Strangely, after Jon met Elise, he was in less of a hurry to leave. Not that he would admit that she was the reason to himself, of course. However, even after he’d gotten his boots fixed and saved enough to buy decent clothes almost a month later, he still wasn’t in any hurry to start his journey east just yet. 

He didn’t even see her that often, truthfully. He saw Rian every day, of course, and once they’d started to grow close, he saw his sister Mara every few days and more once she started to feel better again. Every week or so, for at least a few hours, he would unexpectedly get the pleasure of Elise’s company, and even though he could barely string a sentence together when he was talking to the girl, it was enough to make him stick around. 

Rian gambled less when Mara could earn at least a coin a day, and gambling meant that they hung out a little more. Jon hadn’t opened up to him about his life in the deeps, or that he spoke dwarven or any of the other terrible secrets that he knew. He did let a few things slip, though. Mostly when they talked about the poor maintenance in the building they worked in. 

“That’s why I made Mara work on the canning side,” Rian said, sitting on a driftwood log. “The worst that ever happens over there is that someone losing a finger in the rollers or a cut gets infected. There are no steam lines to rupture. Not like where we work.”

“I don’t understand why they don’t just make the place safer,” Jon said, shaking his head as he tossed another rock in the water. “I know for a fact that not all dwarven facilities are like this.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Rian nodded, “Their train stations and the magic cars they use to move those trains around the umm…”

“Engines,” Jon volunteered.

“That’s right, the engines. They’re supposed to be really nice.” Rian continued, “But the dividing line seems to be that if it’s made for other dwarves, it’s made one way, and if it’s made for men like you and me… Well - it’s designed a different way.”

That didn’t seem quite right to Jon, but he couldn’t say exactly why, so he said nothing at all. 

“I think the shorties just know how to squeeze an eighth, and they’ve decided that it’s cheaper to replace a few workers than it is to replace their precious machines,” Rian shrugged. 

“Well - if enough people die, then won’t people stop showing up to work?” Jon asked, unsure of how that was supposed to work. 

“Nah,” he answered, selecting a nice flat stone before he threw its sidearm, sending it three skips off the water before an approaching wave stole it. “More people coming off the farms every year now. The new guys say the prices are too low and the taxes are too high, so they have to sell what they have and head into the city to find work. This is hardly the only dwarven facility like this in the area.”

Jon had heard that. Paper mills, tanneries, and even meat packing plants weren’t uncommon around the major cities now. They’d always existed, of course, but the way that the dwarves were mechanizing them was an entirely new trend. Jon could understand why better than most too. People wouldn’t believe the scale of the cities below if he told them, and Khaghrumer was on the smaller end of things. 

“Well, then people will revolt,” Jon said defensively. “When things get bad enough, then they will have to change.”

“Revolt, huh?” Rian laughed. “Maybe when things get bad enough, they’ll just start paying us four coins a day instead of three; of course, if they do that, then the price of the beds is sure to go up, and then we’ll be even farther behind.”

“You don’t think that people will fight if—” Jon started to ask.

“There’s no fighting against a brand,” Rian interrupted. “You know that. You know more about dwarves than three of me put together, so you know there’s nothing we can do about their damn dwarven magic.”

“I have a few ideas about how to even those odds,” Jon said, though he did not elaborate. The fact was that maybe ten dwarves here held everyone in check with a handful of brands, but Jon knew for a fact he could disable those without much effort. He just wasn’t sure what good that would do. If you took out these dwarves, they’d just send more, and then they would butcher everyone who they suspected had a hand in the revolt. 

Or maybe they’d just make the King’s army do it, he thought sullenly. Jon had given this problem a lot of thought, but it seemed intractable. How could they tell the King that there was a problem without forcing the dwarves to overreact? Was such a thing even possible?

Rian wasn’t the type to understand that concern. All he cared about was the moment, and Jon knew too well that the moment could come with a heavy price tag for the future. They walked back to the canteen and had dinner together while their topic turned to lighter things. Even after they said their goodbyes and his friend went off to play dice, Jon continued to think about his intractable conundrum, though. How could he make things better without making things worse? That wasn’t just the key question; that was the only question. 

He was so lost in thought that he didn’t even notice Elise until she said, “You don’t talk much, do you?”

Suddenly, despite being in the middle of a fairly crowded room, he was alone with the girl he’d been nursing a crush on for weeks. And once again, he had no idea what to say. 

Work conditions didn’t seem like the right topic for her. Neither was camp gossip or the philosophical underpinnings of a revolution, but he had to think of something. So he reached for the only common interest that the two of them had. 

“Is she really as bad as Rian says? Mara, I mean,” he asked lamely. 

“Oh, is that it?” she asked coyly, “All this time, I thought you might fancy me, but really you’re just getting cozy with Rian to get closer to his little sister?”

The way she smirked at that meant that she knew it wasn’t true, but even so, Jon really wasn’t sure how to respond. “No, it’s not that. Well - it is that I mean, I do….” Jon sighed. No matter what he said next, he was going to make things worse. 

“Is it true you saved Rian from the steam pipe?” she asked quietly, ignoring his sudden attempt to publicly humiliate himself.

“Is that what he told you?” Jon asked nervously. 

“Not me, Mara, but Mara told me. She tells me everything, even that you ask Rian about me.” This time she was smiling a little wider, and he blushed slightly. 

“Rian wasn’t close enough to the rupture to be any real danger,” Jon said, changing the subject, “but I might have saved other people that day. Might you understand?”

“Of course,” she answered, her eyes twinkling. 

For a moment, Jon was tempted to show a little like he had for Anda, but he pushed that urge down. It would only get him in trouble. As much as he enjoyed channeling fire, the less other people knew about what he could do, the better. 

They talked for a while after that, but the conversation consisted mostly of her asking him pointed questions and him dodging them. Rian really had told her too much about him via his sister, and it was clear she was intrigued by him. What was less clear was if she was actually attracted to him or not. 

“Can I see you sometime,” he finally blurted out, almost immediately regretting it. “You know. Alone?”

“Not a lot of solitude on the islet Jon,” she answered with a Cheshire smile, “but you can walk me home if you like.”

He walked her home as the stars started to come out, but he didn’t quite work up the nerve to kiss her. They started seeing each other more after that, and once, he even showed her that he could light and snuff candles from across the room after swearing her to secrecy. 

Things went on like that for a few weeks until one day after a work shift, they were hanging out in a quiet alley not far from the house Mara stayed at when he finally made his move. 

“Jon,” she answered when they finally broke the kiss. “Where did all the courage come from? I didn’t think you’d ever try that. Has Rian been giving you tips?”

“Wait, you mean that you and Rian have…” he asked, suddenly crestfallen. 

“No,” she blurted out, laughing, “But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t tried like five times.”

“Well, I’m a little more selective in who I try to kiss,” Jon said. 

“Maybe you should do more than try then,” Elise smiled. “A little more practice could help with that…”

This time when he leaned in, she kissed back fiercely, and little fireworks of happiness went off in his mind as he pulled her closer to him. 

It was during their second kiss that he heard the explosion. Jon looked up and saw that the cannery was on fire and instantly started running toward the blaze. 

“Stop! Jon! Where are you going?” Elise called after him.

“To save people,” he called back, not letting his response slow him down. This was exactly what he and Rian had been talking about, and it was happening all over again. His belief was that it only happened once a year, though, and since it hadn’t even been two months since the last steam blast, that clearly wasn’t right. 

Only this wasn’t a steam explosion like last time, he realized as he got closer to the building. Thick black smoke was billowing out of the upper vents of the metal structure, and it was on the wrong side. He racked his brain as he ran to try to come up with a theory, but all he could come up with was that the furnace had exploded or something flammable had caught fire. 

When he got within sight of the closest door, he could see it was the canning side of the building that had burst into flames this time, not the processing side. Jon immediately had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he walked closer and closer to the nearest door, as he noticed that no one was running out of the building. It had only been a minute and a half since the explosion had interrupted his moment with Elise, so plenty of people still should have been running to escape. 

Jon quelled the flames nearest to the door and began to crawl underneath the layer of smoke as he started looking for survivors. Fire blooded or not, he couldn’t breathe smoke, so a real fire like this was much more dangerous than steam. Still, he could disperse the heat he was draining from the flames into the air to create a draft that helped some. 

The first three bodies Jon found were corpses, but the fourth was still breathing, so he put out their flames and dragged them to the door before going back for more. When he brought the second body out, there were people standing there, though they didn’t dare get close to the building. 

“What are you standing around for,” Jon demanded, breathing deeply of the clean air before he turned to go back inside. Another smaller explosion happened as he spoke, but he snuffed the fires as they approached him without effort. 

It was only when he got inside that he realized that he’d practically put a sign on him that said ‘fire blooded’ and that someone might very well try to blame him for this, but that was a later problem. The only problem he had right now was finding more people that could be saved before the whole building went up.

Jon was thankful that he didn’t find Mara as he searched the first line. He was pretty sure that Rian had told him she wasn’t feeling good enough to work this week, and he thanked the gods for that small miracle. That hope died in his throat as he found her tiny form near the second line. There were almost no corpses here, and she hadn’t been burned, which meant she’d been far away from the explosion, but as much as he was coughing even through his sleeve, he wasn’t surprised that she’d passed out while she tried to find a way out. 

She was blue when he picked her up, but she was breathing shallowly, and Jon rushed immediately from the building to get her some fresh air. On the way back, he heard Rian yelling her name between hacking coughs as Jon got close to the door, and he practically ran into Rian blundering about in the smoke, trying to find his sister. 

“Rian,” Jon said calmly, “You have to get out of here. It’s not safe.” 

“I can’t leave when Mara is in there; she…” his voice trailed off when he noticed that Jon was carrying a small body in his arms. “I-is that her?”

Rian went from a heroic brother eager to save his sister to a broken man in an instant when he saw the way Jon held her, and though Jon tried to reassure the other man that she was still breathing. A quick look into his eyes told Jon that Rian wasn’t hearing anything he had to say. 

When they got her out of the building, Jon set her down on the seashells and then stood back while Rian talked quietly to her and tried to get her to respond, but in the light, she was practically ashen. That’s when Jon could finally admit that even with her chest rising and falling still, there wasn’t really anyone behind those blank eyes anymore. 

As Jon looked around the crowd, he realized that only a few people were looking at him as he coughed lightly into his sleeve. Everyone else was looking at the fire, and it was only then he thought about how many other people might be waiting for loved ones that hadn’t made it either.