The nine hours turned into four.
Soren was still on the floor with Grimm in his lap and Selah half-asleep on her bed when the knock came, and it wasn't the soft kind.
Three hard raps. Official cadence.
He looked at the window. Still dark outside, maybe five in the morning, and whoever Joan Sawyer had sent hadn't waited for a civilized hour.
"Don't open it," Selah said from under her arm.
"Can't not."
"You're bleeding from your nose. Your wolf is mute. Your soul is at seventy-four percent." She sat up. "Do not open that door."
The knock came again, harder.
[DING! — Investigator from the Continental Bureau's Thermal Division has arrived at your location. Name: Cole Harver. Rank: C+. Authority level: SITE-WIDE ACCESS.]
[DING! — Notice: Cole Harver has a secondary classification. Classification: REDACTED.]
Soren stared at that for two seconds, then stood up, wiped his nose on his sleeve and opened the door.
The man in the hallway was shorter than he expected and looked about forty, dressed in the plain gray coat the Bureau used for field work and holding a scanner tablet with both hands.
His eyes went to Grimm first.
Then to Selah, who had pulled on Soren's jacket and was standing at the foot of her bed with her arms crossed and frost working its way up the window glass behind her.
Then to Soren's sleeve, where the blood hadn't fully dried.
"Soren Kane?" the man said.
"That's me."
"Cole Harver, Thermal Division. I'm here about a cryogenic anomaly registered in this corridor at three forty-seven this morning." He glanced past Soren's shoulder without asking to come in.
"The temperature drop hit minus eleven Celsius in a twelve-meter radius. That's a Class-C Hazard event."
"My roommate has an ice-type beast," Soren said.
"I know." Cole looked at Selah. "Selah Young. Frostbite Sprite, unregistered early bonding"
Selah didn't answer.
"My question,"
Cole said, turning back to Soren, "is why a Frostbite Sprite is producing minus-eleven readings when the documented maximum output for that class is minus four."
Soren filed that number away and ran the math.
the sprite was fused now. The reading was coming from Selah herself, not the sprite, and the Bureau's scanner was reading them as the same entity it already had on file.
It didn't have a category for what Selah was now.
"Cold snap," Soren said.
Cole looked at him.
"In the building," Soren said.
"There isn't a cold snap, It's April."
"Building's old, man."
Cole's expression didn't change and Soren got the feeling it hadn't changed in a long time.
The man lifted the scanner and pointed it at Selah, and the readout came up immediately, and Soren watched Cole's eyes move across it.
Whatever the scanner was showing, it wasn't matching the file.
Cole lowered it slowly.
"Miss Young," he said. "When did your bonding stabilize?"
Selah's chin came up. "Last night."
"The sprite's mana signature is integrated with your biology. That's not stabilization. That's fusion."
He said it without inflection. "The Bureau has a word for what your reading looks like right now."
"What word?" Selah said.
"Unclassified."
The three of them stood there for a moment.
Grimm's tail gave one thump on the floor.
Cole looked at the wolf for the first time since his eyes had passed over her at the door, and this time he looked longer.
"F-rank Shadow Beast," he said, reading off memory, because he hadn't checked a file.
"Blind Shadow Pup, bonded to Soren Kane."
"Yes," Soren said.
"That animal is not F-rank."
"She had an accelerated evolution."
"I can see that." Cole's scanner was still in his hand but he wasn't lifting it.
"Our report last week put her at C-rank but she's reading higher than that right now."
"She's tired."
"Tired beasts read lower, not higher."
Soren stopped trying.
He stood still and let Cole look at whatever he wanted to look at, because the man had a redacted secondary classification and a scanner that was showing him things the system couldn't label.
There was no lie in the room worth the energy of defending it.
"I'm going to file an unclassified event report," Cole said.
"That means the case stays open. It means I come back." He looked at Soren directly. "It also means I'm not escalating to the full Bureau team tonight."
Soren kept his face even.
"There's a student in the medical wing," Cole said. "Memory gaps, balance disruption. The attending medic logged a shadow trace on his clothes."
"I heard the alarm."
"Did you?"
"Hard to sleep through."
Cole put the scanner in his coat pocket and stepped back from the doorway.
"Twenty-eight days," he said, and the number matched Dani's timeline so exactly that Soren's stomach went cold.
"What?" Soren said.
"That's how long I'll hold the unclassified status before I'm required to escalate." Cole looked at him one more time.
"Whatever you're doing, Kane, you have twenty-eight days to be done with it."
He walked down the hall and the sound of his footsteps went away around the corner.
Soren closed the door and stood with his hand on the handle and counted to ten.
"He said twenty-eight days."
"I heard."Selah said.
"That's the same number as Dani."
"I heard that too."
Selah sat back down on her bed and pulled her knees up and the frost on the window climbed another two inches.
"Someone is managing us," she said.
Soren looked at the door. "The question is who."
[DING! — Quest timer updated: 28 days remaining.]
[DING! — Notice: Investigator Cole Harver's secondary classification has been cross-referenced. Classification: UNREDACTED. Secondary role: Handler, Continental Bureau Anomaly Division. Assigned cases: 3. Active monitoring: SOREN KANE.]