned in Tobi’s direction. The camouflage flickered, the surface shifting as something underneath it registered his presence.

Now.

"Now," he said.

Musa hit it.

The disc was a meter and a half across and it caught the center entity dead and the entity’s camouflage dropped instantly, the adaptive surface going inert, and for the first time Tobi saw what it actually looked like without the shimmer.

Wrong in a specific way. Like someone had taken the idea of a person and rebuilt it from memory, most things right but the proportions slightly off, the joints slightly too many, the head slightly too small and too smooth.