The Element That Burned Water

The book smelled like dust and old glue, and the page Maya had stopped on showed a man with a bandage over half his face.

"Read it again," she said.

Soren read it again. "It says they called it the element that could not be tamed. Three of the chemists who tried to isolate it died. Others lost fingers, or their sight."

"From a gas."

"From a gas," Soren said. "Pale yellow. It's called fluorine."

Maya pulled her knees up under the attic window. The afternoon light came in gray and thick with floating specks. "Okay. So a thing that's just sitting there, being a gas, killed people who were being careful."

"They were the best chemists in Europe," Soren said. "That was the whole problem. They knew exactly what they were doing and it still got them."

"For how long?"

Soren ran his finger down the page. "Almost seventy-five years. People kept trying. People kept getting hurt. Nobody could hold it long enough to study it."

Maya frowned. That was the thing in her head that didn't fit. "Hold it in what?"

"What do you mean?"

"If it's that nasty," she said, "what do you even keep it in? You can't use glass. Glass is sand. What's a bottle that fire can't get out of?"

Soren stopped. He looked at the page, then at her. "That's actually the question, isn't it."

"It's my question. You answer it."

"Give me a second." He reached for the notebook beside him and wrote fluorine, then bottle, then a question mark, pressing hard. "So. Most fires need something to burn and oxygen to burn it. You take away the oxygen, the fire stops. Right?"

"Right."

"This doesn't need oxygen. The book says fluorine is the thing that does the burning. It's worse than oxygen at the one thing oxygen is famous for."

Maya went very quiet, then said, "Read me the list. The stuff it burns."

Soren found it near the bottom of the page. "Asbestos. They put asbestos in fireproof suits. Fluorine sets it on fire."

"Keep going."

"Sand. Glass. Brick."

"Keep going."

Soren paused before the last one, because it was the one that didn't sound real. "Water."

Maya turned her head slowly. "Water burns."

"Spray water on a fire and it dies," Soren said. "Put fluorine near water and the water catches fire. The book says it gives off a different flame entirely."

"That's not allowed," Maya said. "Water is the thing you use to make fire stop. It's the opposite of fire. That's the whole point of water."

"I know."

"You can't burn the thing that puts fires out."

"I know," Soren said again, and he was grinning now, the way he did when something broke a rule he had trusted his whole life. "But it does. So either the book is wrong, or I had the rules wrong."

Maya pulled the book into her own lap and stared at the bandaged man. "They knew this. The ones who got hurt. They knew it ate through everything and they kept reaching for it anyway."

"For seventy-five years."

"Why," she said. It wasn't really a question to Soren. It was the question itself, the one underneath. "What's so good about a gas that you'd lose your fingers for it?"

Soren thought about that honestly. "Maybe because nothing else acted like it. If everything you know follows a rule, and one thing breaks the rule, you have to know why. You can't just leave it."

"Even if it hurts you."

"They couldn't leave it," he said. "I get that. I'd want to know too."

Maya looked up at him. "You wouldn't stick your hand in poison gas."

"No. But I understand the part where you can't stop thinking about the one thing that doesn't behave." He shrugged. "That's the whole reason I write stuff down. There's always one thing in the day that doesn't fit, and if I don't put it somewhere it just sits there."

Maya was nodding before he finished. "Yeah. That." She tapped the bandaged man's face. "He had a list in his head. The same as me. Stuff that doesn't make sense yet. And this was on it and he couldn't get it off."

They sat with that. The dust turned in the gray light between them.

"So who held it," Maya said finally. "Somebody must have. We have fluorine now. It's in toothpaste. My toothpaste says it."

Soren flipped the page. He read for a while. "A man named Moissan. Eighteen eighty-six. He got hurt four times trying."

"And the fifth time?"

"He froze everything," Soren said slowly, working it out as he read. "Cooled it way, way down. Cold things move slower. A reaction that wants to run away can't run as fast if everything's freezing." He looked up. "He didn't make it gentle. He made it cold. He used vessels made out of stuff it had already finished burning, so there was nothing left for it to take."

"He fed it something it had already eaten," Maya said.

"Basically."

"That's clever." She said it the way she said it when she was genuinely delighted, all the impatience gone out of her voice. "He didn't beat it. He just stopped giving it anything to grab."

Soren wrote down cold and already burned and underlined them both.

Maya stood up under the slanted attic roof and held the book toward the window so the gray light fell on the bandaged man's one good eye. "It's in my bathroom," she said. "Downstairs. In a blue tube. The thing they died trying to hold."

She didn't put the book down. She started for the stairs, still holding it open, already halfway gone.