“S-so,” Carol said, “what are you doing, exactly?”

“I’m going to take their smoke screen away.” I held the sprinkler head in my right hand and closed my eyes, focusing on it, on its texture, its shape, its composition. I began pouring energy into the object, imagining it as a glowing aura of blue-white light with dozens of little tendrils sprouting from it. Once the energy was firmly wrapped around the sprinkler, I transferred it to my left hand and extended my right again.

“B-but we don’t have any lights.”

“Oh, we have lights,” I said. I held out my right hand and called forth my little ball of sunshine. In the myrk -free interior of the circle, it was as white-hot and as bright as usual, but I could see that outside of the circle it didn’t spread more than five or six feet through the myrk out there.

“Oh, my God,” Carol said.

“Actually, all the regular lights are on too—they’re just being blocked. The myrk isn’t shutting down the electricity. These computers are all on, for example—but the myrk is keeping you from seeing any of the indicator lights.”

“Harry!” Michael called.

“You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!” I called back in an annoyed tone. The rest of the spell was going to be a little tricky.

“H-how are you doing that?” Carol breathed.

“Magic,” I growled. “Hush.” I wore a leather glove over my left hand, as usual, which should offer my scarred skin a little protection. All the same, this wouldn’t be much fun. I murmured, “Ignus, infusiarus,” and thrust the end of the sprinkler into the flame floating over my right hand.

“How does this help us?” Carol demanded, her voice shaking and frightened.

“This place still has electricity,” I said. Maybe I was imagining the smell of burned leather as the heat from the flame poured into the metal sprinkler. “It still has computers. It still has phones.”

“Harry!” Michael said, swinging his head left and right, staring up at the ceiling. “They’re climbing. They’re going to come through the roof.”

I began to feel the heat, even in the nerve-damaged fingers of my left hand. It was going to have to be hot enough. I drew up more of my will, lifted the sprinkler and the flame, and visualized what I wanted, the tendrils of energy around it zipping out to every other sprinkler head in the whole building. “And it still has its sprinklers.”

I broke the circle with my foot, and energy lashed out from the sprinkler to every other object shaped like it in the surrounding area. Heat washed out of me in a wave, headed in dozens of different directions, and I poured all the energy I could into the little ball of sunshine, which suddenly had several dozen sprinkler heads to absorb its energy instead of only one.

It took maybe ten seconds before the fire detector let out a howl and the sprinkler system chattered to life. People let out surprised little shrieks, and a steady emergency klaxon wound to life somewhere out in the station. Sparks flew up from several phones, monitors, and computers.