On Ark Island, Rosabelle Wolff struggled to keep her sick sister, Clara, alive amid sanctions tied to their father’s treason. Pressured by Lieutenant Sebastian Rivers to marry and controlled by head of security Soledad, Rosabelle agreed to execute captured spies in exchange for aid. During an attempted execution, the prisoner—James—revealed rapid healing, massacred soldiers, and cornered Rosabelle, but he spared her when she begged for mercy for Clara. Rosabelle was then submerged in Klaus’s undersea “cradle,” where the AI probed her mind and deemed her “very strange,” sparing her life. From surveillance, Commander Mona Damani revealed that Klaus had mapped James’s mind and engineered Rosabelle’s perceived weakness to make James protect her.

Ark detonated James’s stolen weapons to injure but not kill him, anticipating his recovery. After Rosabelle endured a near-catastrophic neural interrogation led by Sebastian, he fast-tracked her deployment and tightened control over Clara. Meanwhile James, having escaped to the forest, confirmed Ark’s wildlife was chipped and surveyed the island’s secretive infrastructure before stealing an air-trike; it crashed near Rosabelle’s settlement, where soldiers assaulted Rosabelle and seized Clara. Unable to ignore Clara’s screams, James rammed the scene with the damaged chopper, killed Rosabelle’s captors, and extracted her under heavy fire. Pursued by Ark, the pair negotiated a tense truce; Rosabelle insisted James take her to the New Republic as she overrode safety systems and drove the crippled craft off a cliff into the sea, then hacked the aircraft in flight to unlock stealth and reroute power, setting a course for the mainland.

At the New Republic, James defended bringing Rosabelle in alive, while Warner condemned the risk. Medical scans showed Rosabelle’s skull fracture, malnutrition, and a pattern of bruises suggestive of standardized torture, with no embedded tech detected and a notable forearm scar. Warner directed James to gain leverage through kindness and to “sponsor” Rosabelle through an eight-week rehabilitation program, strictly isolating her from leadership. Rosabelle, still operating under Klaus’s phases, received a covert holo-coin from a planted nurse revealing her next objective: obtain a black vial within two weeks. In therapy and daily life Rosabelle remained guarded, assessed others as possible operatives, and reacted violently when threatened, as when she stabbed an aggressive neighbor and James healed him on the spot. James and Rosabelle’s interactions deepened in complexity—she perceived his strict moral code and he learned fragments of her past and coercion—while staff repeatedly disciplined her, and James defended her against unproven accusations.

Late one night, Leon, seemingly manipulated by Klaus, delivered a warm glass vial to Rosabelle and, under Klaus’s control, outlined her true mission: drink the vial, bury herself alive, and become a catalyst for a hidden explosion that would cauterize a vast radius, strip powers, and ready the populace for control; she had eight weeks, and Clara’s fate was wielded as leverage. Leon then lost control and self-immolated just as staff arrived; in the ensuing chaos, Rosabelle wounded Deepti and stabbed Agatha, and when James arrived and looked at her with devastating disappointment, she shut down her vital signs and was presumed dead.

On the autopsy table, Rosabelle revived, revealing a stress response that had thwarted chip implantation for years. She grabbed the vial and attempted escape, fighting Kenji in a brutal close-quarters clash before hesitating to kill him. James outmaneuvered and restrained her, and Kenji recovered the vial. As alarms sounded, Warner ordered a supermax cell prepared. During transfer through tunnels, James oscillated between anger and care—fetching shoes for her, pressing for truth, and extracting her real name and history with Clara—while Rosabelle withheld decisions about the vial and asked to return to Ark for reasons she refused to share. When a sniper’s laser targeted them, James shielded her, but upon reaching the atrium, guard Samuel shackled Rosabelle with electrified manacles until James forced the current lower.

Warner confronted James, cut him off from Rosabelle, and exposed that Rosabelle had lied about her parents, confirming she repudiated her father. Ordering her taken away for interrogation by Hugo, Warner recognized her intentions and locked the building down. Accepting that she had been identified and would be imprisoned, Rosabelle decided to conserve her strength, planning her next move from inside a cell as the clock on Klaus’s eight-week deadline—and Clara’s peril—continued to tick.