“No, we’re supposed to be helping him, remember? If we leave him to die of his injury, we’re not helping him. The luck will turn against us.”

“Not if he’s dead, it won’t,” Williams said.

Kara sighed. “Too big a chance — he could do a lot of damage before he dies. I can heal the head injury but leave him unconscious.”

She put her hands on him for a few seconds, then leaned back. I couldn’t see any difference.

I had to admit that I didn’t really want to see him wake up. Not right then, at any rate. His attack had really rattled me. He’d seemed like a pretty suave guy. I’d have expected some complex and nuanced assault — manipulation, a trick, something like that. Instead he’d just knocked me down like a schoolyard bully.

I gave myself a mental shake. It was dumb to spend time being disturbed about the specific way someone attacked you.

We got ourselves together. Williams staggered up, and Kara and Callie each took hold of one of his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“He needs help making a new barrier,” Kara said. “Getting your working busted that way really takes it out of you.”

“We can share our strength with others this way — skin-to-skin contact, plus intent,” Callie said. “Kara and I don’t have John’s gift for barriers. Kara’s keeping us unseen right now, but she can’t protect us from the fire. John can, but he’ll need to pull on our strength to do it.”

“You should only do this with someone you trust,” Kara added. “Once you open yourself to someone, it’s pretty easy for them to pull more than you want them to.”

I nodded. Even thinking about doing that with Williams made me feel ill.

When they gave me the go-ahead, I stepped toward the wreckage. The fire was picking up again in the center, now that the firefighters had stopped hosing it down. I peered into the fire, trying to see past it.

“Don’t try to look through it,” Callie said from behind me. “Look into it. Look deep, not long.”

I nodded, though the difference between looking “deep” and looking “long” didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

“Remember, you’re looking for a catch or hitch — an anomaly of some kind.”

I tried to do as she said. I stared at the mound of twisted metal, trying to make out the shapes and colors, the lumps and cavities. I didn’t see anything shaped like a tube, much less a tube with a hitch in it.