The Charge Projector’s core wasn’t that much different from an Emitter. The latter device sent a jet of Charge out, much like a nozzle or valve—or, if it was rigged to a wire, it accelerated the Charge through a closed system. If I paired it with a Refiner and Heart, I could do something similar with fluid Charge. The Emitter was one of the first Voltsmithing components I’d discovered, way back on the beach outside of the Redline Tunnels, and I used them all the time in my creations.

  Unlike an Emitter, though, the Charge Projector was a volatile, messy device. For one thing, it didn’t have any restriction whatsoever on how much Charge ran through it. As I analyzed it and—very carefully—applied a single point of Charge from a battery, I saw that flaw almost instantly. It took almost twenty minutes of fiddling to understand why the device’s designer had allowed that flat to persist, though.

  The obvious conclusion, in this case, was the correct one. The Charge Projector needed huge amounts of power, and any independent Emitter-style restriction choked it. It was a little like trying to start a chainsaw or weed trimmer without priming the engine first; without fuel, the machine wouldn’t start.

  “God dammit,” I muttered to myself. The fuse array would mitigate some of the Charge overload that had been so fatal to the original projector, but not all of it. I was still operating on limited time. The only good news was that—hopefully—the Fuse of the Forgesmith would keep most of the parts intact. That’d let me take multiple stabs at talking to the World Engine.

  The rest of this was going to suck.

  A lot.

  As I gradually ramped up the amount of Charge flowing into the projector—still using an independent battery rather than the Waypoint Beacon’s or the Lab’s power source—the entire projector started to pulse with orange light. I watched it just long enough to confirm that, yes, that pulsing was definitely happening and that, yes, it was definitely going to cause damage if it went on too long, just like an engine knock. Then I shut the machine down.

  I’d need to mitigate that pulsing knock before I continued, and that meant building yet another ridiculous device to string into my Rube Goldberg contraption.

  Back in high school, I’d had a friend who’d been into watching videos on the internet. Not those kinds of videos, but ones of people who built crazy things in their yards or houses—like, for example, a five-minute video of a guy who’d built an obstacle course for a basketball that ran down a hill from his house, through the woods, and all the way to a friend’s backyard, just to shoot a basket into his friend’s hoop. There had to be a good hundred different steps for that poor basketball, and I’d been so bored by the end of it.

  A good machine—barring engineering for catastrophic failure—was one that had no unnecessary components, where if I took away anything, the machine would stop working. Instead of following that principle, though, I felt like I was going the opposite direction. The process of getting Charge from the Waypoint Beacon’s battery to the Charge Projector was already five steps long: beacon, three fuses with different structures, and projector. I’d have to add at least one more—maybe two—to fix the pulsing knock.

  I groaned, headed to the component bins, and got to work.

  The good news was that I already knew how to mitigate the problem, at least in theory. I couldn’t use Emitters, because they were built to restrict Charge too heavily. But Lens Arrays…I’d used Lens Arrays to trap and slow Charge before. That’d be easy enough—especially if I could use multiple arrays to split the sheer amount of Charge.

  It’d be full of components I might not need, but it’d probably work. The hard part was splitting the flow of energy so it was evenly divided among the three Arrays I decided on, and installing it after the Emitter/Refiner pairs I was using to power the fuses. The more friction—or, since I was still thinking about this thing as electricity, resistance—between the pulses, the less the Arrays would mitigate it, and I needed as much slow-down as I could to make that work.

  By the time I’d finished the prototype Lens Array…array…it took up most of the west side of the Voltsmith’s Laboratory. Wires were everywhere, and it was a total mess. But I was ready—or at least, ready enough.

  I connected the whole system, one piece after another—with the exception of the Waypoint Beacon’s battery. Then I applied Charge and watched it.

  There were still fluctuations, but they were a lot smaller. I fiddled with the lenses and mirrors until they shrank to almost nothing, then unplugged the test battery. It was time to make my first attempt.

  The second I plugged the gigantic Beacon battery into the device, waves of Charge surged down the wire and into the fuses, then into the Lens Arrays. The projector started glowing a bright orange, almost like it was on fire or melting, and I adjusted the arrays even further until the projector started to form a face.

  Leana Collins’s face.

  It stared at me, flickering a couple of times every second. The woman’s tattoos were clear even as pulses of Charge rippled upward, distorting them.

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  And one other thing happened.

  Principle of Voltsmithing Learned: Principle of the Worldpulse

  The World Engines power everything, Voltsmith. You have learned enough to reach out and begin understanding the great creation that governs the universe—the flow of Charge and life force, moderated and modulated in turn by these powerful engines. Most Voltsmiths never reach this level of mastery over their discipline, and even fewer have the wherewithal to take it to its next level.

  The world’s pulse is just that—a pulse. Understanding the ebb and flow of power is key to beginning to tame it.

  The Principle of the Worldpulse was interesting. Maybe even essential. The promise of understanding the creation that…governed the universe…was almost intoxicating.

  But it wasn’t my priority.

  “If I can get to the World Engine, can I change the rules of Integration?” I asked quickly.

  Leana’s brow wrinkled, tattoos folding almost dramatically. The projection changed, just like before, but this time, the pulses didn’t come as quickly—I recognized more individual faces, even if I didn’t have names for them: orcs, Voril-like thin humans, and other alien-looking beings. Then Leana appeared again. I had no idea why she, of all the faces the World Engine could have chosen for its avatar, was the one talking to me. It could have picked Tommy, or Brian, or—if it really wanted to mess with me and they were dead—Mom and Dad or Beth.

  But no, it had chosen this woman I’d never met, whose body I’d found in the Watery Grave.

  To understand the World Engine, you must understand Charge.

  That wasn’t the answer I wanted. It took me a moment to realize that it was an answer, though. Not a simple yes or no, but a full sentence. “How do I understand Charge?”

  You already know. Leana’s lips moved, and Charge pulsed in and out of my ears as the projector heated up. The woman’s projection didn’t make a sound, but I heard her voice in my mind anyway. Charge is life force, as you guessed in our last conversation. That life force exists on all worlds, no matter what—if anything—resides there. It flows back and forth, from living being to the world and back again. This is the normal, typical state of the universe, and it has been for millennia.

  But it is not the state that best suits the Universal Order. You know something of their goals. You survived the dungeon my ally set up our conversation within.

  “They’re using the World Engines, or Integration, or something, to separate their worlds from others. The system’s part of that,” I said.

  Partially correct. The projector’s glow grew brighter by the second as ‘Leana’ spoke to me. The Universal Order created the World Engines long ago. They manage each and every world’s Charge, monitoring it as it grows until those worlds reach one of their six tiers.

  Our time grows short, but—

  “I can fix that. We just need to take our time and let the projector cool down between conversations.”

  Very well. When worlds are ready, they’re either Integrated quickly or harvested slowly. The Waypoint Beacon in your possession is part of that process.

  The Charge Projector popped and hissed, and I held up a hand. “I’m shutting this down before it melts down completely. I’ll work on refining it, and we can talk more afterward.”

  Without waiting for a response, I disconnected the wires from the Waypoint Beacon to the fuses, and Leana Collins’s face disappeared.

  The projector’s orange glow changed, too, and I stared at it. There wasn’t any Charge left in the system, but that didn’t matter; just running the device for that long had heated the metal until it was all but molten. I’d need to mitigate that, too.

  What a pain.

  But I’d learned exactly what I needed. I had a direction now: get to the World Engine and continue working on the Waypoint Beacon problem. I’d need both if I wanted to change the rules of Integration.

  Of all the stupid things Hal Riley could have done, whatever he was doing in his Voltsmith’s Laboratory was the stupidest.

  Voril stared at the enigma of a creation he’d built, trying to understand what was happening. Her sensors all showed the same signals she’d seen just before he’d killed the Whole New World dungeon, but there was no energy spike and no overload. Most of her mind was on the process happening in the lab, and on whatever Hal was up to. She had to understand it.

  One screen, though, was locked. And on it, the Consortium’s Orderman and another person stared at her, waiting for an answer.

  “We asked, Voril, what’s going on in the Chicago region of Earth, and why unauthorized dungeons have been deployed in several locations,” the Orderman said. “The typical procedure is to allow the phase to play out as intended, not to accelerate the process. If this Voltsmith is truly a problem, the blue beam can be deployed.”

  “That’s not necessary. The Chicago region is operating well within expected parameters. The vast majority of its efforts are focused on ‘creating a viable region’ out of the area around it—including the colonial behavior that tends to precede resistance and collapse. I expect the Museumtown safe zone to emerge victorious, but be so weakened that any external pressure is enough to collapse it. The Milwaukee and Gary regions, respectively, are both significantly stronger and more unified—even after the disaster Gary’s ruling faction encountered at the end of Phase Two.” Voril’s eyes flicked back to the screen with the Voltsmith’s Lab on it.

  “And the extra dungeon below the Rat’s Nest? That faction was slated for natural destruction or subsumption, but the dungeon you’ve chosen could allow their continued survival.”

  Voril took a deep breath. “I continue to believe that the Voltsmith is on to something, and I want to challenge him in any way I can. His growth is a massive opportunity for the Consortium.”

  “That being said,” the second figure on Voril’s locked screen said quietly, and both Voril and the Orderman went silent. His voice sounded like a dagger in the back, smooth, treacherous, and cutting. “That being said, the Universal Order would like to remove the Voltsmith—without deploying a blue beam. The region is indeed operating correctly, and without the Voltsmith’s influence, it should fully collapse by the end of Phase Four, allowing harvesting to be completed.

  “As such, I will be taking over operation of the Chicago safe zone until further notice. Hand over control of all deployed and undeployed dungeons, field bosses, and monster types immediately. You may remain to observe.”

  Voril shivered, but she pressed the buttons to allow the Universal Order’s Integration Specialist to take control of her region.

  It was about to get ugly on the ground.

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