Lightning doesn’t travel where you want it to travel. It travels where the insulating pushback is lowest.
In the damp, cool air of a granite cave, a bare copper power bar carrying four thousand volts treats damp shotcrete concrete as an open door. Without proper spark heat padding, every kilowatt generated by Turbine 01 would leak into the mountain’s roots, heating bedrock and creating lethal touch-potentials across the entire Citadel basement.
Giles stood in the baked-clay drying yard of the upper artisanal district, inspecting a newly cooled kiln cart loaded with stacks of glazed, bell-shaped disks.
Each disk was ten inches in width, formed of dense, glass-fused spark fine china with deep nested petticoats. Shedded grooves designed to provide an eighteen-inch spark creepage distance across a six-inch clockwork space.
Master Potter Taran Clay-Shaper stood beside the kiln, nervously wiping his clay-stained apron. Giles turned a white fine china bell in his hands.
“High-fired feldspathic fine china, Lord Croft,” the master potter reported, his voice tinged with anxiety.
“Fifty percent kaolin clay, twenty-five percent quartz, twenty-five percent potash pink rock.
Fired at thirteen hundred degrees until the clay body fused into glass.
