Trial by Fire

Today’s lesson was about controlling her power, and Lily’s continuing problem was an excess of strength. All Tristan and Rowan wanted her to do was look at a fern and increase her ability to see into it, as with a microscope, using slow, measured increments of magnification until she was down to the atomic level. To Lily, this was like trying to hold a glass doll with a vice. Her problem wasn’t ability. She could look so closely that not only could she see into the atom, but she could see down to the quarks and beyond to the squiggly, almost alive-looking strings that jigged enchantingly through a dozen dimensions. She just had a slight problem doing it slowly.

“No,” Rowan scolded when she skipped a magnification level. “I told you to stop before you could differentiate the cell walls. You’re looking at a single cell’s mitochondria. That’s deeper than I asked.” Lily groaned, but Rowan had no pity for her. “Stop there and observe it,” he said. “Then draw for me, in all the exact stages, how the mitochondria turn sugar into energy by passing the spare electron around in a circle.”

That would take forever. For a second, Lily thought she might start crying.

“Ro,” Tristan objected. “She’s exhausted. You can’t expect her to observe a whole cycle.”

“How else is she supposed to learn?” Rowan snapped.

“But I already learned this,” Lily whined. “Mr. Carnello taught me this in eighth grade. It’s the citric acid cycle discovered by Hans Krebs, like, seventy years ago.”

“Try about two hundred and seventy years ago. Here anyway,” Tristan said with a sympathetic smile. “And we’ve never heard of any Hans Krebs. The cellular energy cycle was first observed, understood, and manipulated by witches.”

Lily threw up her hands in defeat. One of the things she was trying to absorb was that here, in this version of the world, magic had made all of what Lily knew of as scientific discoveries, and no wonder. With her willstones, Lily didn’t need microscopes or chemicals or centrifuges to see and manipulate cells or—for example—unzip and recombine DNA. All she needed was a willstone and a deep understanding of the way DNA worked and she could do it.

Here, in this universe, what differentiated science from witchcraft was that scientists had fewer resources and couldn’t magically manipulate the natural world by will alone. They had to fumble around until they found a chemical or developed a machine that achieved the same results. There weren’t many people who called themselves scientists here, and not just because Lillian persecuted them. Witches were much more efficient at tackling the challenges of biology, chemistry, and physics, so why even try to be a scientist? That is, unless you were either in love with the profession or because you were desperate and had no access to a witch’s cure-alls, as was the case with the Outlanders.

Witchcraft had done amazing thing in this world because manipulating the natural world was second nature to witches. It was, quite simply, what a crucible’s body was meant to do. Because of that they’d achieved just about every scientific milestone a couple of hundred years before the scientists of Lily’s world had. Witches had harnessed electricity, cloned animals, cured congenital diseases like cystic fibrosis and Down syndrome—and they’d being doing this for centuries. When witches needed a machine—like the trains, elepods, or lamps that lit the rich neighborhoods—they had their mechanics build them. Witches supplied the discoveries, and their mechanics made the gadgets they needed.

Scientists had always lagged behind. They had access to the knowledge that the witches supplied, but they had to come up with different methods for reaching the same goal. A scientist had to dream up a microscope and build it first, only to see something that a half-grown crucible could look at without even trying. Not a lot of glory in that job.