He jogged on, glancing around to check where the guards were. The prisoner that the one guard had been talking to—paying attention to Gambol.

It happened almost forty seconds later. Behind William, Gambol leaped to the fence to grab something and go over the heads of a group of others, and the fence distorted. It was a flicker, a separation of the wire from its diamond-shaped links to a webwork of segments of wire, each sharp at both ends. It was so quick and momentary that Gambol and most who weren’t paying attention wouldn’t have seen it.

A slash of crimson. Gambol had cut his hand. He tumbled through the group he had been meaning to jump over, with some glancing hits and a violent fall.

He’d been moving fast, and the fall was consequently violent—the kind that could snap necks or break limbs.

William jogged over, while the guards called for backup or ran to the gate where they could enter the yard. Other prisoners were backing off. Staying out of it.

“What the fuck was that?” Gambol’s voice wasn’t jokey anymore. He was writhing on the spot, back twisting, limbs curling and twitching. The words came through grit teeth.

“Don’t move,” William said.

“Can’t not,” Gambol muttered.

William reached out, placing his hand on Gambol’s shoulder.

I hate my power, hate it so much.

He sensed the wound to Gambol’s back and he sensed it, feeling it in detail and in entirety, so real that he might as well have been the one to destroy his back in a freak fall.

He explored that sensation and found a catalogue of similar scenes. He could see other Gambols, including ones without powers, arranged so that some were close, others far away, and there was a pattern to them that distorted the perspective. Where they had powers, they stood in the shadow of great monoliths that were simultaneously existing in the plural and the singular, the images too indistinct to make out, too great in scale to ignore.

He could see himself, blurrier, hard to track. He could transfer things from the other to himself and vice versa. Even ailments or complaints as minor as feeling too hot or too cold could be moved. On the other end of the scale, he had brought someone back from a point so close to the brink of death that he wasn’t sure he hadn’t brought them back from death itself.

A lower back injury was easy, in the grand scheme of things.

He picked out versions of himself, distributing the load. He took on the lower back injury, the injuries that would be bruises from the fall. Some of these alternate Williams would feel a share of the injury, possibly even a totality of the injury.