The rift stabilization worked.
Not cleanly. Not easily. And not without Damien spending four hours on his knees in the transit yard with his hands pressed into the cracked asphalt, channeling every drop of the Earth Mage fragment's seven percent through the southeastern anchor point while the rift pulsed and flexed like a wound trying to reopen.
Tomas's military contact, a woman named Ora Desmond, full Earth Mage, built like a siege wall and twice as patient, handled the northern anchor. Ren's clinic patient, a retired Earth Sage named Mrs. Carrera who hadn't used her abilities in six years and arrived with a walker and a thermos of bone broth, handled the western point with the steady competence of someone who'd been doing impossible things since before Damien was born. Yuki's contact, a freelance geokinetic named Pell who charged by the hour and didn't ask questions, covered the east.
Four anchor points. Four Earth-type awakeners channeling mana in synchronized pulses, drawing the excess energy away from the rift boundary and dissipating it into the ground. Maya coordinated the timing from a tablet connected to four separate comm units, her voice counting down pulses with the metronomic precision of a conductor keeping an orchestra from falling apart.
It worked. The rift contracted from seven meters back to four, then three, then stabilized at two-point-eight. Slightly larger than its original size but no longer expanding. The mana density readings dropped below the B-rank threshold. The containment cordon was maintained but the emergency status was downgraded.
The Association's containment team arrived two hours after the stabilization was complete. They measured the rift, checked the anchor points, filed a report, and left without acknowledging the five people who'd done their job for them.
Maya had the whole thing documented. Timestamped footage from four angles, mana density readings at fifteen-minute intervals, a complete operational record proving that Damien Cross's team had stabilized a rift the Association's own contracting had destabilized. She didn't release it. Not yet. She stored it on three separate encrypted drives and told Damien it was "leverage for when we need it."
That was Tuesday.
Wednesday was supposed to be recovery.
---
Damien woke at five AM with the Stone Skin fragment itching under his skin.
Not metaphorically. The fragment, absorbed from the Golem less than forty-eight hours ago, was generating a low-frequency resonance that manifested as a physical sensation. Like wearing a shirt woven from sandpaper. Every time he moved, the fragment activated involuntarily, hardening patches of his skin in random locations for one to three seconds before releasing.
His left forearm went rigid while he was brushing his teeth. His right shoulder plate hardened while he was pouring coffee. The skin across his ribs, already sore from the Golem's kick, locked into a stone-like state for four seconds, which made breathing feel like expanding inside a cast.
He called Ren.
"Involuntary fragment activation," Ren said over the phone. His voice had the measured quality of someone who was already diagnosing while the patient was still describing symptoms. "How long since absorption?"
"Forty-two hours."
"And the fragment type?"
"Stone Skin. Defensive. It's supposed to let me harden my skin on command. Instead, it's doing it randomly."
"Is the activation painful?"
"Not painful. Uncomfortable. Like the fragment doesn't know where it belongs yet."
"That's because it doesn't." Ren paused. Damien heard the sound of a chart being pulled, a physical chart, paper, because Ren's clinic couldn't afford digital records. "New fragments integrate into your existing mana channel network over a period of days to weeks. During integration, the fragment is volatile. It responds to stimuli the established fragments have learned to ignore. Stress, temperature changes, involuntary muscle contractions. Think of it as a new hire who doesn't know the office yet."
"And the random activations?"
"The fragment is testing connections. Reaching out to the established channels, looking for compatible pathways. Most of the time, it finds a stable position and settles. Occasionally..."
"Occasionally what?"
"Occasionally a new fragment is incompatible with an existing one. The mana signatures conflict. Instead of finding a stable position, the new fragment disrupts the channel it's trying to connect to." Another pause. "Has the Stone Skin activation coincided with any difficulty accessing other fragments?"
Damien stopped moving. He was standing in his kitchen with his coffee mug in one hand and the phone in the other, and the question landed with the quiet weight of something he'd been avoiding since yesterday.
"I haven't shifted since the dungeon."
"Try now. Something you use frequently."
[Class Shift: Neutral → Scout]
The Scout fragment activated. His perception sharpened. Hearing, vision, spatial awareness expanding outward like a lens adjusting focus. Normal. Clean. No interference.
"Scout works fine."
"Try Warrior."
[Class Shift: Scout → Warrior]
The shift happened. Strength surged through his muscles, his posture squared, the familiar weight of combat readiness settled into his frame. But something was off. Not missing. Distorted. The Warrior fragment's physical enhancement was running at maybe eight percent instead of ten. A two-percent drop that might sound trivial in theory but felt like trying to run with one shoe in practice.
"Warrior's weak. Not gone, diminished."
"Try Earth Mage."
[Class Shift: Warrior → Earth Mage]
Nothing.
The command registered. Damien's mind sent the instruction, shift to Earth Mage, the same way he'd sent it a thousand times, the mental gesture as familiar as flexing a finger. But the response was silence. Not failure, not the stuttering collision that happened when he'd tried to force three fragments together. Just nothing. As if the Earth Mage fragment had been unplugged from the network and forgotten to leave a forwarding address.
He tried again. And again. The third attempt produced a flicker, a brief pulse of geokinetic awareness that lasted half a second before cutting out like a bulb burning through its filament.
"Earth Mage is gone," Damien said. His voice was steady. The rest of him wasn't. "I can feel the fragment. It's there, it's present, it's part of the inventory. But the channel is blocked."
"Stone Skin," Ren said. "They're both Earth-type fragments. The new one is trying to integrate into the same mana channel that Earth Mage occupies, and the two are interfering with each other. Like two radio signals on the same frequency."
"Can you fix it?"
"Not over the phone. Come to the clinic. I need to map your mana channels and see where the conflict is occurring." A pause. "And Damien? Don't try to force the Earth Mage activation. If the channel is conflicted, forcing it could damage both fragments permanently."
He hung up. Set the coffee down. Tried Earth Mage one more time, not forcing, just asking, the gentlest possible activation request.
Nothing.
The fragment that had cracked a Golem's armor. The fragment that had, for one and a half seconds, combined with Warrior to produce something multiplicative, something that none of his sixty-four other pieces could replicate. The fragment that Gareth said represented the beginning of real combination training.
Gone.
---
Ren's clinic hadn't changed. Same water stains on the ceiling, same cracked tile, same waiting room with plastic chairs and a television playing muted news. Same handwritten sign: HEALER ON DUTY. WAIT TIMES VARY. WE WILL GET TO YOU.
The only difference was the second healer, a young woman named Adisa, part-time, funded by Maya's operational budget, who was handling the morning rotation so Ren could see Damien in the supply-closet office without abandoning twenty patients.
The examination took an hour.
Ren's hands moved across Damien's body with the focused attention of a cartographer mapping terrain. Not touching, not quite, but hovering close enough that the healing mana could read the channels beneath the skin. His eyes were closed. His breathing was slow and measured, each inhale drawing mana-data from Damien's system the way a stethoscope draws sound from a chest.
"There." Ren's right hand paused over Damien's left side, between the ribs and the hip. "The conflict point. Your Earth Mage fragment occupies a tertiary mana channel, a small one, consistent with a seven-percent fragment. Stone Skin is trying to integrate into the same channel because they share an elemental affinity. Earth calls to earth."
"And they can't share?"
"They can, potentially. But Stone Skin is newer, more volatile, and it's generating involuntary activations that are flooding the channel with defensive mana. Earth Mage is a precision fragment. Geokinetic awareness, structural mapping, delicate force application. It can't function in a channel that's being randomly saturated with Stone Skin's hardening impulses."
"So remove Stone Skin."
Ren opened his eyes. The look he gave Damien was the same one he'd given the fragment combination assessment in the dungeon. Calm, direct, unhesitating.
"I can't remove a fragment. Nobody can. Once absorbed, a fragment integrates at the cellular level. It's part of you. Removing it would be like removing a specific memory from your brain. The technology doesn't exist."
"Then what are my options?"
"Two." Ren sat back. His folding chair creaked under the shifted weight. "Option one: wait. The integration process can take weeks. There's a chance that Stone Skin will stabilize on its own, find a secondary channel, and stop interfering with Earth Mage. The involuntary activations would cease, both fragments would coexist, and you'd have access to both."
"What's the probability?"
"Based on the conflict severity I'm reading? Maybe thirty percent. Fragment conflicts this acute resolve naturally less than half the time."
"And option two?"
"Train the Stone Skin fragment deliberately. Active exercises that teach the fragment to respond only to conscious commands, which would reduce the random activations and potentially free up channel bandwidth for Earth Mage to reestablish its connection." Ren paused. "But that takes dedicated effort. Weeks of daily practice. And during that time, you'd have limited access to Earth Mage. Possibly none."
"Weeks. While the Association is compressing timelines and we're trying to reach a hundred fragments."
"Yes."
Damien stared at the supply closet wall. Bandages, potions, mana salves. A spider plant stubbornly alive despite every reason not to be. The office of a man who'd chosen to work in the one place nobody else wanted to, because the people there needed him most.
"There's a third option you're not mentioning," Damien said.
Ren's expression didn't change. "What option?"
"I absorb more fragments. Not Earth-type, something different. Fire, Water, Wind. If the conflict is between two Earth fragments competing for the same channel, adding a non-Earth fragment might redirect Stone Skin's integration toward a different pathway."
"That's not how mana channel integration works."
"You said it yourself. Stone Skin is looking for compatible pathways. If I expand the network, give it more options—"
"You'd also be increasing the total mana load on a system that's already inflamed from the combination attempt in the dungeon." Ren's voice stayed calm. Healers didn't raise their voices; they just made the truth more precise. "Your channels need recovery time. Adding more fragments right now, even non-conflicting ones, increases the risk of cascade failure."
"Cascade failure meaning what?"
"Meaning you don't lose one fragment. You lose several. The overloaded channels start rejecting fragments like a body rejecting a transplant. The more fragments you carry, the more catastrophic the cascade." He leaned forward. "Damien. I know you want to push through this. But pushing is how you got here. The combination in the dungeon stressed your channels. Stone Skin absorbed into an already-compromised system. If you add more stress, the system breaks."
"And if I don't push, Wells wins. She gets her interview. She profiles the team. She develops her anti-shift technology and I'm standing still while she builds the thing that makes me irrelevant."
"If you push and cascade, you're not standing still. You're going backward." Ren straightened. "I'm your healer. I'm telling you what your body needs. What you do with that information is your choice. But don't pretend the choice is between caution and progress. It's between controlled growth and self-destruction."
The words settled into the room like dust after demolition. Damien looked at the spider plant on the windowsill. The thing had no business being alive. Bad light, poor soil, inconsistent watering. And yet.
"Two weeks for Stone Skin to stabilize or not. Daily training exercises to accelerate integration. No new fragments until you clear me." Ren's prescription was delivered the way prescriptions should be, without negotiation. "Do we have an agreement?"
"We have an agreement."
"Good. I'll design the training regimen tonight and send it to Maya for scheduling." He stood. "Now please leave. I have patients."
---
Maya was waiting outside the clinic. Leaning against her car, tablet in one hand, coffee in the other, watching the Sixth District morning traffic with the detached attention of someone cataloging movement patterns for later analysis.
"Earth Mage is blocked," Damien said. "Stone Skin fragment conflict. Could take weeks to resolve."
"I know. Ren texted me the assessment while you were getting dressed."
"He texted you before telling me?"
"He texted me simultaneously. I read faster." She opened the car door. "Get in. We have a meeting with Gareth."
"That's tomorrow."
"It was tomorrow. I moved it up. The fragment conflict changes the training timeline, and Gareth needs to know before he designs the next session."
Damien got in the car. Maya drove. The silence between them was working silence, the kind that happened when both parties were processing the same information and hadn't yet decided what to say about it.
"The hundred-fragment plan," Damien said.
"Still on the table. Modified."
"Modified how?"
"Ren says no new fragments for at least two weeks. That shortens our acquisition window from sixty days to forty-six. The math still works, but the margin is tighter and the error tolerance is zero."
"Assuming Stone Skin resolves. If it doesn't—"
"If it doesn't, we adjust. Plans aren't sacred documents. They're maps, and maps get redrawn when the terrain changes." She turned onto the highway on-ramp. "The bigger concern is the combination training. Earth Mage was the fragment Gareth wanted to pair with Warrior. If it's offline—"
"Then we find a different pair."
"Which pair?"
Damien closed his eyes. Sixty-five fragments, arranged in his mental inventory like tools in a chest. Each one at ten percent or less of its full class's capability. Each one occupying a specific mana channel, connected to the network through pathways he could feel but couldn't see.
The Warrior fragment was solid. Reliable. His most-used combat class, the foundation Gareth had built his training on. It wanted to combine. Damien could feel the potential, the edges where Warrior's mana signature aligned with other fragments' boundaries. Earth Mage had been the natural match because geological awareness enhanced physical strikes in ways that were intuitive, complementary.
But Earth Mage wasn't the only option.
"Fire Mage," Damien said. "Warrior plus Fire Mage. Flame-enhanced strikes. It's a standard combination in the guild meta. Fire Knights, Blazing Berserkers, every fire-melee hybrid build."
"You tried three fragments in Gareth's gym and collapsed. Warrior, Rogue, and Fire Mage. It failed."
"Because I tried three. Two is different. The Warrior/Earth Mage combination worked, for a second and a half, but it worked. Two fragments can merge. Three can't. Not yet."
"Is Fire Mage compatible with Warrior the way Earth Mage was?"
"I won't know until I try."
"And trying is what Ren just told you not to do for two weeks."
"Ren told me not to stress my channels. A single two-fragment test, under Gareth's supervision, with Ren monitoring my mana in real time, that's not stress. That's a controlled experiment."
Maya's hands tightened on the steering wheel. She drove for thirty seconds without speaking. When she spoke, her voice had the clipped quality that meant she was angry about something she couldn't argue with.
"Thursday. At Gareth's compound. Ren present. One attempt. If it fails or if Ren says stop, you stop. Non-negotiable."
"Non-negotiable."
"And you tell the team. All of them. Before the attempt. No solo decisions about your own body."
"I'll tell them."
She nodded. Didn't look at him. The highway traffic was light for midmorning, and the Third District gave way to the Seventh as they drove toward Gareth's warehouse.
---
Gareth was not on his bucket.
This was, in Damien's experience, a sign that the old man was either very angry or very focused, because the bucket was Gareth's throne and leaving it required either emotional upheaval or an engineering project. Today it was both.
He'd reconfigured the training floor again. The combat course from Thursday was gone. In its place, a circle of mana crystals, twelve of them, arranged on the mat in a pattern that Damien recognized from advanced combination theory textbooks. An integration ring. The kind of setup full-class specialists used to sync abilities before joint operations.
"Sit," Gareth said. He was standing in the center of the ring, hands behind his back. Not on the bucket. Not drinking tea. Both absences felt like emergency alarms.
Damien sat on the mat. The crystals hummed around him, a low, resonant frequency that he could feel in his mana channels the way a tuning fork feels music.
"Maya told me about the Stone Skin conflict. And the Earth Mage loss." Gareth paced the circle's perimeter. His feet were bare. Damien had never seen him barefoot before. "This was always going to happen."
"Which part?"
"The conflict. You've been absorbing fragments for six years without a single rejection. Sixty-four pieces from sixty-four different classes, all of them integrating cleanly into your network. You assumed it would continue indefinitely."
"I didn't assume anything. I just—"
"You assumed. Every person who gets sixty-four successes in a row assumes number sixty-five will be the same. That's not strategy. That's faith. And faith doesn't survive data."
He stopped pacing. Crouched in front of Damien with the slow, deliberate motion that meant he was about to say something the listener needed to hear more than anything else that day.
"Every Class Shifter in recorded history, and there have been four before you, all of them documented in texts that the Association would rather not exist, hit a fragment limit. A point where new fragments stopped integrating cleanly and started competing with existing ones. The limit is different for each Shifter. For one, it was forty. For another, eighty. The third reached a hundred and twelve before the conflicts began. The fourth..." Gareth trailed off.
"What happened to the fourth?"
"Cascade failure. A hundred and thirty-one fragments. She absorbed one more and the system collapsed. Lost thirty fragments in a single event. Spent the rest of her life at a hundred and one, unable to grow." His eyes were pale blue and completely still. "You're at sixty-five. The conflict started at sixty-five. That doesn't mean your limit is sixty-five. It means your channels need to adapt before they can accept more. The question is whether they can adapt fast enough."
"Maya wants a hundred fragments in sixty days."
"Maya wants leverage against the Association in sixty days. Fragments are the mechanism, not the objective." Gareth stood. "The plan to reach a hundred isn't wrong. The timeline is aggressive but not impossible. What matters is how you get there."
"How do I get there?"
"By fixing the channel architecture first. Right now, your mana network is a collection of individual pathways. Sixty-five fragments, each in its own channel, each operating independently. That works for sequential shifting. Press a button, get a class. Press another button, get a different class."
"You've used that analogy before."
"Because it's still accurate. You're still treating your system like a vending machine. What you need is a network. Interconnected channels. Fragments that share pathways instead of competing for them." He gestured at the crystal ring. "The integration ring forces mana flow between channels. Sit in it, activate fragments, and the crystals map the connections. Over time, the channels learn to communicate. The fragments stop fighting for space and start sharing it."
"How long?"
"For the Stone Skin conflict to resolve? With daily ring work? Ten days instead of Ren's two weeks. For the full channel network to develop, the kind that would support a hundred fragments without cascading? Months."
"We don't have months."
"Then you'll have to learn faster than anyone before you." Gareth's voice dropped. The whisper. The one that Damien had only heard three times, and each time it preceded truth that felt like surgery. "The fourth Shifter, the one who cascaded, she was smarter than you. Better trained. Had more support. And she broke herself because she wanted a hundred and thirty-two when her body could only hold a hundred and thirty-one."
"I'm not her."
"No. You're the one who tried to combine three fragments in a gym and collapsed. You're the one who forced a dual combination in a B-rank dungeon and gave himself a nosebleed that signaled channel inflammation. You're the one who absorbed Stone Skin from a creature that was engineered to test you, and now you've lost access to the fragment that was going to be the foundation of your combination training." Gareth's hand found Damien's shoulder. The grip was light. The weight behind it was not. "You push too hard. You always have. And up to now, the consequences have been manageable. Bruises, bloody noses, hurt pride. The stakes just changed."
"I know."
"Do you? Because what I see is a young man who's about to tell me he wants to try a new combination on Thursday, two days from now, with inflamed channels and a conflicted fragment network."
Damien opened his mouth. Closed it. The old man had anticipated the request before he'd made it, which shouldn't have been surprising but was.
"Warrior and Fire Mage," Gareth said. "That's the pair you're thinking of. Since Earth Mage is offline."
"Yes."
"And you want to do it here, supervised, with Ren monitoring."
"Yes."
"And you've already discussed this with Maya, who agreed under conditions."
"Thursday. One attempt. Ren says stop, I stop."
Gareth released his shoulder. Walked to the edge of the crystal ring. Picked up his thermos from where it sat next to his bucket, and for the first time that morning, took a sip of tea.
"The channel inflammation from the dungeon combination hasn't fully resolved. Ren's assessment of two weeks is clinically accurate. Attempting another combination before then carries a risk of mana scarring that could permanently reduce the capacity of both Warrior and Fire Mage channels."
"But the nosebleed means the channels are adapting, not failing. You said that yourself."
"I said that because it's true. Adaptation and damage are not mutually exclusive. You can grow and hurt at the same time. The question is whether the growth outpaces the damage." He drank more tea. "Thursday. Integration ring. Ren present. One attempt, under my supervision. If I say abort, you abort. If Ren says stop, you stop. And if the combination fails, you accept a three-week moratorium on any further combination attempts."
"Three weeks?"
"Three weeks. During which you'll work the integration ring daily to develop your channel network. Build the infrastructure before you build the weapon." He set the thermos down. "And you'll tell your team about the fragment conflict. All of them. Today."
"I was going to—"
"Today. Before you leave this building. They deserve to know that their multi-classer just lost access to a fragment and might lose more if things go wrong. That affects their operational planning and their safety."
The words stung because they were right. Damien nodded.
"Good." Gareth walked back to his bucket. Sat down. Retrieved his tea. Looked, for the first time that morning, like the retired old man he pretended to be instead of the S-rank weapon he'd actually been. "Now get out of my gym. I have to recalibrate the integration ring for your mana signature, and I can't do that with you sitting in it."
---
He told the team.
They were scattered across the city, Tomas at his gym, Nessa at a shooting range in the Fourth District, Ren at the clinic, so he did it the way Maya suggested: a group call. Five people on a phone line, no video, just voices.
"Stone Skin is conflicting with Earth Mage," Damien said. He kept it clinical. Facts. No embellishment, no minimization. "I've lost access to Earth Mage for at least ten days. Possibly longer. The fragment is still present, but the channel is blocked."
Silence. The kind that happened when four people were all processing the same information at different speeds.
"Operational impact?" Tomas asked. Military mind. Cut to the relevant data.
"I can't do the Warrior/Earth Mage combination that cracked the Golem. I can't sense geological structures. I can't contribute to rift stabilization if another one occurs."
"Combat capability?"
"Reduced. Not eliminated. I have sixty-four other fragments at full functionality. But the one we were going to build the combination training on is offline."
"The hundred-fragment plan," Nessa said. Her voice was flat. "Maya briefed us yesterday. Sixty days, aggressive growth. And now you're telling us one fragment conflict is enough to knock out a key ability?"
"Yes."
"So what happens when you hit seventy? Eighty? Do we lose a fragment every time?"
"That's what the integration ring is for. Gareth is developing a training protocol to expand the channel network. If it works, future fragments integrate without conflicts."
"If."
"If."
Another silence. Ren's voice came through, calm and measured.
"The risk is real. I've examined Damien's mana channels. The current inflammation is manageable. But the system is under stress, and adding more fragments without resolving the underlying architecture will increase the probability of cascade failure."
"Cascade failure meaning what?" Nessa again.
"Multiple fragment loss. Potentially dozens. The more fragments in the system when a cascade occurs, the more fragments at risk."
"So the plan to reach a hundred fragments could end with him having thirty?"
"In a worst case scenario, yes."
Nessa made a sound. Not a word, just an exhale that carried the weight of a woman who'd joined a team three days ago and was already calculating whether the investment was going to pay off.
"I'm still in," she said. "But I want to know the probability ranges. Not feelings. Numbers. What's the actual risk of cascade at each milestone?"
"I'll work with Ren to calculate that," Maya said. She'd been quiet through the call, letting Damien deliver the information without interference. "We'll have a risk assessment by Thursday."
"Thursday is the combination attempt," Tomas said.
"Yes. Warrior/Fire Mage. Under Gareth's supervision, with Ren monitoring."
"And if that fails?"
"Three-week moratorium on combinations. Integration ring training daily. Fragment acquisition paused until the channels are stable."
"That pushes the hundred-fragment timeline past Wells's interview deadline."
"I know."
Tomas's voice carried the particular weight of a man balancing risk against reward and finding the ledger uncomfortably even. "Then Thursday matters. Not just for the combination, for the whole plan. If it works, we accelerate. If it fails, we're in defensive mode for a month."
"That's the situation."
"Understood. Anything else?"
"One more thing." Damien took a breath. "I should have told you about this immediately. The conflict started yesterday morning. I spent twelve hours trying to fix it before calling Ren. That was wrong."
Nessa made the sound again. "How many hours before you called Maya?"
"Eight."
"Eight hours. You sat on a fragment failure for eight hours before telling your tactical coordinator."
"Yes."
"Is this going to be a pattern? Because I've worked with team leads who held information before, and it ended with three healers getting hurt and me getting fired for pointing out the problem."
"It's not going to be a pattern."
"That sounds like something a person who holds information would say."
Maya cut in. "He told me this morning. He told the team this afternoon. The gap is too long and he knows it. We're working on it."
"Working on it isn't the same as having it fixed."
"No. It's not." Maya's voice was steel wrapped in patience. "But fixing it is a process, and the process is happening. If you need a faster timeline, I'm open to suggestions."
Nessa went quiet. When she spoke again, the edge was softer. Not gone. Banked.
"I'll be at Gareth's Thursday. I want to see the combination attempt."
"Same," Tomas said.
"I'll be there in a medical capacity," Ren added.
The call ended. Damien stood in his apartment with the phone in his hand and the fragments, sixty-five of them, sixty-four functional and one at war with its neighbor, humming quietly inside him. The Warrior fragment was solid. The Rogue fragment was ready. The Scout fragment was sharp and clear.
The Earth Mage fragment was silent. A hole in the network where capability used to be.
He set the phone down. Walked to the window. The Fourth District spread below him, unremarkable and indifferent, and somewhere in the city a woman named Wells was sitting in an office with a seven-day deadline and the patience of someone who knew that time was on her side.
Sixty days to a hundred fragments. Seven days to an interview. Two days to a combination attempt that would determine whether the plan was possible or the whole strategy collapsed.
He pressed his palm against the window glass. The Stone Skin fragment activated involuntarily. His hand hardened against the surface, skin turning the color and texture of granite for three seconds before releasing.
Sixty-five fragments. Sixty-four working. One fighting. And the gap between what he was and what he needed to be was measured in channels he couldn't see and timelines he couldn't control.
Thursday was two days away.
