This story is a sequel to Maelstrom

It wasn’t the first case—there had been others. But nothing like the Canterlot fire. It wasn’t the what that I think of late at night alone in my tiny apartment, but the who and the why. In retrospect: maybe I shouldn’t have solved the case. I should have let things slide, taken the offer, lived in peaceful ignorance, wrote it up as one more accident in the Weather Service’s history.

But I couldn’t.

The job was going well, too well not to be fouled up by something. At first I thought it would be me--it'd happened so many times before that I recognized failure as an old friend and success like a stranger in a dark alley. When she walked in with the manila folder and its precisely typed pages, I knew it would be trouble, but how far and wide, I couldn't have known.