The Forgeheart Elixir was the key.

  I’d spread all my winnings from the unfinished Mycopolis dungeon on the Voltsmith’s Laboratory’s workbench. The only components that mattered were the three Elixirs, and in a technical sort of way, the Forgeheart Elixir was probably enough to solve my problem on its own. The projector was a magical item. It could fix any spent magical item.

  But I didn’t want a one-time fix for a device that had melted down once already. I wanted a permanent one—and more importantly, one that would act as a catalyst to kick-start the two components I already had. The projector could be fixed with some tinkering, anyway, and the Waypoint Beacon was little more than a battery for the device I wanted to build. I even had a pretty good idea for how to avoid backlash from overtaxing it—I’d just have to test it thoroughly once I had the catalyst figured out.

  So, for the first time in…a while…I fired up an old machine. I’d gotten it from the Wild-Seared Tower at the end of Phase One. The Liquid Charge Generator sat in the corner of my lab, with a thin layer of dust across it. I’d found other, more convenient ways to get ‘fluid’ Charge in the second Phase, but I didn’t have anything that’d convert a magical item into a Charge-powered creation. That alone made the Generator a unique part of the lab. And it was there that I started.

  The elixirs behaved exactly like Leana Collins’s potions had—like any Alchemist’s potions would. If I drank one, or poured it over a magical item, it’d consume the liquid, and the effect would occur—one-time use, no Mana component. No Charge component, either.

  I took a deep breath and placed the Elixir of the End, bottle and all, inside the Liquid Charge Generator. Then I fired it up.

  That process alone took almost an hour, and when I’d finished, what I had wasn’t a bottle of potion anymore. It was a copper wire-wrapped, completely sealed glass vial, vaguely pill-shaped, with copper plates bent over the ends like half-spheres.

  Fuse of the End (0/5 Charge)

  This fuse, when correctly installed and activated, adds a lethal effect to any creation.

  I stared at the description for a moment, then nodded grimly. It was, by far, the most dangerous Voltsmithing component I’d ever held—I could kill anything with it, I just knew it—but the elixir inside was identical to the Elixir of the End. The device clearly had room to install snugly against an Emitter/Refiner pair. The contraption I needed to build was coming together.

  The next two hours were dedicated to creating the other two fuses, and when I was finished, I was exhausted. I closed the garage door, pulled the office door closed behind me as I searched for the old couch in the break room, and closed my eyes.

  Fuse of Lifegiving (0/5 Charge)

  This fuse, when correctly installed and activated, adds a healing effect to any creation.

  Fuse of the Forgeheart (0/5 Charge)

  This fuse, when correctly installed and activated, adds a reinforcing effect to any creation.

  The next morning, I returned to the lab, and to my three fuses. The last one was interesting; instead of repairing a device, it seemed to be more oriented toward protecting it. That would be perfect for what I had in mind. Unfortunately, the other two fuses seemed…less useful.

  Now that I had all three, though, my next step was wiring the Charge flow to go from the Waypoint Beacon into the projector—preferably without overloading the whole thing. I set the three fused in line with each other, using rubber O-ring-padded grips to hold each of them in place gently, then strung the Emitters and Refiners in pairs between them, using wire to link the whole thing together. But I didn’t connect the Rube Goldberg-looking thing to either the projector or the Waypoint Beacon yet.

  First, it needed a test run.

  I hooked up a single, medium Charge battery with fifteen Charge in it to one end, flowing from Forgeheart to The End and ending on Lifegiving. Then I attached a single light to the far side. That’d give me some indication that the machine was running, without blowing half of the lab up by going all-out to start.

  Then I added five Charge to each of the three components.

  As soon as I did, the Forgeheart Fuse started to glow a brilliant, rich orange. It wasn’t the color of Charge, more the color of a cooling piece of metal on an anvil. Five seconds later, the Fuse of the End went deep purple, throwing wild shadows across the room, and a moment later, a bright green joined the others as the Fuse of Lifegiving filled with Charge.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  And the light lit up. So, the device was passing power through it safely. Or…mostly safely. Next, I needed to—

  “What are you doing?” Tori asked. She had an almost disgustingly self-satisfied smile plastered across her face.

  I shrugged. “You’re up early.”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Carol and I had a talk, and…”

  “Good for you two.” I gave her a grin, then drained the Charge from the Voltsmith’s Grasp. “Give me a hand, would you?”

  “Stop making that joke, and I will.” Tori couldn’t help but smile, though. I had her. She walked over and unbuckled the Voltsmith’s Grasp from my body. “What do I do with this?”

  “Thanks. Hook it up where the light is when I say so.” I unplugged the battery, and the multicolored Charge running through the series of fuses cut off. “Okay. Go for it. I’ll coach you through it.”

  “And what, exactly, are you trying to do? New power system for your arm, or for the mech?” Tori fiddled with the wires. “Where do these go?”

  “Attach them directly to the interface nodes on the end of the arm. This has nothing to do with the mech or with the Grasp—yet. I’m trying to re-open communications with the thing that called itself the World Engine, and this string of elixirs is going to—hopefully—modulate the Charge flowing from the Waypoint Beacon and into the projector system so it melts down more slowly. Okay. Wires in? Next, cap them.” I handed Tori a set of plastic widgets that screwed on over each node.

  Once they were in place, and the Voltsmith’s Grasp sat on the floor, she eyed it doubtfully and turned back toward me. “And you’re using your arm as a Guinea Pig?”

  “Yes. I can rebuild it in a few hours if I have to—and if I have help doing it. The projector is priceless, and so is the Waypoint Beacon. Adding Charge.”

  Fifteen seconds later, all three fuses threw a kaleidoscope of color across the Voltsmith’s Laboratory, and the Grasp’s fist had tightened around nothing. “Test two accomplished. Next, we’re going to add more power.”

  “How much more power?” Tori asked.

  “A lot.” I unhooked the medium Charge battery and pointed at two large wires. “Undo my arm and help me back into it, and we’ll start Test Three.”

  “How many tests are there?”

  “So far? Three.”

  “Great.”

  My arm plugged back in, and a moment later, it was moving again. “Next, we wire up the Beacon.”

  “Not the projector?”

  I shook my head. “There’s a scenario where I can get another beacon from the Garden or the Fireborns. I’ve never seen another projector. We go from most replaceable to least replaceable for this process.”

  The wires attached through the maze of gears and cogs, directly connecting to the massive Charge battery at the Beacon’s core, and I took a deep breath. If this worked, I’d be ready. There wasn’t a fourth test because, after this one, the only thing left would be powering the projector—and that was the real deal, not a simple test drive. And if it didn’t work, I’d have to hope Tori, Carol, and Zane would help me wage a clandestine war on the Fireborns to get their beacon. Otherwise, we were probably screwed.

  Then, one at a time, I touched the wires to the three-fuse catalyst.

  Two towns over from Cozad, just before I’d left for Chicago, there’d been a couple of guys who’d bought all the tools they needed to get into solar power. It was supposed to be the next thing—a bunch of farmland was fallow every year, and they had this idea that they’d get free energy by setting up solar on wheels and moving it around from field to field, harvesting power from the crop-less land. The shade would slow down the weeds that always popped up, and they’d pay the farmers a percent of the profits.

  Of course, they hadn’t figured on the electric company being annoying. They generated so much energy that it caused problems with the whole grid, and lawsuits followed.

  I didn’t get any lawsuits. But I did get three points of incredibly bright light, each so brilliant that I had to shield my eyes. “Hal?” Tori asked.

  The device was still stable, though. I ignored her and held the wires in place.

  “Hal!?”

  The lights grew brighter and brighter, and a moment later, the fourth light—the test one—flooded with so much Charge it blew out instantly.

  “Hal!” Tori glared at me as I pulled the wires loose. “What the hell?”

  “Third test accomplished,” I said, grinning. “And even better, I learned something.”

  Tori huffed and headed for the door. “You’re on your own.”

  “Sure, Tori. See you later.”

  I’d actually learned two things. First, that I could overload the whole system, but that it wasn’t the fuses that’d blow first. It was the device that the Charge flowed into after. I took a few minutes to disassemble the tiny light, and what I found was fascinating. The wire inside it was still intact. Technically, it even worked. But the glass had shattered instantly. I’d paid just enough attention to my physics courses to know that this was the opposite problem early lightbulbs had faced; they’d burned out the wires too quickly until Edison figured out his special materials.

  I could only assume the Fuse of the Forgeheart was doing its job, toughening the components that came into direct contact with Charge. If so, that was great news for me.

  The second bit of news was even better.

  Principle of Voltsmithing Learned: Clausius’s Failed Law

  Energy cannot be created or destroyed. For generations untold, physics has operated under that assumption. To power a car, dead plants and animals must burn. To make a starship move, atoms must be split. To take a step, food must be consumed. This is inviolable.

  Charge cannot be destroyed. But a talented enough Voltsmith can make a mockery of Clausius and all the other students of physics by seemingly creating energy from nothing. You, as a Voltsmith of the second Rank, can leverage this imbalance of power to your own benefit.

  Energy wasn’t being created here. That wasn’t possible. No matter what the Principle said, it wasn’t. I reconnected the wires, this time with a welding mask on to block the worst of the ultra-bright lights, and watched the Charge Battery in the center of the Waypoint Beacon. It didn’t drop—and it wasn’t just that there was so much Charge in it that it wasn’t noticeable. It wasn’t going down at all.

  I laughed. The device I’d built was wildly impractical—it took a power source the size of a car to get it started, and probably had to be connected to it all the time—but I’d just figured out how the Voltsmith’s Laboratory powered itself. And even better, I’d almost certainly generated enough Charge to power the projector.

  After I’d disconnected the wires and wheeled the Waypoint Beacon far, far from my workspace, I finally got to work on the tiny, hand-sized component I’d stolen from the Whole New World dungeon. It was almost time to make contact with the World Engine again.