We went to check on Callie when we got back to the house. She was resting comfortably in the guest bedroom. Kara didn’t seem to be home, but she’d clearly done more healing. Callie now looked fine. I spent a while standing there marveling at her skin as she slept. It was perfectly restored. In fact, she looked a little younger, as though Kara had taken away some of the years’ wear and tear along with the burn.

The memory of what she’d looked like when Williams carried her in rose up powerfully in my mind. The thought twisted my feelings from wonder to anger.

“What was it that burned Callie?” I asked, when I went to sit down in the living room with Graham.

He glanced up at me but didn’t answer.

“Graham?”

He sighed. “Williams originally came here to deal with an S-Em incursion Callie reported — a large fire nearby.”

“You mean the one at the old mill up at Bilford Crossing?”

I remembered that you could still see the column of smoke on Sunday, more than a day after it had caught fire.

“Yeah, that’s the place.”

“So Callie got burned in that fire?”

“I imagine so.”

“I don’t get it. What does the fire have to do with the other world?”

Graham looked uncomfortable. “There’s no reason for you to worry about that kind of stuff, yet. Let’s just focus on your development, okay?”

It was nice that he was trying to protect me, but it wasn’t going to fly. I needed a better picture of what I was facing.

He must’ve seen my thoughts on my face.

“Okay, okay. You remember how I said that some Seconds can travel from their world to this one?”

I nodded.

“There are several ways that can happen. One way is the opening of a strait. A strait is a place where you can open a passageway between the worlds. Some of them are worked into existence, but most appear spontaneously. You might think of the worlds as having skins that are thicker in some places and thinner in others, and sometimes a connection forms at the thin spots. I’ve also heard it described as rippling, so that in some places the worlds bulge out and can touch, but in others there’s a lot of distance between them.”

That confused me. “Well, which one is it?”

“Neither, really. Those are just metaphors. No one really knows how the worlds coexist, spatially or dimensionally. There are different theories.”

I nodded, feeling a bit dense.

“The mill is built on a strait, which seems to be stuck open. The human firefighters can’t put out the fire because it’s actually coming through the strait from the S-Em. They can’t get at what’s really burning.”

“That sounds bad.”