Rowan’s workshop was strewn with the remainders of a former life. In parts, he could just barely make out the outline of an old experiment in the soot. Piles of expensive glass collected, partially melted, where once he’d had sets of tubes and beakers suitable for either his Fulminancy powered lights or holding the gaseous mixtures which enhanced them.

  Twisted metal had embedded itself into his wooden workbenches and idea boards alike, though none of his scraps of paper remained, more than likely incinerated in the blast.

  The ground was still slightly damp as he swept at it with a broom, trying to collect the glass in a pile to be melted down. Glass was expensive in the mountains, and Rowan would obviously be out of funds as soon as Cashin heard anything about all this— if he hadn’t already.

  Fortunately, at least, no one was permanently injured from the blast. It had been the first thing Rowan had checked on yesterday after recovering from his initial shock, and it was the only good thing that had come out of two days of dealing with the aftermath. The walls— several feet of sturdy stone— had held true through the explosion, though the mortar was cracked in places. Rowan wasn’t entirely sure the structure was sound, but going through his old things was too important to leave it behind.

  Most of the workshop had already been cleared out, and though Arlette had offered several workers employed by the manor, Rowan had refused. He’d ordered the door locked as soon as he’d gathered his wits about him, intent on finding the source of the explosion in the first place.

  He leaned on his broom, surveying the wreckage once again, the pungent smell of charred wood reminding him of the smell of a bad Lightstorm Downhill. His mood grew fouler by the moment, and he sighed, adding his tiny collection of glass to the much larger pile by the door to the rest of the house, newly restored to its hinges. The back was still peppered with shrapnel.

  His workshop was a husk now, hollowed out by hours of work and care, but still Rowan had learned nothing. He abandoned his broom and stood in the middle of the blackened room, searching for answers.

  I was so careful, he thought. He’d followed every recommended safety procedure to the letter— and indeed he’d even added a few of his own. His letters from Uphill colleagues were riddled with teasing and snide remarks about his passion for safety, and how true discovery couldn’t be had without risk.

  But Rowan didn’t want risky discoveries— he wanted progress without any sort of compromise. He wanted his inventions to improve lives. To be embraced without any sort of hesitancy. He wanted people to feel safe using the Fulminancy he harnessed.

  Now they never would.

  Cashin will never agree to this now, he realized, running soot stained fingers through dark and sweaty curls. It’s more bad publicity for him, just like his parlor. He’d be a fool to keep the deal with me, even if he thought there was potential.

  Rowan walked over to the remains of his workbench and picked up a charred and twisted piece of glass, turning it in his hands. Then, only because no one was around, he hurled it into the far wall with a vicious throw, and leaned back over the workbench, arms trembling, breath coming in thick rasps.

  How long would his prototypes remain in Hillcrest before they were torn down? How long would it take for public criers to announce further failure of the Northmont son— of Rowan’s second fall from grace? Cashin would abandon him, and Rowan would be left with nothing— again.

  He would be no one.

  Unless he could figure out a way to keep it all under wraps.

  He hesitated, staring at the charred workbench. Could he keep it under wraps?

  His innate sense of honesty nagged at him. He couldn’t simply dump an unsafe technology onto the unsuspecting public. If it reacted the way it had in his workshop, then more lives than Rowan’s own were potentially at stake. Instead, he would need to get to the bottom of what had caused it, then find a way to either solve the problem or warn the public.

  He counted up the number of prototypes he knew about, and was a little dizzy by the number he came up with. Fulminancy-powered lighting was already wildly popular, and Rowan would be hard pressed to undo his work so quickly. I need to work fast, he thought. But where to start when the entire workshop was a dead end?

  Rowan’s failure was damning enough on a personal level, but it begged a larger question— one fundamental to Hillcrest’s existence. Fulminancy had long been touted as safe, though users did occasionally lose control in a usually destructive manner. This had mostly been remedied by shepherding Fulminancers Uphill through the use of fighting rings, and sending anyone without control off to mountainside villas to be forgotten about entirely.

  The Uphill blamed any further accidents on the Downhill for raising miscreants without control, and the Downhill blamed the Uphill for a lavish lifestyle that made their children emotionally unstable and prone to fits. In reality both tiers of the city produced Fulminancers with problems in equal parts; whether or not a Fulminancer managed to master their powers at all was more of an issue of wealth, time, and resources than anything else.

  But now, standing in his charred workshop, Rowan was bothered by something else. For some time, his experiments had been reliable and mundane— safe to the point that he received complaints about their boring nature. What had he done differently that would have resulted in such a stark change?

  I added more Fulminancy to that tube, he realized, blinking. But he’d done that before without issue. Perhaps there was a threshold he’d somehow crossed, but he’d been adding to it for months without problem. Rowan had dozens of charts and models that pointed to the statistical impossibility of it blowing— he wouldn’t have tampered with it otherwise. It seemed to point to one possibility— Fulminancy was inherently unstable.

  And if Fulminancy was unstable both in its natural form in a parlor, as well as in Rowan’s prototypes, where else was it unstable? And why?

  Behind him, the door clicked. Rowan didn’t look up as soft footsteps approached. Not Arlette then, he thought idly, still staring at his charred workbench. A steaming, foul smelling concoction of a drink was plopped in front of him, and Rowan winced. Definitely not Arlette.

  Claire of Bellmere leaned against his workbench and crossed her arms, staring him down. Blond, tousled curls were tied behind her head in a way that managed to look simultaneously feminine and out of sorts. Her hazel eyes were shrewd and no-nonsense, and though her voice was always melodious and pleasant, she had a knack for making it seem less so with her brusque nature.

  She nudged the drink towards him, even as her eyes assessed him. She had a way of trying to see through people— a feat Rowan wasn’t entirely sure was impossible with her Fulminancy.

  “Drink,” she said, shoving the poorly named concoction towards him. “You’ve moped long enough.”

  “Moped?” Rowan spluttered in spite of himself. He picked up the drink and sniffed tentatively. It was pungent and earthy at the same time, with the bite of licorice hidden beneath layers of other odd smells. It did little to convince him to try it. “Claire, my entire workshop is gone in case you haven’t noticed. I’m not moping— I’m trying to figure out what happened. Leave a man to decipher the world in peace, will you?”

  Claire twisted her mouth to the side in a considering way as she looked around the remainder of the room. “Looks to me like something exploded. There— now you can spend the next few days doing something productive instead of staring at the same piece of charred glass.” She knocked the piece Rowan was still holding out of his other hand and looked pointedly at the drink.

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  Rowan sighed and sipped at it reluctantly. It was terrible— but not as bad as Claire’s concoctions usually were. And it did help to take the edge off of his headache, though sleep would help more.

  “A destroyed workshop isn’t enough I see,” Rowan said, sipping. “You have to poison me as well.”

  “Everything is poisonous with the right dose,” Claire replied. “That wood ash for example.” She nodded to a pile in the corner. “Toss it on plants in the right amount and you can save an entire crop. Put too much and you’ll find yourself with nothing to harvest.”

  “I trust you didn’t put wood ash in this.”

  “Not much. I’d much rather use it as an anticoagulant or an antibacterial than waste it on your drink.”

  Rowan blinked. The words were familiar, but… “Claire, why do you need to worry about old healing myths when you can just use Fulminancy?”

  Claire sighed as if she’d been asked the question a thousand times before— and likely, she had. She had an unhealthy obsession with plants and old medical literature. He’d never met a Fulminant healer so reluctant to use their powers. Of course, he hadn’t met very many at all.

  “Fulminancy doesn’t take care of everything,” she said. “I can see a lot more than a Dud healer, and I can speed along a natural process— sometimes dramatically if I do it right. But bodies adjust too quickly to repeated healing, I’ve found. It’s better to let the body do what it can without Fulminancy’s help.”

  “Does that really happen?” Rowan asked, intrigued in spite of himself. With his curiosity some of his worries abated as well. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” she replied, testing her weight against the workbench. Then she hopped onto it and dusted the soot from her hands. “It’s something you really only notice if you’re working with large quantities of patients. People with chronic injuries or illnesses start to respond less favorably to Fulminant healing over time. The Uphill doesn’t want to admit it because it would mean a lot less coin for them if people stayed home for simple maladies. So most healers just accept it as part of the drawback of healing with Fulminancy.”

  She shrugged and began to pick through the tiny pile of charred paper Rowan had managed to salvage from the walls, and Rowan’s brief distraction evaporated as surely as some of the pages crumbled in Claire’s hands.

  “How is everyone?” he asked quietly. Claire gave him a pointed look as she put back a few of the pages.

  “You’d know if you ever left this place.” Then she seemed to see the look in his eyes and her face softened a bit. “They’re fine,” she said quickly. “The aftermath was downright boring, really. Just a couple of bruises from the entire house nearly falling in on itself and— what? Really, Rowan, I can handle a couple of bumps. Thank Mariel no one was in the room when it happened. We’d be having a much different conversation otherwise.”

  “Thank you,” Rowan said, handing the cup back to Claire. It had been as terrible as he’d feared, but Claire was trying to help in her own way. She took it and shrugged, legs swinging from the table. Already Rowan expected her to leap off of it, on to her next patient or task, but it seemed that even Claire was a little taken aback by the destruction of the workshop. And perhaps my attitude, Rowan thought. He tried to stand up a little straighter, though he felt that no amount of mental fortitude could help him fix the problems he now faced.

  “You missed the fight,” Claire said. It was a transparent way to change the subject, but Rowan remembered, as if from a dream, the Bloodcrawler mystery he’d been so interested in two days ago.

  “Who won?”

  “That girl Kess,” Claire said appreciatively. “I went to watch it for Arlette to make sure her bets were good, and boy were they.” She let out a low whistle.

  “That good huh?”

  “The girl’s incredible— no Fulminancy for most of the fight, and she held her own— albeit with a few injuries I wouldn’t mind taking a look at.”

  She paused, something distant in her gaze, and Rowan realized there was more to the story. “But?” he prompted.

  “But there was a flash of something at the end of the fight, right before she struck the final blow,” Claire continued. “It’s hard to say whether it was really Fulminancy or not— whatever it was, it was tiny— but her career Downhill is finished.”

  “They’ll think she’s just been cheating all this time,” Rowan mused. “She’ll be lucky to fight again.”

  “Exactly.”

  Kess’s victory was shocking, but Rowan found that there was a bit of disappointment buried underneath the shock. Yes, she’d done something incredible, but perhaps it was less so with Fulminancy at her beck and call, even in such a tiny amount. Another dead end, he thought with frustration. Kess wasn’t a Dud after all, nor was she any different from other Bloodcrawlers who eventually worked their way into the Uphill rings.

  “Well,” he said, pushing off the workbench to pace around the shop again. “At least she’ll have a lucrative career Uphill. They’ll grant her a sash with a bit of training, won’t they?”

  Claire winced. “Not exactly. She sort of…provoked the crowd. They’d been expecting a slaughter, and when she walked away relatively unscathed, they weren’t pleased.” She shook her head. “I don’t see the Uphill extending a sash to anyone with that kind of reputation any time soon— and she’ll at least be in legal trouble for not registering for a blue sash.”

  “The Uphill needs fall guys too,” Rowan pointed out.

  “Yes, but not the kind who have a mob chasing after them.” She rolled her eyes and hopped off the table, then tapped Rowan lightly on the arm, almost affectionately. That ship had set sail for the two of them long ago, but Rowan appreciated the gesture anyway. He smiled. “There’s still an entire manor left outside this room, you know,” she said with a wry smile. “Come out once in awhile when you’re done collecting pretty glass.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Claire waved and walked to the door to the rest of the manor, then paused. “Oh!” She turned, and pulled a tiny, charred notebook from her pocket— one of Rowan’s, carefully penned. It was more of a dumping ground for ideas than a book of real value, but Rowan snatched it from Claire’s hands, eyes wide.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, flipping through the book. The edges were charred, but most of the text was unaffected. “I didn’t think anything would survive.”

  “Well, most of it didn’t,” Claire pointed out, looking around the room again. “But we found that one and a few more blown to the edge of the room, buried in some rubble.” She winced. “Some of them are a bit damp, so we’re still drying them, but most of them are legible.” She shrugged. “Figured you’d want us to save what we could.”

  “I—“ Rowan hesitated, book in hand. He’d written more than passing thoughts down in the tiny thing; he realized he’d been writing down the details of his most recent experiment in it. “Claire, this is incredible. Thank you. Truly.”

  “The rest are in the library,” she said.

  Claire bid him farewell with a smile as the door to the rest of the manor clicked shut behind her. Rowan stood there in the hollowed out husk of his workshop, and suddenly the place seemed less foreboding. Yes, his deal with Cashin was likely cloudspawn. Years of work were indeed gone, and with them, his sense of security. And yet if some of his work was preserved, he might yet have a chance to unravel the whole thing.

  If Fulminancy was unstable to the point of danger, the public had to know, no matter the cost. But Rowan wasn’t a politician— he wouldn’t scare people with unfounded, unscientific rumors about a power that had become as much a part of Hillcrest’s makeup as the surrounding mountains, or the trio of odd storms that rotated in and out of the city.

  Rowan turned towards his workbench, where his final experiment had gone awry. He pushed aside some of the ash, though most of it had already been swept away. There was something he hadn’t noticed before, distracted as he’d been with his lost work. Where he’d put his hand over the tube to demonstrate his ability to snuff out Fulminancy to Arlette, there was a lighter patch than the rest of the workbench. He swept at it again, the ash collecting on his fingers, but sure enough, that part of the table had somehow been spared.

  Either Rowan or some other force had dampened the explosion in this particular spot. His mind spun with the possibilities. Could Fulminancy have insulating powers? He wondered. Or perhaps something else was blocking the blast here. He didn’t dare think of the other possibility— that his own strange ability to snuff out Fulminancy had somehow interfered, even from across the city.

  Mind spinning, Rowan left the workshop behind to collect his notebooks from the library. Mariel and the other founders of Hillcrest had long ago left them Fulminancy, and so many years had passed that few questioned it.

  Now Rowan did.

  Fulminancy was inherently unstable— of that much, he at least had a strong suspicion. But something he was unable to identify had been able to stop that destruction in its tracks. What could stop Fulminancy?

  The Council had long ago convinced the public of the relative safety of the powers, even as events like Rowan’s workshop and the parlors suggested otherwise. The Council wants people to believe it’s safe, Rowan thought. But who would try to convince people of the opposite of the truth?

  And more importantly, why?

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