It was fortunate, then, that Tress’s room contained five different varieties of the most dangerous substance on the planet.
THE SCHOLAR
Tress had given her room a cursory inspection when she’d moved in. She’d sorted through the things Weev had left, mostly to make certain nothing truly dangerous was hiding among them. Those earlier explorations had been the actions of a girl playing a role.
Now she looked again. As a girl trying to save her life.
Where she had read, now she studied. Where she had arranged, now she organized. And where she had accepted, now she experimented. Nothing motivates quite like a deadline. Particularly one that emphasizes the dead part.
Tress didn’t just pour her whole heart into the activity, she gave it her entire body, for a heart can’t accomplish much without a nice set of fingers. Weev had not been an orderly person. Tress had hoped he’d left behind manuals of instructions. Instead she found scraps and scrawled notes, cluttered with collected tidbits and half-finished ideas. The sort of mental detritus that those unacquainted with genius often attribute to unfettered brilliance.
In truth, there was no pattern to such a mess other than the subtle chaos of frustration. Signs of a mind stretching beyond its limit toward ideas just beyond its reach. This can happen to a dunce as easily as a genius; it’s no proof of capacity, any more than a person being too full for dessert is an indication of their weight. In Weev’s case, the scraps were indicative of a mental hoarder: a person who collected ideas like a grandmother collects ceramic pigs.
It was in the middle of realizing this—and coming to understand that she would find no miracle solution—that Tress ran across the first promising scrap. It was a detailed schematic for a cannonball, with a scrawled message at the bottom indicating the captain had wanted Weev to figure out how to make them himself, so the ship wouldn’t have to keep buying them at high prices from the zephyr-masters.
This intrigued Tress. She had a casual interest in the mechanics of cannonballs, like the way you might find yourself interested in the cuisine of a culture whose language you’d been learning. What held her attention, however, was the intricate use of spores inside them.
Weev had been stymied. That much she could tell from his scrawled notes, which only served to distort and obfuscate the otherwise orderly diagram. Still, it depicted a sprouting technique she hadn’t been aware of.
By now you’ve seen that a cannonball on Tress’s world wasn’t merely a lump of metal, but a piece of artillery—one I promised to explain in more detail. You see, each had a timer inside that, after its launch, would lead to a secondary explosion and a burst of water. Yes, you know that part already. But do you know how the timers were made?
It turned out to be quite simple: the timer fuse was a vine. From the notes, Tress learned she wasn’t the first to discover that applying water to an aether would cause it to continue to grow after its initial burst. The explosive emergence was erratic, but everything afterward was far more predictable. Even precise. An exactly measured verdant vine would grow at an extremely reliable rate when given an exactly measured amount of water.
（Yes, for those of you who care about things like weather patterns, this growth eventually stopped—and a given vine would eventually exhaust all of its growth potential. Otherwise, people couldn’t very well eat them. Getting the vines to the end of their growth potential was essential for turning them into emergency food.）
Anyway, the initial explosion that sent the cannonball soaring also broke a small glass container of water inside, soaking a clipping of verdant aether. That vine grew—pushing a plug with a bit of silver on the tip—through a short tube toward the central mechanism of the cannonball. This was a charge of zephyr spores surrounding a hollow sphere made of roseite. That roseite, in turn, had wax on the inside—which allowed it to contain, but not touch, a charge of water.
The silver tip pushed through the zephyr spores, killing a small number of them but leaving most unharmed, and then touched the roseite sphere—which cracked from the pressure of the silver. Water flooded out, touched the zephyr spores, and released their explosion—which detonated the entire mechanism violently, shooting out shrapnel and water.
I have seen the modern designs, a note at the bottom said—she didn’t think it was from Weev, but the original creator of the diagram—and agree. Impact detonation charges are the future of artillery.
She didn’t know what that last part meant, but nonetheless she found the diagram ingenious. Here were three different aethers working together. Verdant for the fuse. Roseite for the water container. Zephyr for the explosion. The central sphere didn’t break from the initial firing of the cannonball because it was far, far stronger than glass—but it had a built-in weakness, in that silver could damage it. In this design, she also discovered that wax could insulate an aether from water.