Chapter 2 The Furnace

Garrick was already waiting outside when Marcus came down, a lantern in one hand and an expression that suggested he knew exactly how today would go and had prepared himself for it.

"You're actually going out there," Garrick said.

"Show me Furnace Three."

Garrick turned and started walking without another word.

The morning air was sharp and cold, biting at any exposed skin, and Marcus pulled his coat tighter as he followed.

His leg complained with every step, the ache settling into a familiar rhythm that he was beginning to accept as his new normal.

The walk through Hollow Crest gave him his first proper look at the town in daylight, and it was worse than the red marks on the map had suggested.

Empty storefronts had boards over their windows, the wood gray and weathered from seasons of neglect.

A frozen water trough sat in the middle of a small square with ice so thick that nobody had bothered to crack it open recently.

A child watched him from a doorway with the specific blank expression of someone who had stopped expecting things to get better.

"How long has it been like this?" Marcus asked.

Garrick didn't look back. "Longer than anyone wants to admit."

People whispered as they passed, their voices low but audible in the still air.

One voice carried clearly through the cold.

"Probably just going to look."

The tone was not hostile but worse than hostility, the resignation of people who had watched too many officials walk through and change nothing.

They reached the edge of the mining district, and Furnace Three rose before them as a hulking structure of blackened stone and rusted iron.

The roof had partially collapsed inward, leaving a jagged gap that exposed the gray sky above.

Scorch marks crawled up the walls like dark veins, and the ground around the entrance was littered with debris, chunks of metal and stone that had been blown outward by whatever had happened inside.

The smell hit him next, burnt metal and old ash and something chemical underneath that made his nose prickle.

Marcus walked the damage slowly, the way he used to walk a site back home, looking at what the destruction was actually saying rather than just at the destruction itself.

A massive crack ran through the furnace's main chamber, splitting the iron casing from top to bottom, and scorch patterns radiated outward in layers of heat and time.

He crouched and picked up a piece of twisted metal, turning it over in his hands.

The edges were smooth in some places and jagged in others, like it had been pulled apart by two different forces at once.

"This fracture pattern is wrong," he said. "Two forces acted simultaneously, one from inside and one from outside. That's not a normal blowout."

Garrick stood behind him, silent and watchful.

"Who signed off on the pressure maintenance here?"

"Dain's man. Harker. Been doing it for three years."

Marcus made a face. Garrick almost smiled.

The site office attached to the main building was cramped and dusty, with shelves of ledgers lining the walls and loose papers scattered across the floor.

Someone had been through here already, and they had not been careful.

Marcus worked through it systematically anyway out of engineer habit, checking everything and trusting nothing.

He found the inspection log for Furnace Three and flipped to the final pages, but specific pages had been torn out, the ones that mattered.

He searched the floor near a toppled shelf and found a fragment that had been crumpled and stepped on, barely larger than his palm.

He held it to the light filtering through the grimy window and read the remaining words. "Foreign material found in pressure chamber." The rest of the sentence was missing.

He handed it to Garrick without a word. Garrick read it and went very still, his jaw tightening as he processed what he was seeing.

"The mining rights," Garrick said slowly.

"They're not ours permanently. They belong to a consortium based in Blackwater Ridge.

There's a clause in the original charter that says if Hollow Crest's population drops below two hundred, the rights transfer automatically."

"What's the current population?"

"Two hundred and thirty-seven."

Marcus did the math without saying it out loud. Sixty-three people.

Someone had been counting down and making sure the numbers kept dropping.

"So when you said the town was dying," Marcus said, "you meant someone was killing it."

Garrick didn't answer. He didn't need to.

Marcus turned back to the furnace wreckage, picking his way through the debris and stepping over fallen beams.

The floor sloped downward near the rear chamber where a drainage grate had been pulled loose by the force of the explosion.

He crouched and peered into the darkness below, and something glinted in the lantern light.

He reached down and pulled it out, finding a palm-sized object with an irregular shape and a dull gray surface that caught the light strangely.

His hands knew something was wrong before his brain did because it was far too light.

He hefted it, comparing the weight to what it should have been.

A piece of iron this large would have been twice as heavy, and steel would have been even more.

He ran his thumb across the surface and found it completely smooth with no rust, no pitting, and no signs of weathering whatsoever despite sitting in a damp drainage channel for who knew how long.

He scraped at it with his fingernail but nothing happened, and he tried a piece of broken stone from the floor to scratch a line across the surface but it barely left a mark.

He held it up. Garrick reached for it instinctively, then pulled his hand back before he touched it.

"What is that?" Garrick asked.

"No idea. Never seen anything like it."

Marcus pocketed the sample, feeling its impossible lightness against his thigh.

In his old life, this thing would have had a dozen research papers written about it with a whole team of scientists trying to understand its properties.

Here it apparently just blew up a furnace and killed eleven people.

He looked at the ruined chamber one more time, taking in the fracture pattern and the missing pages and the metal that broke every rule he understood.

"Take me to Lyra."

Garrick just headed for the door without arguing.