"Seth," says Daniel firmly, focused, "raising people from the dead is not an exact science. There is no way you could have predicted that."

He concentrates on the dull ring of the glass striking the table, the fade of the pitch into the blended room tone. He needs some way to inject reason into this, detachment. "If you got that power from someone else, then they must've known they had it in the first place. And to know they even had it, they must have tried it and it must not have resulted in anything like that, or people would have noticed. You couldn't have known. You couldn't."