One ordinary year, the first human mutations wake: small, strange, and costly. A Lagos sleep technician who drifts into strangers' dreams hunts her vanished brother across five countries, gathering a dockworker who is strong for four seconds, a market girl who is a living battery, and a gentle nurse whose frightened breath could end a city, while the grieving founder of the Meridian Trust builds humane cages and is not entirely wrong.
While asleep she drifts toward the minds of the awakened, appears inside their dreams, and can speak with them
wants: Find her brother Chidi, whom police wrote off fourteen weeks ago
Involuntary 'dimming': when afraid, light and attention slide off him; eyes lose him, cameras blur him
wants: To go home, and to stop vanishing from the people he loves
First-mutation strength: roughly double a trained strongman's output, arriving in short involuntary bursts
wants: A quiet invisible life and a safe one for his daughter Zosia
Bioelectric charge like an electric eel: stored in her body, released through her bare hands
wants: Control, so she can touch her family again; engineering school someday
His body brews a novel lethal airborne virus; he is asymptomatic and sheds it when stressed
wants: Never to kill again; to feel a human hand on his skin one more time
Touch-null: her bare skin suppresses another person's power for as long as contact holds
wants: That no other family burns because an untrained power woke in the night; a world with hearths for the new fire
Proximity sense: awakened people register as pressure behind his eyes within a few hundred meters
wants: Order, quiet inside his own skull, and to repay Agnes the debt of a livable life
65 pages · 11 chapters · 164 AI agents · 2026