“No,” Hanne said. “I think that’s how we contain malice.”
“By throwing it into muck?” Barley scowled.
Hanne let out a grunt of frustration. “How do you build up a tolerance to poison?”
“Oh!” Mae’s face lit up. “You ingest tiny amounts your body can fight off. You teach your body how to respond to it so that if you’re ever given a lethal dose, you stand a chance at survival.”
Bear was frowning at Hanne. “What a strange metaphor. You could have said something about throwing flour on a surface to keep dough from sticking, or spreading compost to fertilize fields, but you went for poison. Something is wrong with you.”
Hanne’s fingernails bit into her palms. Not right. Something wrong.
They could say whatever they wanted about her, but she was on the cusp of tearing this whole place to pieces. She just had to hand them the answers for the problems they could not solve. “Perhaps if there’s a way to mix the bulb material and malice. That might fool malice into behaving as though the metal is a pellicle.”
“You think you can fool malice?” Barley narrowed his eyes. “As though it’s alive?”
Hanne waved that away. “I mean in the same way the same ends of magnets repel each other, or as malice itself tends to gather like quicksilver. It’s just the property of the substance.”
“You’re right,” Mae said. “Which means we just need to figure out what material to mix with malice.”
“What materials have you tried to use so far?” The answer to their problems was titanium, but Hanne couldn’t simply hand them the answer. She had to lead them to it.
The malicists went through each of the burned-out bulbs, describing the properties that seemed more- or less-useful against the malice.
“Titanium corroded the least.” Mae held up the container, which still had the bright shine of metal in a few places even though most of the bulb was blackened. When she turned it, Hanne saw a hole that had burst open as though from pressure.
“Then it seems like titanium is our best bet,” Hanne said. “How soon can we test?”
Soon, all three malicists were buried in their notebooks, pencils scratching as they made calculations quicker than Hanne could follow.
“We’ll want to introduce the malice during the reduction process,” Bear muttered, writing furiously.
“But we’ll have to do it close to a malsite in order to have access to the malice. That will take time….” Barley flipped through pages in his notebook. “We can use the ever-burning forest near Boone. If we take the proper precautions, we could use the ambient malice there to create the alloy.”
“How much should we use?” Mae asked. “Too much and we risk another blowout.” She motioned to the cabinets of destroyed bulbs.
“Hmm.” Hanne pretended to think, as though she didn’t know exactly what the rancor had told her in that crushed-carapace voice. “Start small, I would say. One part malice, one hundred parts metal?”
“Yes, yes.” Barley wasn’t sneering now, just writing numbers as quickly as he could. “I’ll arrange for transportation to Boone and obsidian-tinted glasses.”
Mae leaned closer to Hanne. “The glasses cost a fortune, but they’ll protect our eyes from the malice fires.”
“Ah,” Hanne said softly. She didn’t want to think about visiting malsites, with or without protection.
Barley was ignoring them. “We should be able to go in a few days, after we’ve got all the math on paper.”
“This is it!” said Bear, excited now. “Once we can contain the malice, we can tell the queen the device is ready. Ivasland will crush its enemies, and we’ll be heroes.”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Mae with a laugh. “Scientists never get to be the heroes.”
They worked throughout the day, the malicists making notes and calculations, while Hanne pretended to work. Instead, she inspected the plans for the device and took in the contents of the cupboards, especially the ones labeled COMBUSTIBLE.
It was afternoon when Mae slid into a chair next to Hanne; their feet bumped, but Mae didn’t pull hers back. “I’m sorry I was a little short with you yesterday.”
“About what?” Hanne tilted her head, as though she had no memory of the moment Mae had declined to talk about the stars in windows or the stiff silence that had sat between them the rest of the walk to the dormitory.
“I used to have these friends,” Mae said softly. “The kind who’d say their only crime is caring too much about Ivasland—loving it too much, believing in our ideals too much. Do you follow me? Some would call us radicals. We had big ideas. We thought we knew what was best for Ivasland.”
Hanne waited.
“There were five of us,” Mae went on. “Originally, anyway. We called ourselves a five-pointed star, with Ivasland in the center. We saw ourselves as protectors of Ivasland’s true values of equity and education. We didn’t like that Ivasland sold so many light globes, water filters, and other things that we invented to Embria or Caberwill. We hated that we must rely on our neighbors for materials to build those products—and that they can charge us whatever they want for the materials! It isn’t fair that we do all the work but they get all the benefit. So we wanted Ivasland to be more self-reliant, to strike better trade deals—ones that benefitted us more than they did them. And then, rumors came that the queen and king might be looking at studying malice. We were appalled, of course, but then I was tapped for the project, and, well, everything changed for me.
“I reasoned that studying malice was different from using it. Even when Bear, Barley, and I were given instructions to build the machine, I told myself that it was better we use a device like this, rather than Embria or Caberwill.” She straightened. “We would use it responsibly. We would use it to remove malice to a different location, somewhere it couldn’t hurt people anymore. Of course, then it turned into a weapon. But still, better for us to possess such a thing.”
It was better for no such machine to exist at all, but Hanne didn’t say that out loud. Instead, she whispered encouragingly, “Still, you hoped that if you stayed on the project, you might have some influence over its use? The king and queen may call it a weapon, but it could be more, too? A way to free Ivasland of its malice?”
The tightness in Mae’s expression melted away. “Yes, exactly. And now we are so close to finishing it. I really feel you’ve provided the breakthrough we need.”
Hanne lowered her eyes demurely. “I want you to know, I feel the same way about Ivasland. This is a place of knowledge and grand ideals. I’m conflicted about the machine being a weapon, but it’s better for us to have something like this, rather than Embria or Caberwill getting to it first.”