Frightened by the realization that he could see me, I pushed the heat and sound away and then pushed harder, reminding myself that I wasn’t actually standing in that landscape. It’s just a picture in the fire, a picture in the fire, I chanted in my head, Go away, go away, go away. Slowly the scene shrank and lost its sensory richness until it was just an image. I closed my eyes for a long second, and when I opened them, all I could see was smoldering wreckage. I couldn’t see any flames.

I looked away and saw that things around me had changed. Callie was still standing next to Williams, holding his hand, but Kara was lying at his feet. Williams himself looked pretty damned wobbly. The asphalt was slagged to molten tar in an arc around us. I shivered. The fire had come for us, but Williams’s barrier had held.

“Is Kara okay?”

“She will be,” Callie said. “When the fire surged, John pulled enough to drain her. She’ll be back to normal in a few days. Until then, she’ll be weak and ill.”

It was a damned good thing Callie had come with us, I realized. Williams had needed more than what Kara had.

“We need to back off,” Williams said.

It took a while. He gripped Graham by the front of his shirt and dragged him along while keeping a hold on Callie with his other hand. I pulled Kara along by the ankles. She wasn’t big, but I wasn’t strong, so it was hard. We moved back about a hundred feet before Williams seemed to feel safe dropping the protective barrier.

I was bagged, and Williams looked even worse. Callie might not have been so tired physically, but I could see she was mentally exhausted. I didn’t blame her — I couldn’t imagine facing that fire again after what had happened to her. I went and sat next to her and took her hand.

“You were really brave to come back here,” I told her.

She smiled and squeezed my hand.

Williams said, “What’d you see?”

I described it to them, including the guy in the lawn chair.

There wasn’t a moment of stunned silence. There was a full minute of it.

Williams said, “Limu.”

Finally Callie said, “You saw through the strait. You saw through and —”

“Talk about that later,” Williams interrupted. “We have to tell Cordus about Limu.”

“Who’s Limu?”

“That’s who you saw,” Callie said, sounding shaky. “The great demons are territorial. This is Lord Cordus’s part of the world. Lord Limu claims the Pacific Rim.”

Williams said, “Call Cordus. Now.”

“Graham has to do it,” I said. “This was all supposed to be helping him, remember?”

“Fuck him. It’s over. It doesn’t matter.”