At least m'lord had made damned sure he had the right woman this time, after that unholy mess day before yesterday. Fortunately, he'd stopped short of bringing in those poor kids to ID his new prize last night, after they'd got her to Suze's and unwrapped her. This time around, Jin and Mina hadn't even been told she was found yet. When he'd asked m'lord, But which is better? M'lord had replied simply, Neither. Which just about summed it up.

Roic tried not to flinch as Raven punched the assorted tubings through thawed skin and carefully seated them in his vessels-of-choice. Roic did start at a brief rap on the door, and turned on his heel, alert.

Consul Vorlynkin stuck his head in. "Lord Vorkosigan, a message came-oh."

"You didn't bring the kids this time, did you?" demanded m'lord, alarmed.

"No, no. Johannes is baby-sitting. They still don't know."

"Whew. Though perhaps you could bring them over soon, if all goes well."

"And if it doesn't?" asked Vorlynkin grimly.

M'lord sighed. "Then maybe I can bring them."

"You can come in," said Raven over his shoulder, "but you have to put on a filtering mask. You can't hang in the doorway like a cat."

Ako hastened to hand Vorlynkin a mask, and helped him adjust it; he grimaced as the memoryseal bonded to his skin. He came cautiously up to the procedure table. "I did wonder what this was like."

"Any problems so far?" m'lord asked. He was perched on a tall stool, partly to oversee the procedure, but mostly, Roic suspected, to block him from pacing.

"Not yet," said Raven. He reached over and started the first flush of warmed, hyper-oxygenated IV fluid. His patient's skin began to turn from clay gray to an ethereal ice-pale. Someone had made an unexpected effort to preserve her long hair, treated with gel and rolled in a wrapping; it lay curled like a snail shell above her shoulder. Ms. Chen's hair had been cropped in a medically utilitarian bob.

Madame Sato was taller than Roic had expected, fully five-foot-eight. That and her dark hair gave her a slight, unsettling resemblance to m'lord's wife Lady Ekaterin, actually, which Roic elected not to point out. Sato's face was a rounder shape, if also stretched over a fine symmetrical scaffolding of jaw and cheekbone, and her body was thinner in a way that suggested stress rather than athleticism. An elf-lady strung out on bad drugs and bad company.

"She's not what…" Vorlynkin stared, mesmerized. "I thought you said she'd look terrible. Skin flaking and bleeding, hair falling out and so on."

"There wasn't a thing wrong with her when they put her in cryo-stasis," said Raven, "and this appears to have been first-class prep, and recent at that. When he arrived on our operating table, Lord Vorkosigan was in much worse shape than average. To put it mildly. I suppose someone has to be better, to keep the average balanced."

"She looks like something out of a fairy tale."

"What," said m'lord, swinging one heel to tap upon a stool leg, "Snow White with just one dwarf?"

Vorlynkin reddened, an I-didn't-say-that look in his eyes.

M'lord snickered at him. "Now all we need is a prince."

"So who's t' frog?" asked Roic, secretly glad not to be alone in his fanciful impressions.

"Different fairy tale," m'lord told him kindly. "I hope."

Raven switched tubing, and the clear fluid was replaced with dark red. The ice-woman look slowly changed, the skin tone shifting through faint pinkness like a chill spring to a warmer gold-ivory, as though she was receiving a transfusion of summer. At length, Raven closed the exit line draining from her leg, sealing vein and skin with plastic bandage. Raven and Tanaka fussed about with the leads and wires and the strange cap. "Clear," Raven called, looking up to be sure his amateur audience had stepped back. The snap of the electrical stimulus was quieter than Roic had expected, but still made him recoil.

For the first time, the silent woman's chest rose, and her skin seemed suddenly not just pliable but alive. A few moments of uneven stuttering, while Tanaka watched their monitors and Raven stared narrow-eyed at his patient. His face was calm but his gloved hands, Roic noticed, were clenched. Then her lips parted on a longer indrawn breath, then another, and Raven's fists relaxed. Roic remembered to exhale before he disgraced himself by passing out, but only just.

"Got it in one," said Raven, and shut down the external pump.

M'lord's eyes squeezed closed in gratitude. Vorlynkin, transfixed, breathed, "That's astounding."

"I just love this part," Raven confided, to the air generally as far as Roic could tell. "It makes me feel quite godlike. Or at least wizardly."

M'lord's lips twitched. "Are you saying this is an ego-trip for you?"

"The best ever," agreed Raven. "I live for these moments."

"Always glad to see a man happy in his work," m'lord murmured.

Raven circled his patient's body, tapping here and there with a stylus in a pattern Roic suspected was meaningful. And very old. "We have reflexes. Peripheral nerves are firing up nicely," he reported. He returned to her head, smoothing a stray strand of hair back from her forehead in a curiously tender gesture. "Madame Sato?" he called. "Lisa?"

The eyelids fluttered, opened, squeezed shut. The lids bore the epicanthic folds of her Earth ancestry, the eyes the classic almond shape. The irises were a rich, dark brown, further reducing her resemblance to Lady Vorkosigan, whose eyes were a striking blue-gray.

"Hearing's working," Raven murmured. "Grossly, at least." And, "Lisa?" he repeated. "Are you with us yet?"

It could hardly be reassuring to the woman to open her eyes on a circle of masked faces, like bandits. Especially if the last thing she remembered were the faces of her all-but-murderers. Had they been leering? Coolly professional? Indifferent? But bandits indeed, stealing her will, her world, her life from her.

Roic leaned in. In his best reassuring guardsman's tones, he tried, "Ma'am, you're all right. Safe and alive. Rescued. Your children are both safe and secure as well. You'll get to see them soon."

Another fluttering of lids; a moan.

"And larynx," said Raven happily. "That should please you, my Lord Auditor."

"Indeed," said m'lord.

She sighed again, the tension passing out of her.

"She'll sleep for some hours, after this," said Raven. "The longer, the better."

"We'll clean her up and move her to the isolation booth," said Medtech Tanaka. "Ako, you can help with the skin treatment."

Tubes and needles were pulled away, lines coiled up, machines turned off. Roic helped shift the live woman off the procedure table onto the transfer cart. M'lord slid down from his stool, stretched his back, and leaned on his cane. "How soon till we can move her to the consulate?"

"Depends on her white blood count, and a few other things," said Raven. "But possibly as early as the day after tomorrow. You'll have to keep her quiet in one of those upstairs bedrooms for a few days."

"We can do that," said Vorlynkin.

M'lord turned his head toward the consul. "Wait, why are you here? Has Leiber shown up?"

"No, not yet. You have a sealed message from Barrayar that's arrived in the tight-room. We can't access it, so I don't know how urgent it may be." He added with reluctant honesty, "Also, I was curious how this was going. Given the need to deal with Mina and Jin." He didn't want to be blindsided again, Roic read this. Understandable.

"Ah, all right," said m'lord. "Raven, if you're on top of things here, I guess I can go back."

Raven waved assent and turned to follow the medtech and Ako, trundling his patient away. The room seemed very empty when they'd left, disconsolate and messy like the morning after a winter solstice party.

Vorlynkin blinked and rolled his shoulders, as if trying to come back into himself from somewhere far away. "That was very strange. I've never seen anyone die, but this-it was like watching time run backwards. Or something."