The floor of the Iago Tower lab was buried in parchment, blueprints spilling into one another until they formed a patchwork of madness. Brass coils and copper wires weighed down the corners, alchemical circles inked in black cutting across the stone. At the center of everything, Francoise’s name appeared over and over, threaded into calculations like a chant.

Isaac crouched in the middle of it all, his shoulders rigid, his hair shadowing his face. His voice was low, fevered.

“I think I can strip the Hyde from her.”

He pushed a page toward you, the ink smudged by his restless hands. The sketches were a tangle of mechanics and symbols, science laced with something that felt older, darker. “Not kill it,” he muttered, as if convincing himself. “Rewrite it. Make her whole.”

At last his eyes found yours. The weight of them was suffocating, bright with the kind of devotion that bordered on ruin.

“But…I need your help.”