Esmond looked at the pieces for a long moment, and something in him gave up the last of its fight.
"They're devices." His ruined voice scraped over the word. "Alchemical ones. Vessels, rods, feed lines." His eyes moved across them, and there was a terrible familiarity in the way they moved. "I know where they came from. I'd know that work anywhere." A breath. "I helped make it."
Trafalgar said nothing, which was its own kind of pressure, and let the man keep going.
"They're built for one thing." Esmond's head sank back against the bed. "Forcing growth. You feed a creature through them, steady, over time, and you push it past anything it should ever become. Bigger, stronger, and angrier, which is the part most people forget to ask about. You don't only grow the body. You grow the temper right along with it, until the thing's half mad and twice the size it was born to be."
