The Unwritten Verse

The conference room at the Beaumont Foundation was all glass and hush, a high floor above Zurich’s sleek streets. Elara Vance sat straight-backed at the head of the oval table, a neat folder aligned precisely with its edge, her hands resting lightly, fingers unadorned but for the pale ink stains that never quite washed out. The board members settled into their leather chairs with the rustle of expensive fabric, expectation tightening the air. Behind them, the city and the lake shone like a polished blade.

“The Seraphim Codex,” she began, her voice even, carrying without force, “is a twelfth-century manuscript made of calfskin vellum. Its pigments—azurite, vermilion, carbon black, likely orpiment—have survived eight centuries because no one mistook speed for care.” She looked each member of the board in the eye with the calm of someone who knew exactly what she could promise and what she would never risk. “My proposal is to restore—and more importantly, to stabilize—without imposing our century’s impatience onto their century’s craft.”

She clicked the remote. The screen at the far wall filled with a photograph of a pale, fragile folio. Hairline tears veined the margins; the paint on an illuminated initial had lifted into tiny cupped scales. “The vellum has warped in the upper third,” she said, laser pointer steady as she traced the bulge without touching the screen. “Humidity fluctuations caused collagen fibers to tighten. My first step is a controlled environmental acclimation. Seven days. Forty-five to fifty percent relative humidity, at a standard temperature. We bring it to equilibrium before we touch a single corner.”

She changed slides. A close-up showed a lifted flake of azurite, crystalline and poised to fall. “Consolidation will be done with isinglass, prepared fresh, applied with a 000 sable brush underneath each flake. No flooding. No shortcuts. It will take time, and it will hold.” Her tone made time sound like a gentleman’s agreement.

Another slide: a fine tear along the gutter, the fibers frayed. “Japanese kozo, 3.5 grams, feathered edge, toned with Golden fluid acrylics to match the vellum. Reversible wheat starch paste. Pressed under blotters and weight between spun polyester for twenty-four hours. I will not introduce any adhesive, solvent, or technique that cannot be undone without harm. That is not just a philosophy. It is policy.”

A board member, a woman with pearl earrings and a reputation for slicing through sentiment, raised her hand. “And what of the illegible margins? The faded rubrication?”

Elara nodded, anticipating the question. “Documentation first. D50 lighting. No UV. A macro lens for every folio recto and verso. Raking light to capture surface topography. I will not employ ultraviolet fluorescence until after consolidation; even then, exposures will be carefully measured and minimized.” She paused. “What’s lost to fading is not our property to force back into visibility. We record. We interpret carefully. The codex is not a machine to be hacked.”

A ripple of approval moved around the table, small, but there.

She advanced to a slide showing a translucent membrane hugging a pigment island back into place. “Lifting paint will be coaxed down with breath and warmth, nothing more. My tools are brushes, bone folders, blotters, patience.” At that, a brief smile tugged at her mouth, quickly gone. “We will create custom supports for every opening angle the binding allows. We will never exceed its natural range.”

Someone else, a man whose tie sat like a badge of old money, leaned forward. “The Seraphim Codex is rumored to conceal earlier writing. Palimpsest, some say. How do you propose to address that?”

Elara didn’t flinch. “If it is palimpsested, any underlying text might be faint. It may not be there at all. I will not scrape, wash, or chemically enhance. My job is to safeguard the text present. Speculation is not a conservation method.” Her gaze steadied him. “If, after stabilization, non-invasive documentation suggests safe, conservative investigation, we will discuss it. But this proposal is for restoration and preservation.”

She took a breath and shifted to the next segment: budget, schedule, staffing. “Six months on site at the Monastery of St. Florian. Two assistants—both conservators with hands I trust—rotating to prevent fatigue. A climate-controlled microchamber. Custom cradles fabricated ahead of time. Daily logs. Weekly reports to the Foundation. Every intervention photographed and cataloged.”

Her hands were steady, but her heart beat with a quiet intensity as she spoke of the codex. “You’ve funded projects that chased novelty. This one honors endurance. The Seraphim Codex has outlasted empires because artisans understood humility. I am asking you to fund humility.”

There was a silence after that, not empty, but full. She let it stand. She had learned that confidence was not volume or flourish; it was clean methods, clean tools, clean boundaries.

“Risks?” the pearl-earring board member asked.

“Elastomeric failure in the binding cords,” Elara said promptly. “We detect by gentle flex and sound. We will not reback unless failure is imminent. Mold bloom if the environment is mishandled—prevented by strict protocols. Pigment friability—addressed with consolidation before any page-turning.” She allowed herself a small, controlled exhale. “My greatest risk is external pressure to move faster. I won’t.”

She closed her folder, aligning it again. “The Seraphim Codex does not need saving in a dramatic sense. It needs someone to sit with it long enough to understand what it can bear. I can do that. I have done that—St. Cyprian’s Gradual, the Leyden Hours. Both stabilized without spectacle. Both now consulted without fear.”

She clicked the final slide: a simple image of her worktable, orderly, waiting, lit by morning light. “This is not a glamorous proposal. It is a promise to keep something alive.”

When she finished, the room remained still a moment longer. Then came the polite clearing of throats, the brief exchange of glances, the murmured appreciation. Questions began to stack at the edges of the table, manageable, practical. Elara answered each with the same precise, unhurried certainty, every detail steeled by years of practice and a fierce private vow that history deserved gentler hands than the world usually offered.

She had just gathered her notes when the door at the far end hissed, and a man slid into the room with a leather case and a grin timed like a cue. Julian Thorne didn’t apologize for being late. He never did. He set the case on the table as if the table had been built for it, and when he straightened, the lights dimmed at a subtle flick of his finger on a remote he must have palmed while walking.

“Good morning,” he said, casual, urbane, as the wall filled with a high-contrast image of a manuscript so battered and ghostly it seemed to breathe. He didn’t look at Elara. He didn’t have to. He knew exactly where she was in the room. “I’m Julian Thorne. I won’t repeat what you already know. The Seraphim Codex is extraordinary. I’m here to talk about the text you can’t see.”

He tapped the remote. The image shifted: a stack of false-color scans, blues and reds mapping pigment densities, green lattices picking out underdrawing. A murmur traveled around the table, the sound people make when they think they’re seeing secrets.

“We have a suite of multispectral imaging rigs,” he said, the words smooth, practiced. “Seventy-five nanometers to nine hundred and fifty. Narrow-band LEDs. Tunable filters. We capture reflectance and fluorescence across the spectrum, and then we unmix the signal. Pigments absorb and emit differently. So do inks. In palimpsests, the older iron gall leaves a distinct signature under the later hand—especially if the scribe didn’t fully scrape. Most don’t. We can coax it up. No scraping. No solvent. Light only.”

Julian opened his case and revealed not a jumble but a perfectly nested set of instruments: a compact camera head with a honeycomb lens, filter wheels labeled in neat, odd increments, a fold of black velvet that drank the room. He lifted each piece with a tenderness that made people lean forward. Elara knew the trick. It was showmanship. But she felt the prickle at the back of her neck all the same.

“These,” he said, holding up a set of slim, matte panels, “are my lights. Narrow-band. Cool. I’ve used them on vellum older than the Seraphim. The irradiance at the surface is lower than daylight. Exposure is controlled. We measure. We don’t guess.” He placed the panels on the table without a sound. “This is the key: we’re not only taking pictures. We’re doing spectral separation. Think of it as peeling layers mathematically. The written-over words are still there, their chemistry a fingerprint. We isolate that fingerprint.”

On the screen, letters emerged—faint, fragmented, but undeniably different from the bold black above them. The board leaned in. Elara recognized the sample. He’d chosen a page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, an older victory famed enough to bear the weight of a pitch. He made sure the board saw the before and after, the alchemy of pixels turning into meaning. He made sure they forgot the years of preservation that had made such imaging possible.

“Imagine,” Julian said, and now his voice threaded warmth through the room, “a layer of commentary beneath the illuminations we already revere. A scribe’s corrections, a private prayer, a lost hymn. We don’t have to damage the codex to ask what’s beneath. We ask with photons and math.”

He switched to a slide of his proposed setup in the monastery: soft boxes angled like petals, a cradle that looked unnervingly improvisational to Elara’s eye, though he called it modular. He showed a timeline that compressed weeks into a bright ladder of tasks. He showed budget numbers that, she had to admit, were tighter than they should be, an artful compression that suggested he understood where boards were likely to flinch.

“Risk?” he anticipated, smiling at the woman with pearls. “Light is the only risk. We monitor cumulative exposure with dosimeters. Our filters are clean; our wavelengths selected to avoid damaging resonance with organic binders. We can keep exposure below the cumulative levels of exhibition under gallery lighting. The scanning head never touches the surface. We use a negative pressure hood to keep ambient dust off the vellum while we work. Everything is non-invasive. Reversible in the only way that matters—stop shining light, and it stops.”

He did look at Elara then, a slide of charm across his face. “This doesn’t replace conservation. It complements it. Elara’s protocols will stabilize the folios so that they can safely be imaged. Her work enables mine. Together, we could bring the Seraphim’s full voice into the present.”

The board absorbed this as if he’d offered a truce and a miracle on the same plate. Elara kept her hands still. Her pulse spiked, a tight, unpleasant beat against her wrist bone. He would anchor himself to her integrity like a climber to a piton, then lean far out over the abyss without fear.

“What about iron gall corrosion?” she asked before anyone else could, her voice even. “Under UV or at certain near-IR excitations, you risk catalyzing oxidation. The ink breaks down the substrate. You can accelerate damage you can’t see in a single session.”

Julian didn’t flinch. “We avoid UV except for controlled fluorescence capture, and even then, we use UVA at low intensities. Iron gall absorption is stronger in the visible; our near-IR bands are designed to exploit reflectance contrasts without driving reactive species. It’s all measured. We’re not waving blacklights.”

“And the cradle?” She kept her gaze on the projection, on the way his proposed supports forced a flatness that the binding might not bear. “That opening angle is ambitious for a twelfth-century sewing on double cords. You can’t force the spine.”

He nodded, to his credit. “The rendering is a placeholder. We’ll fabricate a custom cradle to your measurements on site. You control the openings. I work within them. I’m reckless,” and here he smiled directly at her, the word glittering with a dare he thought she might take, “but I’m not stupid.”

Laughter, the polite kind, moved around the room. Elara bit the inside of her lip hard enough to feel the sting.

A board member asked about deliverables. Julian answered with a promise of layered datasets, processed images, a searchable corpus of any recovered text, a public-facing portal that made donors’ eyes shine. He knew how to make a future sound inevitable.

She waited until there was a pause. “Hidden text,” she said, cool, shaping each syllable so it wouldn’t splinter. “Is a rumor until you prove it. You may find noise masquerading as signal. Partial characters that people will be tempted to complete with their own wishful thinking. Announcing discoveries before you understand them has consequences. Once you release an image, you can’t pull it back out of the world.”

Julian didn’t bristle. He softened, a tactic. “Which is why we don’t announce until we are sure. Which,” he added, eyes scanning the board with a humor she knew they’d find reassuring, “is why I’ll let Elara say no when I want to say yes too fast.”

“Speculation is not a method,” Elara said. “The Seraphim Codex isn’t a stage for your technology.”

“And it’s not a mausoleum for your caution,” he returned, quickly enough that several heads snapped between them.

Silence edged the table. Outside, the lake threw a clean white light into the room. Elara stared at the mockup of his lights and felt the old anger touch her, steady and hot—the kind reserved for people who mistook daring for merit. He was brilliant. He knew how to be. He knew how to make the room love him. He would take a manuscript that had survived wars and fires and time and put it under a battery of lamps because he believed in his math.

The chair of the board cleared his throat. “This is a compelling proposal, Dr. Thorne. Ms. Vance, your concerns are noted and valued. It seems, perhaps, there is room here for…balance.”

Elara kept her face still. Inside, something she’d let herself believe in—a clean lane, a project that would be hers to shepherd with quiet, principled care—shivered and cracked. She looked at the spectral alphabet ghosting out from under the Archimedes text on the screen, at the way the room leaned toward it like a congregation to a miracle, and she felt her confidence buckle in a way that had nothing to do with her abilities and everything to do with how the world rewarded spectacle.

Julian clicked to a final slide: the monastery, snow stitched along the roofline, sky the blue of a bruise. “We can do it there,” he said softly, as if the place itself might be listening. “Carefully. Together.”

He made it sound like an invitation. To Elara, it sounded like an incursion dressed as a promise. She stacked her folder, squared its corners again, and knew the codex would not be hers in the way she had imagined. It would be a battleground, and he had just rolled in the artillery.

The chair folded his hands, the knuckles pale. “We’ve heard two excellent presentations,” he began, voice appropriately grave. No one breathed. Elara felt the tight drum of her pulse in her throat. “What is clear to us is that the Seraphim Codex deserves both reverence and courage. Ms. Vance, your conservation plan is meticulous. Dr. Thorne, your imaging strategy is compelling. Neither is sufficient alone for the scope of what this artifact represents.”

He paused, letting the sentence stretch. Elara knew performance when she saw it; the board loved their own drama as much as Julian loved his. “Therefore,” he said, and the word landed like a gavel, “we will fund the project under one condition: that you do it together.”

Elara kept her face smooth by force. Together. The room brightened with the board’s collective relief at their own solution. “The Seraphim will not be moved,” the chair continued. “You will conduct the work at the Monastery of St. Florian, with the cooperation of the brothers and under the Foundation’s oversight. Ms. Vance will have full authority over conservation and handling parameters. Dr. Thorne will design his imaging protocol within those constraints. A joint timeline. Joint reporting. A single final deliverable.”

The woman with pearls nodded, pleased. “Checks and balances,” she said, as if she’d invented the phrase.

Julian didn’t smile immediately, and that—irritatingly—made Elara look at him. Something in his expression had gone quiet, almost solemn. Then he glanced at her, not a smirk, not an I won, just an acknowledgment that the line had been drawn and they were now both inside it. “I accept,” he said. His voice was steady. “On those terms.”

The chair turned to Elara. “Ms. Vance?”

There was a version of the moment in which she said no. She could refuse to strap herself to a man whose idea of care involved numbers instead of touch. She could walk away from the codex and live with the ache of it as an absence rather than risk its harm, or the harm to her work’s integrity, or the humiliation of being tied to his speed. The image of the chest opening in St. Florian’s cold light surfaced in her mind with a clarity that hurt. She had wanted that moment since she was twenty-two and saw a photograph of the Seraphim’s lapis margins in a book so heavy it left a mark on her knees.

“Elara?” the chair prompted gently.

She swallowed the iron taste of pride. “I accept,” she said. Her voice did not shake. “On those terms, with the understanding that my conservation assessment dictates all contact and exposure.”

“Of course,” the chair said, as if people honored caution without pressure. “We’ll circulate a memorandum of understanding this afternoon. Travel within the week. The monastery is prepared to host you for the duration of Phase One.”

Someone at the far end of the table, a donor with a tan that looked perpetual, leaned forward. “How remote are we talking? Wi-Fi?” Laughter rolled, easy, expensive.

“Snowbound in winter,” said the chair, almost fondly. “There is internet. There is also silence.”

Elara signed her name where the assistant slid the paper. The pen was heavy, cool, and left a black line that felt like a cord tightening. When she passed the folder back, her knuckles brushed Julian’s sleeve. The contact was nothing—a fraction of a second, fabric on skin—but it jolted her nerves. She pulled her hand back and folded it over its twin, pressing both against the table to keep them still.

“Logistics,” the project manager chirped, already in motion. “Shipping your equipment, Dr. Thorne? Ms. Vance, your solvents, supports, humidity chambers—”

“No solvents,” Elara said, automatic. “Not until the full assessment.” She began to list what she would need and what she would refuse, the cadence of it familiar enough to slow her breathing: Tyvek covers, acid-free, pre-fabricated cradles adjustable by millimeter, environmental dataloggers, the vellum humidification tent she trusted more than the ones most institutions owned. She spoke to the manager but felt Julian listening, cataloguing her requirements with a mind that moved like hers, only sideways.

“I’ll ship the scanner head in a Pelican case,” he said. “LED arrays separate, packed with foam. Dosimeters in triplicate. The negative-pressure hood—”

“We’ll trial your hood on a sacrificial substrate before it comes near the codex,” Elara said.

“Agreed,” he returned, without sting.

The board dispersed by degrees, pleased with themselves, shining their phones at calendars. The chair shook hands. “I’ll expect weekly updates,” he told them. “And if there are disagreements…,” he added with a pointed, paternal glance, “…you will resolve them as colleagues.”

Elara stood. The sunlight off the lake had shifted to a harsher angle, cutting across the conference table and striping the glass with white. She slid her notes into her bag and felt the heft of them like ballast. At the door, she hesitated. Julian had lingered, as she knew he would, hovering at the edge of the table as if waiting for a cue he refused to call. He approached now with a careful ease, as if she were a skittish animal he meant to soothe.

“Truce?” he said, softly this time, his earlier brightness dimmed to something that might have been sincerity. He held out his hand, not in front of the board, not for show. A private offering.

She looked at his hand, the long-fingered precision of it, the faint ink smudge near the knuckle that shouldn’t have appealed and did. Her gaze climbed to his face, the arrogant lines of it gentled. The monastery rose between them like a third party, cold and absolute. She took his hand because refusing would have been childish and because they were already tied whether she liked it or not.

“Professional,” she said. She kept her palm flat against his, cool, refusing the automatic curl of fingers that would make the gesture human. “Nothing more.”

His jaw flexed, a flicker of humor or hurt moving there and then gone. “Professional,” he echoed. His grip was warm, firm, and gone a heartbeat later.

They walked out together and then not-together down the corridor, the Foundation’s glass walls reflecting their shapes back at them in doubling panes: her in navy and restraint, him with a case slung over his shoulder like a dare. At the elevator, the assistant jogged up with envelopes. “Travel packets,” she said brightly. “Flights to Zurich, transfer to the monastery. Rooms reserved on site. It’s all in there. Congratulations.”

Elara slid the envelope into her bag without looking. In the mirrored doors, she met her own eyes and saw, to her annoyance, not only the familiar flare of resistance but also a sliver of something like anticipation. The elevator chimed. They stepped in. For three floors, they stood too close in the small polished box, pretending not to be aware of one another. He smelled faintly of soap and paper dust, a detail her brain filed without permission.

At the lobby, the doors opened onto the noise of the city. He gestured with a small tilt of his head, oddly formal. “See you in the Alps,” he said.

She nodded. “Bring your dosimeters,” she replied, and left before she could see him smile. Outside, the lake threw back a sheet of light, and the cold bit her lungs clean. She stared at the water until the glare faded to something she could stand, then turned toward the week ahead, to a monastery she’d never seen and a partnership she hadn’t wanted, both inevitable now as weather.

Elara didn’t walk so much as slice through the cold, each step a controlled strike against the pavement. She kept going until the Foundation’s glass and steel gave way to older stone and narrow shade, a street that held the quiet she needed. She didn’t stop moving. If she stopped, the fury would spill out and make a spectacle, and she refused to give anyone that pleasure.

Her phone buzzed. A message from the project manager with a checklist. She silenced it and shoved the device back into her bag. In the window of a shuttered café, her reflection stared back—composed and fine-boned and lying. She’d perfected the look years ago, when the only way to keep from being dismissed was to appear unassailable. It hadn’t saved her then. It wouldn’t save her now, not from this particular humiliation: to be bound to Julian Thorne and his circus of light.

Showman. She let herself think it without apology. He had once given a keynote that made an auditorium of scholars clap like tourists at a magic trick—color maps, hidden inks revealed in a glow that had felt more like a performance than a method. Afterwards, the Q&A turned into a paparazzi line. Journalists swarmed him while the woman who had cleaned the manuscript he’d dazzled them with sat two rows back, ignored, her careful work reduced to a footnote on his slide. She’d felt the heat in her face then like a bruise. He’d noticed her only when the room emptied, stopping by her chair with that easy grin, thanking her for “the groundwork.” As if that word could hold years’ worth of skill and restraint.

Another time, he’d published a piece that went viral—viral, as if that ought to be an academic metric—speculating about palimpsest poetry beneath a well-known codex. The museum that housed it was then harassed by donors demanding he be allowed to scan the entire thing. He’d corrected the press gently, like a teacher, like a saint, but the damage was done. Spectacle. She’d written a measured response laying out risks and limits, and a junior editor had softened her language until it sounded like capitulation. Her name and his had appeared in the same issue, his bold and burning, hers careful and cool. Guess which one the world loved.

She reached the lake and took a bench not yet warmed by any sun. A cyclist went by, the brief whirr of wheels like a whisper. Her hands were restless. She unzipped her bag, took out her notebook, the one that smelled faintly of linen rags and gum arabic, and made a list in the thin, precise script that calmed her. Vellum support cradle—custom, double-tier. Micro-spatulas. Digital microscope. Blotter papers. Pre-saturated humidity beads, individually sealed. She added, beneath, in smaller letters: patience. The word looked wrong on the page, as if it were a note to someone else. She didn’t need patience; she had discipline. What she needed was to protect the codex from ambition dressed up as progress.

A boy with a dog approached, saw her face, and veered away. Good. Her gaze drifted to the water, where sunlight shattered and reformed. The Seraphim rose in her mind the way it always did: thick boards, iron clasps, pigment laid down with a hand so steady it still felt alive under the glass. She’d first learned its measurements by heart the way other people remembered lyrics. The lapis margins had ruined her for anything lesser. She’d spent years doing everything right, saying no more often than yes, refusing the shortcuts that earned quick praise. There weren’t many chances to touch something like that. Finger bones from centuries ago had pressed that skin; breath had dried those pages. To be responsible for it—she had wanted that responsibility more than she had wanted anything else.

And now the price was him. She knew better than most that purity was a myth; everything of value demanded a compromise. This one felt like a blade against the ribs. But the alternative—stepping aside, letting some other pair take their place in St. Florian’s cold scriptorium—was worse. She would never forgive herself. And she couldn’t trust anyone else to put their body between the codex and harm the way she would.

She lifted her pen again and wrote his name in the margin—Julian—then drew a clean line through it. Not as erasure. As boundary. Authority over handling parameters was hers; the chair had said it in front of witnesses. She would nail those conditions to the door of the monastery if she had to. His scanner would live and die by the limits she set. Every exposure, every test, every minute of light would be approved or denied by her hand. She could live with that. She would make him live with that.

Her mind flashed to the brief contact in the conference room, the brush of a sleeve, the stupid way her body had registered warmth. She pushed the memory aside like a contaminant. Attraction, curiosity, whatever it had been—none of it would be allowed. She had navigated worse. Men had smiled, flattered, undermined, disappeared. She’d built a life around the manuscript table and the absolute honesty of materials. Collagen didn’t lie. Gold leaf didn’t pretend. Pigments told you exactly what they were if you learned how to look. She trusted that world. She didn’t trust him.

Her phone buzzed again. She looked this time. Brother Michael, the librarian at St. Florian, had written a formal note of welcome forwarded by the Foundation. It was a few lines—spare and polite—about rooms prepared and a fire in the scriptorium kept banked for their arrival. She read it twice. A monastery that understood temperature and time. She could work with that. She replied with a thank you brief enough to avoid warmth and then typed out for the project manager a list of non-negotiables that would make a lawyer sweat. No exposure above 50 lux. No contact without prior acclimation. No adhesives within the first week. Access to a stable environment control—a list that made her throat loosen as it lengthened.

When she finished, she capped her pen, slid the notebook back into the bag, and stood. The wind off the water cut through her coat and she let it. Cold was clean. Cold kept things still. She turned toward her apartment and the rituals she could control: washing her hands, packing precise tools one at a time, labeling each case, double-checking checklists until the lines blurred. She would go to St. Florian. She would bring the codex home to itself page by page. She would not let the noise touch it. She would not let his speed scour away the time it held.

By the time she reached her building, the decision had settled like a stone in her gut. Reluctance wasn’t surrender. Acceptance wasn’t forgiveness. She buzzed herself in, climbed the stairs, and kept her jaw set. The Seraphim was waiting in a cold room on a mountain. So was he. One of those facts mattered. The other would simply have to be managed.

He caught up to her halfway down the marble steps, out where the Foundation’s glass facade gave way to a wind that pushed color into her cheeks. “Elara,” he said, the single word bright with an optimism that felt like a spotlight. He had that unruffled posture that photographed well—coat open, tie askew in a way that said he had been too focused on ideas to bother with symmetry. He smiled, as if none of this were an insult to the years she’d spent earning the right to be alone with something sacred.

“Dr. Vance,” she corrected, pivoting just enough to make him stop or walk into her.

He stopped. His hands were empty—no notebook, no tech case—and the lack of props made him look disarmingly human. “All right. Dr. Vance.” He softened the address with another smile. “I wanted to say—before we both disappear into logistics—that I’m glad we’re doing this together.”

She lifted a brow. “Glad isn’t the word I’d choose.”

“Fair,” he said easily. “But I meant it. Your methods are—” He searched for a word, and she watched him try not to fumble. “Exacting. I respect that. We don’t have to be at odds.”

“We are at odds by definition,” she said, voice even. “Your approach accelerates exposure and risk in service of speed and novelty. Mine reduces both in service of longevity and legibility. They are not compatible impulses. They can only be managed.”

He took that in without flinching, a small tilt of his head that acknowledged contact. “Managed is a start. What if we aim higher than détente? Truce?” He held out a hand, palm open. “Terms we can both live with.”

She let her gaze fall to his hand long enough to be deliberate. He had the hands of someone who touched equipment more than people—knuckles nicked, faint callus at the base of his thumb. She didn’t take it. “Terms have already been set,” she said. “Authority over handling parameters is mine. You will not move forward without my explicit approval. No scans without my evaluation of each folio’s condition. No exceptions.”

“Understood,” he said, dropping his hand without visible offense. “But within your parameters, I’d like to demonstrate what the tech can do. A corner, an already compromised margin—something that lets you see the cost-benefit in real time. No theater. No press. Just the manuscript and us.”

“Demonstrations are theatre by design,” she said. “And you do love an audience.”

“Not this time,” he said. “This isn’t a stage. It’s a lab with better acoustics.”

Her mouth tightened despite herself. “A scriptorium is not a lab.”

“It can be both,” he said, unbothered. “Places can hold more than one truth.”

“So can people,” she said. The wind lifted a strand of hair from her collar and she smoothed it back with a gloved knuckle. “I’m not interested in your truth as a brand. I’m interested in whether your equipment can function within strict limits without introducing stress to a support that predates our countries.”

“It can,” he said, softer now, the showman muted. “And if it can’t, I’ll stop. I’m not trying to bulldoze you. I know what it is to live with a mistake you can’t undo.”

That tugged at something she refused to name. She filed the sentence away with the other data points she kept on him, labeling it: possible sincerity. “Good,” she said. “Then we understand each other. You will bring your dosimeters. You will accept my light thresholds. You will prepare to be bored.”

He huffed a laugh that didn’t quite break through his composure. “I don’t bore easily.”

“You don’t slow down easily,” she said. “You will now.”

He shifted, the practiced charm recalibrating. “And you—” He paused, considering the risk. “You’ll consider that revelation doesn’t always mean rupture. Sometimes it means context. That’s what I want. Context revealed by technology that leaves the surface untouched.”

She met his eyes for a beat too long, felt the static there, an edge like the moment before a page lifts under a lifting knife. “I will consider any intervention that does not elevate risk beyond negligible. If your device can meet that burden and you can meet mine, we’ll proceed. If not, we won’t.”

He nodded once, the seriousness in his face finally matching the weight in her chest. “Then we have a framework.”

“What we have,” she said, “is a schedule. I will send you an acclimation plan for the first week. You will not unpack your scanner until the environment is stabilized. You will not plug anything in until I’ve signed off. You will not touch the codex without me.”

His mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Do you plan to stand between me and it?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “If necessary.”

He held her gaze as if testing for a crack. Whatever he found made him sober. “All right.” He took a breath, fogging the air. “One more thing.”

“No.”

He blinked. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”

“Experience,” she said. “You were going to ask me to be open-minded. I am. Within the boundaries of the object. Not your ego.”

A flush touched his cheekbones, not of embarrassment but heat pressing against a closed door. “I was going to ask if you’d send me your handling protocols tonight so I can calibrate to them during the flight.”

She stilled, then inclined her head. “I’ll send them this afternoon. Don’t tinker with them.”

“I’ll read them,” he said, voice light again, careful. “And I’ll meet you at St. Florian with coffee and silence.” The corner of his mouth tipped. “Mostly silence.”

She didn’t give him a smile back, but she didn’t cut him for the attempt. “Bring a heavy sweater,” she said. “The scriptorium is cold.”

His eyes flicked over her face, searching for something he didn’t find, then settled. “See you in the Alps, Dr. Vance.”

“Mr. Thorne,” she said, a deliberate demotion.

He laughed under his breath, accepting the hit. “Touché.” He stepped back, giving her the space she had carved, and for a second the distance between them felt like a wire drawn taut. Different disciplines strung on the same line, vibrating at different frequencies, the hum low and unnerving.

She turned first, the meeting dismissed. He let her go, the echo of his presence lingering like the faint scent of paper dust on his coat. She didn’t look back. The terms had been set. The clash had only begun.