Her solution was scandalously simple.

The solution, she often said, was never in the substance. It was in the synthesis.

Most engineers thought of steam, air, or gas as separate. Steam came from water and fire. Air came from wind or compressed pistons. Gas came from wells or rot. But Elara saw what they had forgotten: the cycle .

“Dead?” Elara murmured, pressing her palm to the cold iron. “Or misread?”

Within a decade, the smog began to thin. Children learned that steam, air, and gas were not enemies to be consumed, but partners in a dance. And Emberhart, once a tomb of old energy, became a beacon—not because it had found a new fuel, but because it had remembered how to listen to the old ones together.