“Careful,” I murmured.

“Purple fire ignites powers,” Byron said. “I remember.”

His water splashed down on one of the worse blazes at the admin building. It had been the building where the warden, his deputy and his assistant had all been set up.

It served to get Lung’s attention, pulling it away from Goddess and presumably Lookout.

“Dallon,” Lung growled the word. Still capable of speech. “Pests. Too many of you remain.”

They were hard words to hear put out there so casually. Words that made me think of Crystal’s family, of too many funerals in too short a span of time.

He moved one hand in an almost casual way, and the flames expanded, becoming a slow-motion, rolling detonation, with a sound like the thunder of a dozen lightning strikes. A lick of purple flame caught it and ignited the pyrokinesis itself, the purple disappearing in the rolls of blinding oranges and reds. Lung’s regular pyrokinesis manipulated those flames, in turn, expanding them.

No games, nothing held back. Only a wall of flame that could have swamped many houses and conventional buildings, produced in mere seconds. A ball passed between two people, growing with each toss, with us in the line of fire.

I saw it coming, braced myself, and activated the Wretch, positioning myself between the wall and my teammates.

For a moment, an eye-blink, I saw the Wretch outlined.

Byron had bent his head down, armored arm shielding his eyes. Rain was the one who seemed to suffer the most from the ambient heat, with no shield or barrier to protect him.

“Go,” I told him, indicating.

He bolted for the building. I saw Lung move, drawing a hand back with flame appearing in the palm. I pushed out with my aura, taking flight, with every intent of interrupting his throw.

A fast-moving spark struck the Wretch, leaving me without my defenses. Another hit me dead center in the breastplate, making me sag in the air as my body was momentarily paralyzed, my heart skipping a beat with the intensity of the shock.

Other shots were aimed at Byron, who seemed to endure, and at Rain, who didn’t. I saw Rain fall where Byron and I had withstood the hits, not making it to the door into the admin building before the momentary paralysis gripped him.

“Go,” Byron said.

I flew in Rain’s direction, while Byron stopped using his water to put out fires and started using it to get at Lung from oblique angles. Here and there, the water caught purple flames, and became gouts of the stuff. Wherever she was, the fires extinguished before they reached Lung.