The fire seemed hot and expectant. There was almost no fuel left in there, and the bottom of the grate was full of soot. She would need to remember to tell her father that too.
She thrust the first piece of wood into the furnace, and the fire curled around it like a warm, ok, very warm cat. The second piece, and it jumped on it greedily, and the third was only part way through the door before it was grabbed by the fire in the furnace and pulled in. She sucked on her singed fingers resentfully and closed the door.
"Don't give it too much wood at once" her mother would say. "The fire in the furnace is not terribly smart, it will burn up all of the wood you give it, so don't give it too much at once." With that advice, and the candle, feeding the furnace three times a day had become *her* job.
Jedda looked at the piles of chemicals on the shelf, near (but not too near) her candle. She sucked on her fingers some more, and thought about what her older brother had told her about them. The ones in the white pile made the fire burn hotter, the red pile one made it bigger, and the green pile made it smarter.
Jedda rubbed some of the green with her fingers, looking at the candle and the furnace, then quickly rubbed it onto her skirt, grabbed the candle and walked back up the stairs.
When she got back up the stairs, the adults were still talking about boring adult stuff. The (actual) cat was on the shelf above the heater. She put the candle (carefully!) back into the candle container, as her father had shown her, so as not to let it go out. The candle flames were only young, and could go out if you bumped them too hard, or blew on them. Jedda remembered about the draft downstairs, but her father was deep in conversation with her mother about something, so she decided to pat the cat instead. She sat down sleepily on her chair, and propped her arm up with the chair back so she could scratch the cat without having to hold her arm up.
"The whole warehouse was on fire, a huge fire" said Jedda's father, Samel. "I don't know what they were thinking there, there was magnesium and iron powder, and more copper powder than legally allowed in one place."
"No wonder the fire got so big then! What were they thinking?" Jedda's mother Yuddih sat down at the table, wringing she skirts with her hands "This is terrible for the town! Think of all of the food in that warehouse. How did it start, do they know?"
"The fire service think it was the furnace fire, maybe a draft or something, it was quite windy this afternoon, though it has calmed down now" Jedda tensed, then relaxed sleepily, she knew there was something she should remember...
"so, what happened to the fire?" Asked Yuddih.
Her husband stood up to gesticulate " well, they had to put it out, of course! It was bright green from the copper, and smart enough to know where to go, and what to burn. It itself got too big really, all they needed to do was to wet down some of the warehouse, it had burnt too much iron oxide, and didn't have enough fuel to sustain itself. Luckily there wasn't any sulpher about, so it couldn't reproduce. It would have been had enough with one big fire, let alone loads of other small fires all over the place, smart as that."
"What's wrong with a smart fire, daddy?" Said jedda sleepily.
"People don't want it too smart, they think a smart fire will try and free the other fires and escape. Then we would be stuck, nobody knows how to make fire anymore. Not really."
But Jedda had fallen asleep.
