Page 40 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

"I try not to."

She led Annani toward the stairs instead of taking the elevator, and Annani was glad for that.

"All five have been successfully transferred out of the chests and into hospital beds. We managed not to break any bones, which was what I was most afraid of. The bodies are very fragile, and their bones are brittle. We have used fresh mineral water to activate the regeneration process. We put in feeding lines, which was difficult, and I am glad you weren't there to witness it. Their veins are barely there. Five thousand years of stasis doesn't leave much to work with tissue-wise, and finding a vessel that would actually hold an IV needle took a while."

Annani's gut twisted at the image of needles penetrating veins in bodies reduced to almost nothing.

When Bridget pushed open the doors and they entered, Annani swept her gaze over the transformed operating room, noting that it looked different from last night—less of a space in transition and more like an active ward. Julian was examining a monitor as they arrived, while Gertrude stood at the far end inspecting an IV line.

"We're rotating our small crew. Merlin and Hildegard have the other shift," Bridget said.

Annani approached the first bed and made herself look.

It was worse than she had braced for, and she had braced for a great deal.

The body on the bed was skeletal in the most literal sense of the word, with skin drawn so tight over bone that it looked less like a person and more like an anatomical illustration. The shape of a face was reduced to its underlying structure with almost nothing left to soften it. Monitors beeped behind the bed, slow and faint, and Annani had to look at the screen twice to convince herself the weak, irregular blip crossing it was an actual heartbeat.

"The heart gets repaired first." Bridget came to stand beside her. "Before anything else can be repaired, the body needs a functioning circulatory system to deliver the resources it's drawing on to do the rest of the work. So that's where all the visible effort is concentrated right now. Everything else waits its turn."

Annani had thought it was the brain that needed to be restored first, but what Bridget had said made sense. The brain needed the heart to work first so it could get proper blood supply.

The whole process seemed more like magic than science, but that was probably because Annani was not a scientist and did not understand how it worked.

She looked at the faint, stuttering rhythm on the monitor and thought of Wonder.

"Looking at these five, I cannot believe that Wonder came back from this on her own." She shook her head. "A broken pipe supplied the fresh water, and her body did the rest on its own. How was that possible?"

"I guess that her body had spent a long time working on repairing itself before she woke up," Bridget said. "By the time she became aware of her surroundings, the hardest work hadalready been done, which is why her recovery afterward went as quickly as it did."

"So, you are saying that given enough time, they could regenerate without any of this. Some fresh water as a catalyst and the rest on their own."

"Possibly. I wouldn't want to test that theory intentionally, though. Left alone, with no monitoring and no support, there's no guarantee the process would happen cleanly, or that it would happen at all if something went wrong along the way. Better to give them every advantage we can, even if the body might eventually have managed it without us."

Annani nodded. "Of course. I would have never suggested that. I was just curious."

She walked up to the bed in the middle, drawn to it for some reason.

It was likely just the central positioning. The medical team had placed the bodies in these beds with no regard for anything other than where the Guardians had put down the chests. The middle bed held no more significance than any of the others.

Standing over the skeletal face, she searched it for anything, any curve of brow or set of jaw that her memory could seize on and call Khiann's, but there was nothing. The face beneath her was not a face yet, only the promise of one, features so reduced that even her desperate imagination could not reconstruct it into the face of her beloved.

She moved to the next bed and performed the same futile search. And the next. And the one after that.

None of them gave her anything to hold on to.

By the time she reached the fifth, she had stopped expecting to find him and simply stood there for a moment out of the pure stubborn need to have looked at each of them equally, refusing to let her earlier irrational pull toward the middle bed count for more than it deserved to.

"Not much to look at," Julian said. "But give it a week, and you might be able to tell who is who."

"I hope so." She turned and smiled at him. "Thank you for taking care of them."

"It's our privilege, Clan Mother," Julian said, and Gertrude just smiled and nodded in agreement.

"Let's go to my office," Bridget said. "Would you like some tea, Clan Mother?"

"I would love some." She followed the doctor out through the double doors. "But can I ask you a favor?"

"Anything." Bridget took the stairs again.