The second prototype didn't work either.
Neither did the third. Or the fourth.
Katarina had tried widening the bridge between the two arrays, and she'd tried narrowing it, and she'd tried a third, intermediary array that was supposed to act as a qi buffer. The buffer had held for about ninety minutes before cooking itself into a brown stain on the inside of the box.
Bettola walked past, saw the stain, and told Katarina it was going on her cleanup tab.
[Fair.]
By the fifth prototype, she was starting to suspect the problem wasn't in the arrays at all.
