The beam weighed eighteen tons. Kael knew this not from the groaning sensors of the site foreman's tablet, but from the intimate scream of steel in his palms. It was a sound felt, not heard, a vibration that traveled up his arms and settled in the marrow of his teeth.
Around him, dust hung in the cathedral light of emergency lamps. Silence, thick and clotting, broken only by the patter of falling grit. Five minutes ago, the south wall of the new data center had given way in a cascade of stressed concrete and a bad calculation. Five men were somewhere in that dark, crushed geometry.
"Kael… God, Kael, you're holding it." Foreman Miller's voice was a hoarse scrape from the periphery. He wasn't looking at the beam. He was looking at Kael's legs, braced like hydraulic columns, the veins on his neck standing in stark relief, but not bursting. The human body, Miller's knowledge screamed, could not do this.
Kael wasn't thinking. His world had narrowed to a single, crystalline point: Up. Hold. Up. The mental command was a primal drumbeat. Muscles he had never consciously acknowledged engaged in a symphony of force. There was no trembling, no heroic strain—just a steady, impossible elevation. With a grunt that displaced the dust around him, he shoved the colossal I-beam fully upright, clearing a jagged path into the wreckage.
He found Sanders first, conscious and staring with wide, shocky eyes. "Took you long enough," Sanders wheezed, the old joke a lifeline to normalcy. Kael lifted a slab of concrete off his legs as if it were cardboard. One by one, he pulled them out, a shepherd of the broken. The last was young Perez, leg bent wrong, sobbing in pain. Kael cradled him, moving with a surreal gentleness that contrasted with the devastation around him.
Only when the ambulances wailed, and the site was swarming with paramedics and flashing lights, did the weight descend. Not of the beam, but of the stares. The cameras. The way Miller looked at him not with gratitude, but with a species of holy terror.
A woman in a crisp suit, not a paramedic, materialized at his side. "Kael Rodriguez? My name is Dr. Aris Thorne. I'm with the World Health Organization's Genomic Anomaly Division." Her eyes, a cool, assessing grey, scanned him not for injury, but for… something else. "I think you should come with me. Very quietly. Before others who are less curious arrive."
Kael looked at his hands. They were covered in dust and Perez's blood, but unmarked. No breaks. No tears. He felt… good. Energized. As if he'd just woken from the best sleep of his life.
"What's happening to me?" he asked, his voice low.
Thorne's gaze flickered to the news van screeching to a halt beyond the cordon. "Evolution," she said softly, taking his arm. Her grip was firm. "But evolution doesn't care who it disrupts. Come on. The world just changed, and it doesn't even know it yet."