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 god-like.  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.