“So what you’re saying is that Graham’s won? He’s unbeatable?”

“Maybe not,” Kara said. “We’ve thought before that someone with significantly more power might be able to evade the bad luck he sent their way, but we’ve never tested it out.”

“Maybe now’s the time for me to see if it’s true,” Callie said, sounding nervous.

“No,” said Williams.

There was a finality to his voice that I sure didn’t want to contest. Kara didn’t say anything either.

We all thought about Graham for a while.

“So he’s at the mill, and we can’t get any closer to him — not in a car, not on foot, nothing?”

“That pretty much sums it up,” Kara said. “He left Dorf for a while this afternoon, and Callie saw it was going to happen. Otherwise we never would’ve made it out of town ourselves to come get you. We were hoping he’d stay away, but I guess his luck brought him to the mill. Or maybe he figured out what we were doing and knew we’d try to bring you there. Unfortunately, he’s not dumb.”

We all sat there thinking again. Finally, I had an idea. The kind of idea you have when you’re a new set of eyes looking at an old problem, maybe.

“What we need to do is change something so that it becomes lucky for him if we make it to the mill and unlucky if we don’t,” I said.

“I guess that would work,” Kara said dubiously. “But how on earth could we do that? What he wants is the opposite of what we want.”

“Well, you mentioned your boss — the guy who wanted Kyle killed? He sounds plenty dangerous. What if we called your boss up and told him that Graham might be trying to keep us from closing the strait? Then, if we close the strait after all and tell him Graham helped, maybe he’ll be reassured. We’d be doing Graham a good turn by getting him out of trouble. His luck should be on our side. Maybe.”

“So,” Callie said, “we would get him into trouble, then try to get him out of that same trouble?”

“Yeah. And during the getting-him-out-of-trouble part, we’ll actually be on his side. Even if he doesn’t know it.”

There was a thoughtful silence.

Kara said, “Lord knows I hate Graham, but ratting him out … I don’t know. He’s still one of us, not one of them.”

Callie nodded. “He’s a human being, with a chance at redemption.” She paused. “However slight.”

Williams said, “We have to close the strait,” and everyone looked down.