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“Use your engineering judgment.”
That was what Heimerdinger told the class during the first lecture Jayce attended at the academy, when he was barely eighteen.
Jayce asked about the probability of parallel universes and quantum mechanics, which left the professor shaking his head, an amused grin on his face. “What information do you have to test your hypothesis, my boy?”
Though Jayce was intelligent, he had limited practical knowledge back then–aside from what he learned working the family forge and from his side projects. Attending the prestigious Piltover Academy, under the support of Kirammans, gave Jayce a chance to pursue much grander ambitions, and he had the enthusiasm and curiosity to power them.
His dreams were outsized and, some said, impossible: to harness the Arcane. Even if it meant ridicule or outright dismissal by most of his peers and professors, he didn’t waver.
But he was young, and as youth often demands, he was eager and naive. Maybe even foolish. Certainly arrogant.
A less congenial professor than Heimerdinger might’ve said Jayce didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.
So, with the words of Heimerdinger on repeat in his brain, Jayce took it to heart. What was more fitting for a scientist or an inventor than to develop and hone their mind, their intuition? To consider the practical applications of science and technology to solve everyday problems, the bigger the better. To develop that sense from education and experience, to document his findings with data and observations. Because with that so-called engineering judgment he could make sound and informed decisions about his own inventions and pursue his endeavors more fully.
At least, that was the plan.
He got his hands on the crystal shards that would become the hex gemstone from sources known only to an anonymous treasure hunter. Cassandra Kiramman, as intimidating as she was, didn’t ask too many questions when Jayce made a request for materials. He had little hope that he would get all the things he’d asked for, but then a lead-lined case arrived at his lab. Inside, the most beautiful thing Jayce had ever seen: hex crystals wrapped in a soft black cloth, glowing brightly.
Possessed by the spirit of discovery, he made rapid progress in his studies, abandoning his classwork and spending all of his time in the lab. All consideration of pragmatism and sensibility was quashed, firmly condensed and pushed into the recesses of his mind. He was going to harness magic, the arcane.
That was the plan.
Until the break-in and everything that followed.
Until he was standing on the edge. Behind him, his life in ruins along with his apartment after the ‘incident’ with the crystals. In front, the open air and an end.
Then came Viktor.
With each passing year, Viktor’s disdain for winter doubled.
He hated the freezing temperatures and short days, when the morning sun was barely out before he arrived at the lab and had set long before he left. If he left at all.
He hated the slush in the gutters and patches of ice, impervious to the salt and sugar melt the city workers tossed on the cobbles and walkways.
Mostly, though, he hated how the first sign of snowfall, drifting in from the east and blanketing the city in white oblivion, rendered Jayce still as stone and riddled with anxiety.
Once, early in their partnership, Jayce had invited Viktor (and Sky) for dinner at his mother’s house. They had just had another successful funding round thanks to all that schmoozing and the patented Talis charm. Really, though, Viktor thought much was because of Mel Medarda’s crash course in how to win support and influence the elite.
Jayce had wanted to celebrate. And to introduce Viktor to his mother, Ximena.
It had been a small affair, intimate and understated, with no frilly cocktails or delicately plated rarities. Just simple, delicious dishes from Ximena’s kitchen, with no pretension.
When she came out with the plates, that was the first time Viktor ever noticed her missing fingers. Stupefied by the sight, he fumbled one of his forks, sending it clattering off the table and onto the floor.
He felt Jayce’s eyes on him, scanning and cataloging. Viktor knew better than to ask outright. After living most of his life with a brace or cane (or both), he’d been subject to enough rude questioning and speculation from near strangers and acquaintances.
Thankfully, Sky saved them all from Viktor’s social awkwardness, taking a casserole dish from Ximena and commenting on the mouthwatering aromas of flaky fish and spices. Ximena smiled, revealing a slight gap in her teeth, matching Jayce’s. Jayce retrieved the lost fork, handing it to Viktor, their hands brushing briefly.
“You probably shouldn’t use that one,” Jayce had said. Viktor nodded, setting it aside, and using the salad fork for the rest of the meal.
Dinner continued without further incident.
The following winter, as snow drifted down from the carbon sky, Jayce told him what had happened when he was a child. About the blizzard. How the wind whipped around them as he and his mother descended the mountain, snow buffeting them on all sides. They had trudged toward the base of the mountain, clinging to one another, until Ximena swayed and collapsed.
When she came to, they had made it to a meadow with the help of a stranger who disappeared without a word. They were safe, but her fingers had been so badly frostbitten that amputation was required.
As Jayce told the story, he rubbed at the leather bracelet on his wrist, calloused fingers tracing the gem embedded within it.
Viktor and Jayce watched fresh snow fall from a window overlooking the Talis family courtyard where the trees stood bare, the garden beds empty. Viktor hummed softly. He looked at Jayce’s reflection, translucent in the glass and overlaid on the soft, slow drift of snowflakes.
Jayce’s brow was furrowed and his jaw tense, though he still looked otherworldly in the reflection, as though floating in the dark of space with the snowflakes passing by like stars.
Outside, the roads had frozen over, glimmering with ice. The trams and lifts had stopped running.
Jayce insisted Viktor stay; it made little sense for him to struggle through the storm to make it to the tram stop with Sky. Ximena had made up the guest rooms; it was more than enough for Viktor and Sky to have privacy. So Viktor stayed the night, relieved he didn’t have to endure the storm and possibly slip and slide his way to an even earlier death.
The next morning, Jayce refused to venture to the lab, citing the two feet of snow as an insurmountable obstacle. When Viktor rolled his eyes and reached for his jacket and cane, Jayce grabbed his wrist. Jayce’s hand was so large, easily overlapping Viktor’s thin wrist; a firm grip, but gentle, and warmer than any touch Viktor had felt in recent memory. His heart thundered in his ears as the contact branded his skin.
Flustered, Jayce let go and rubbed the back of his neck, murmuring an apology.
“I have a blackboard here, if you want to work on that theory,” Jayce offered.
And Viktor forgot all about the coat.
Viktor doesn't remember exactly when Jayce became his emergency contact. Maybe it was that first night they met.
It was never discussed outright. Viktor never brought it up, finding the acknowledgement of his illness to be a bit macabre and entirely too distracting. Especially with how much stress Jayce had been under with his evolving role as their ambassador to the council and the rapid acceleration of their work. Deadlines loomed.
Now, as Viktor sat shirtless on an exam table, his doctor asked. Viktor didn't think or stutter. Didn't give it a second thought.
He just gave Jayce's name.
The doctor hummed in acknowledgement, scribbling in Viktor's records, and they moved on.
It had been another long day at the lab, like so many others before. Jayce insisted on depositing Viktor at his door before taking off for a meeting with Mel regarding the latest round of funding and a new list of concerns from the Council.
As they walked, Viktor had avoided Jayce’s concerned gaze. He’d ignored how Jayce firmly took his elbow, guiding him like a loyal dog.
Funny how often it seemed Mel needed just Jayce’s input, he thought. Never Viktor’s, it seemed.
That wasn’t quite fair. Mel Medarda was intelligent, highly competent, and wore her burdens as well as the gold adorning her frame. She knew how to leverage her assets (Viktor and Jayce) and how to play the game, eliding certain pitfalls men like Jayce and Viktor wouldn’t even clock.
Certainly, Viktor could not begrudge her for that; he could even admit he admired it and appreciated that he was not subject to endless council meetings and galas rife with petty politics and double-edged conversations.
The first days of winter were frigidly cold. Viktor’s body ached just before the first freeze. It was a different sort of ache. A gentle cold that ebbed in like the tide and washed over him.
He could have done something about it in the lab. Applied his engineering skills to fix the oil heater, or used a sliver of Hextech for such a thing. But he was exhausted. He didn’t trust his mind with anything that might require delicate soldering work or start a fire. It would go against his better judgment.
The dry air raked against his throat, every breath a renewed rasp. Some unseemly bruising on his chest—a burst of purple on his shoulder, blossoming like lilac in spring—had appeared recently. The mark radiated another ache, tender to the touch, and crept up to his sternum, where Jayce saw it.
Viktor hated how Jayce always seemed to find welts and bruises. Those eyes, like ice melting in cola, always tracked his movements. Sometimes, he ached and despised himself for how he took kindness like a balm. How Jayce took his arm so easily and righted him. More often than not, Jayce walked him back to his sad little home, where the stagnant air hung fetid with the remnants of last week’s leftovers and unwashed laundry.
Alone in his apartment, Viktor removed his braces, flicking the buckles open with ease and tugging the straps loose. His spine ached without the support, but his skin was thankful for relief from the compression of leather and metal. His leg throbbed in time with his heart.
His thoughts were muddled by exhaustion and the two fingers of whiskey he’d sipped while Jayce told him the great news about the next steps for them—for Hextech. Viktor had humored him with a thick swallow of the liquor.
As Jayce had spoken to him, drawing his strong arms wide to gesture to the entirety of their workshop, Viktor had thought of drunks stumbling in piss-soaked alleys in the Undercity. Thought of how his body, an amalgamation of all Zaun offered, was actively destroying itself cell by cell as the drink burned its way through him. Why not add another poison to the mix?
On his bedside table, several prescription bottles sat waiting. Brown and orange vessels with labels–analgesics, cough suppressants, sedatives. There was an empty glass from the previous night next to a well-thumbed copy of An Elementary Treatise on the Arcane and a half-filled notebook.
He didn’t have the energy to get up and refill the cup.
Dry pills it is. He popped them and swallowed the pressed oblong shapes, edgeless and rounded. They lodged in the back of his throat and he suppressed a gag before they finally slid down.
It was done, but the sensation lingered.
The day was over.
And he was alone.
No hand to catch him when he faltered. No concerned gazes or unnecessary queries—"You okay, V?" or “Let me get that for you!”—to nag at him.
Viktor waited for darkness to sweep over him as it had the campus and the city.
It used to be easier, all of this, but as the days grew shorter, everything became just a little more difficult. He tired more quickly. His pain persisted despite taking more pills. In every way, he ached more fiercely.
Rain tapped at the window. Ghost-white pearls gleamed and slid down the glass. The trails made him think of snails and slugs after such a rain, making their way from the sodden earth onto wet concrete. The air sharp with ozone, earthy and metallic.
The patter on the glass seemed to beg: Let me in, let me in. That was what Jayce had said, begging with his frown, the skin under his eyes dark with exhaustion. The gap between his front teeth. That scar on his brow where the hair no longer grew.
He jerked the blinds shut, sending the metal shivering into a single sheet of dirty gray, turning away and into himself.
“Come with me tonight,” Jayce said, like so many times before, hands clutching at Viktor’s shoulders.
Dusk had come already and Viktor hardly noticed until Jayce was striding into the lab, buttoning his cuffs. He was already dressed in his white tails with those shimmering gold buttons, the same color as his eyes. Crisp lines pressed into his trousers. A scarlet cravat tucked into his equally crisp shirt collar.
“Let them see us.”
Us.
Viktor closed his eyes. A tremor jerked through his leg, pain unfolding from hip to thigh, as he shifted on his lab stool. It was a reminder of his present and permanent condition. Could he even stand through half the night while Piltover’s elite swirled around him, snatching canapés and champagne flutes from the trays of faceless waitstaff?
“No,” Viktor said, “My time is best spent here. As is yours.”
Jayce frowned, the glimmer dying in his eye like the last embers in the forge.
Viktor scowled, fingers tightening on his cane. He resented this. His body. Himself. Jayce. He resented the institution that required such false displays of congeniality for notability and, ultimately, financing. No one wanted to pay you for your little science fair project when you were a cripple and a social leper who didn’t want to kiss their shiny leather shoes.
More than that, Viktor did not want to bear witness to Jayce’s performance at such events. He didn’t want to see how these banquets and council meetings contorted Jayce, bending him into an ugly, misshapen version of himself, all for money and distinction. For the approval of people neither of them had ever cared about. Twisting him up like a bonsai, clipping at every errant leaf or misshapen bloom, leaving Jayce stymied, cut off and useless.
Viktor was already malformed enough for the two of them. An oddity shaped by the constraint of his illness and origin as a Zaunite, an Undercity wraith haunting their lab, mentioned only in passing. ‘My partner... ‘ was a sentence he often heard the beginning of, and then tuned out.
Was all this worth giving up their principles? Without the support, there would be no Hextech, no gates or anything else. No way to help people.
But what remained when the very heart of their dream had been hollowed in exchange for the resources and capital to actually build it?
An empty vessel. A lie. A dream dead inside his chest. A partnership (a brotherhood, perhaps something more) bleeding out until nothing remained but faded chalk lines on a hastily wiped board and a resentment that would linger on the back of his tongue, bitter as bile.
To parade the corpse of their ambitions as Jayce was doing tonight? Viktor couldn’t bear it.
So no, he didn’t want to go to the banquet, even if he had found his breath catching at the sight of Jayce’s soft smile and the way those white tails cascaded down his back as he paced the lab, the heels of his boots clicking against the floor.
He did not want to appear at Jayce’s side, hobbling in with his cane, the shadowed half of their dynamic duo. A sideshow to the main attraction. The so-called partner that the elite ignored and whispered about in order to marvel at how magnanimous Jayce was to share the credit.
To see Jayce like this—no longer anxious or uncomfortable at these events, as it had become second nature—was strange, and only highlighted the rift between them. It would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
As time had ravaged Viktor’s body, bestowing its uncaring gifts, it had changed Jayce as well. He had grown wiser, shrewder. Less time in the lab meant more time in council chambers, where he learned the art of duplicity and guile.
It would take a lifetime to put things back to how they were.
A lifetime. How absurd. Another luxury he didn’t have.
He laughed, the sound morphing into a cough and racking his body. Jayce paused, a hand already to the spot between Viktor’s shoulder blades. So warm and strong, bracing Viktor more than his actual brace.
Viktor’s eyes stung, his throat raw, as the familiar pinch of anguish lit up his spine. He wiped his mouth on the cuff of his uniform shirt. A spot of blood seeped into the fabric, copper burning in his throat.
“Will you be alright?” Jayce asked, dropping his hand. Viktor nodded, pushing Jayce’s hand away, ignoring the darkening of his expression and how his eyes fell to the floor.
Then, Jayce was gone and it was just Viktor under the glow of his desk light with his notebook and the memory of Jayce’s palm against his back.
Rather than theorize on his latest idea for a configurable rune-matrix device, he thought of Jayce’s words.
“You don’t get to see the fruits of our labor, ” Jayce had said. “To hear how people talk about the Hexgates and everything we have done together.”
Jayce had said it all in that gleaming jacket, freshly pressed. Hair gel-slicked, smooth as those polished ballroom floors. Freshly shaved, suited up, and without a single crack in the veneer. A replica carved from clay and fired in the kiln with a shimmery glaze.
It was not the Jayce he knew. Not the scientist and the engineer. Not the man, but a facsimile.
It wasn’t what Viktor wanted.
Viktor wanted the scruff of Jayce’s unshaven jaw. The scar over his left eyebrow. HIs coffee breath and sandwich crumbs. The smell of solder and vaporized flux.
He wanted Jayce with his hair falling loose from the perfect coiffe. The weight of frustration, of failure, heavy on his shoulders. The sweat on his collar, his face flushed from the forge.
Viktor wanted them.
Stale and ripe from endless nights of theorizing, experimenting, prototyping. The air thick with the intangible crackle of energy between them. Their minds whirring, feeding off each other, until something inside them broke and they ended up delirious, laughing at some chicken-scratch on the board that neither of them could read. Until they fell asleep at their desks, heads down, drooling over blueprints and notebooks and dreams.
But those things were gone, washed away, emerging only with the sepia tinge of nostalgia.
He swallowed again, throat raw. His mouth tasted of stale breath and hours-old coffee. From a drawer, he pulled a bottle and took two pills before settling on the sunken couch across the floor. He waited until his mind went soft and hazy as the painkillers dissolved into his bloodstream.
Eventually, the sensations in his leg dulled, the knife in his back turning to simple pressure. He drifted into that haze and into the shadows of sleep. Fitful, but dark and hidden from everything else.
“Use your engineering judgment, my boy!”
Jayce was starting to resent that phrase. He heard it all the time, and it wasn’t just Heimerdinger. That was what all the academy’s instructors repeated.
In Jayce’s ethics classes, when they discussed liability and fault. In his economics class, when they determined benefit-cost ratios and applied them so coolly, so casually to the tragedies and accidents of life. In his physics classes, when presented with a ridiculous arrangement of trusses and told to determine the exact amount of tension or strain in each member. Then double it for the factor of safety. Hell, triple it, the professor had said.
But this sort of judgment relied on education, on accumulated knowledge, and on experience: what someone had learned from the mistakes and triumphs over a long, storied career. And on intuition. Your gut.
Sometimes, you just have to listen to your gut.
Maybe Jayce was paraphrasing Heimerdinger on that bit. He was sure he and the yordle had very different ideas about what constituted an acceptable amount of risk.
Jayce knew Viktor wasn’t as cautious; he didn’t have that luxury.
‘When you’re going to change the world, don’t ask for permission.’
Jayce could have had all the data, the statistics, the numbers. He could have tabulated all the outcomes and conclusions based on previous experiments and graduate projects. Could have kept it all in a well-organized binder, three-hole punched and D-ringed for easy updating with the errata released six months later.
The errata. What a joke.
Viktor’s hand was so cold now. Always thin, the fingers felt skeletal, knobby. Viktor’s veins were tinged green in the yellowing light of the room.
There were words he associated with Viktor. Trivial, when referring to a particular equation that had been stumping Jayce. Egotistical, when talking about how Jayce had signed every page of his notebook with that ridiculous scrawl.
Miasmic. As in: ‘The air is miasmic down there.’
Polluted. Noxious.
That was Zaun. That was where Viktor had grown up. The air he had breathed as a child was tainted, and perhaps what had ravaged his body, robbing him of vitality and vigor.
Jayce had known Viktor’s condition was getting worse—he wasn’t that oblivious. But he hadn’t truly seen it until now, had not faced it head-on like he usually would any other obstacle or problem. He had denied it as best he could, hiding the truth from himself with ignorance and distraction.
Distantly, the smell of Mel’s perfume lingered on Jayce’s skin. The memory, now so dissonant, foreign, he could only push it away.
“We'll figure it out,” Jayce said to Viktor, who lay in the bed unresponsive.
He said it to the room. To the dull light flickering at his side. To the mottled tile floor and to the nurse who glanced in the room.
Mostly, he said it to himself.
But something deep in his gut told him he was still lying. There was no way out, no silver lining, nothing waiting in the wings.
He slept that night next to Viktor’s bed, in the visitor’s chair.
Once, Jayce kissed Viktor. Sort of.
Viktor was alone for Snowdown, puttering around the lab like it wasn’t the saddest thing Jayce had ever seen. Three years as partners, and not once had he seen Viktor return home, wherever that might’ve been, for it.
“Come to my house,” Jayce had said, though Viktor shook his head.
He didn’t want to impose.
“Never. You’re never an imposition, Viktor,” Jayce told him, gazing directly, earnestly.
Jayce knew he wore his heart on his sleeve. Viktor would read his moods based on his footfalls. How heavily his heel hit the floor and the speed of his steps revealed far more about Jayce than he ever meant to.
(A few late-night betting games revealed Jayce had no poker face; Viktor, whether because of his teenage years hustling strangers in the dank pool halls of Zaun or just his genetics, was stone-faced, unreadable to Jayce. Either way, Jayce had lost his shirt more than once before Viktor mercifully called off those games.)
A strange expression, a mix of chagrin and surprise, crossed Viktor’s face, drawing his brows tightly together. Got you, Jayce thought, unable to stop the grin that broke on his face.
“If it will make you stop pouting, then fine,” Viktor relented.
Jayce pumped his fist, practically vibrating out of his seat with excitement. He let his mom know that they would have a special guest. She was thrilled, immediately chattering on about making up the guest bed—the room hadn’t seen many visitors lately.
Mel was gone, back to Noxus to be with her family, which sounded about as pleasant as eating blackberry brambles. Jayce offered to accompany her. She looked up at him knowingly, cupped his chin, and said he was such a kind and conscientious person.
And that was why he wasn’t coming along.
When Jayce arrived at the Talis manse with Viktor in tow, Ximena kissed Jayce on the cheek and embraced Viktor tightly, rocking him side to side. This time, Viktor put his hands on Ximena’s back and returned the gesture.
Caitlyn was there for a brief stopover. At the sight of Viktor, she got that gleam in her eye that only a little sister (real or figurative) could get.
“You know about mistletoe, right?” she asked Viktor.
Tilting his head, Viktor glanced up. “Ah, I see.”
“You have to kiss,” Caitlyn said, toeing at Jayce’s leather boot.
“Ignore her. She’s just causing trouble.” Flushing with embarrassment, Jayce nudged her foot away and glanced at Viktor.
That was a mistake. Viktor also had a mischievous look in his eye, a smirk on his lips.
“You would want to, eh, buck tradition, would you?” Viktor leaned forward on his cane, turning his face and presenting his angular cheek.
“It would be poor form,” Caitlyn added.
Bristling, Jayce glanced between the two of them. He and Viktor had had plenty of closeness over the prior years. Getting into one another’s personal space in the lab while working on a vexing problem on the board. Nodding off on the couch while reviewing presentation details, slumping against each other. Jayce did not deny he was a tactile person, and that extended to his partner.
But this wasn’t a serious thing, just a little joke. A holiday jest. It didn’t mean anything.
Caitlyn cleared her throat.
Viktor was waiting, smiling at him, beneath the holly.
“Fine,” Jayce relented.
He leaned in and brushed a chaste kiss against Viktor’s cheek, barely touching, and pulled back just as quickly. His heart was pounding in his chest, face blazing. Even just that brief contact had left him reeling. Viktor smelled sweet, of vanilla and citrus, and his skin was soft.
“Now, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?” Viktor grinned, sharing a chuckle with Caitlyn.
With that, Viktor hobbled through the doorway and disappeared into the Talis’ kitchen, where Ximena was banging pans and singing a holiday tune.
“You’re so obvious.” Caitlyn was rolling her eyes at him, as if she knew better. Amazing, how annoying she could be.
Jayce didn’t reply, instead choosing to jab her in the ribs, like the older brother stand-in he was.
Compromise when necessary. Trade-offs may be requiredto achieve a goal and to see a project from start to finish.
Everything was golden around Jayce as he stepped into the ballroom. The screech of violin strings from the string quartet. Murmurings from behind politely shielded mouths. Dust motes aglow in the air.
He left his champagne flute, bubbling and effervescent, forgotten on a table.
That night, as every night like this, there were a hundred different palms in his. A hundred promises made.
But he had broken the most important one.
The black hole in his gut swirled, growing ever more hungry with each passing moment, with each bit of politicking and gallivanting in this gilded room with its vaulted ceiling, white and gleaming.
Sometimes, you have to compromise to reach an equitable arrangement.
That seemed to be at odds with his former mantra years ago: Crank it.
Jayce ran the simulations in his head, considering the costs.
He examined the conditionals and the trade-odds. The back-scratching, the quid pro quo. If he agreed to this proposal by so-and-so, what would that give them? If they took the high road, what was the most likely response? Was that an outcome they were willing to accept, given the input parameters? How could they achieve progress in the present climate?
He had been using that so-called engineering judgment in all those conversations over tiny tables and even tinier canapes with Mel nodding from across the room. Jayce had made the call. He had compromised to get whatever they needed.
When he mentioned these transactions to Viktor, he often caught a flash of surprise in Viktor’s eyes, followed by a squint. Then a glimpse of disdain.
Lately, Viktor had been more tired, his body growing gaunter. The hollows of his cheeks were carved like arches in a cathedral. The darkness of his eyes didn’t hide his bitter disappointment.
Jayce saw, and he knew something had irrevocably changed.
Had Jayce made a grave error of his own by sacrificing part of their dream to help the unfortunate in order to fund it? It was an unambiguous yes, even if there had been no other way.
“You have to save him,” Jayce told himself when he woke, finding Viktor just as still as before. Fuck the doctors, fuck the Council.
Blood trickled from Viktor’s nose, tracing the curve of his philtrum and settling on his upper lip. With his crimson scarf, Jayce dabbed it away.
He had gotten distracted by the politics and the performance of it all. He had forgotten what really mattered. Fast strokes on a chalkboard, white dust on a waistcoat. The tap of a cane against cobbles near the cafe. Twilight hours with heads bent over desks, and the flash of blue-white light, like lightning. Shared glances. A hand on a shoulder.
The glimmer of something more—always more–now floating away.
He thought about what he had learned in his classes. The necessities of science and engineering. The hard facts. The data. The things he could measure and document. The proof. Experimentation with concrete results, and the cautious, practical application of those results. Those things, he believed, were real.
When he took Viktor’s icy hand in his, running his fingers along that pale and weakened palm, what use was any of it? There was more to behold in this world than there was to hold.
The tubes in Viktor’s nose were translucent twin snakes, winding their way across his narrow sternum and over the rails of the bed.
Outside, the moon was a thin, silvery crescent, and the sky was as black as oil.
You have to save him.