The preservation of Yelena's form was a meticulous, macabre art. Frederick could not allow decay to claim what he intended to reclaim. He employed a combination of techniques both archaic and revolutionary: her body was wrapped in linen soaked in a solution of salts and arsenic to halt bacterial putrefaction, while strategically placed blocks of ice, replaced daily in a sealed cold-room he had constructed, slowed cellular metabolism to a near standstill. It was a horrific parody of his first frog experiment, scaled to a devastating, human dimension. Her skin took on a waxy, alabaster pallor, and the lovely flush of life was replaced by the cool, unchanging temperature of a museum specimen. He would sometimes pause in his work, his scalpel hovering, and stare at the perfect stillness of her face. In these moments, the silence of the laboratory was absolute, broken only by the drip of melting ice and the frantic, scribbling rhythm of his own thoughts.
The next five months were a blasphemous ballet, performed in the hushed theatre of his damnation. By day, he was the master surgeon, working to repair the physical ravages of her mysterious illness. He used fine catgut and silver wire to suture weakened tissues, applied precise galvanic currents to stimulate atrophied muscles, and devised a system of pulleys and gentle pressures to prevent contractures in her limbs. He became a craftsman of the corporeal, assembling a flawless, empty biological machine. Her heart, once stilled, was coaxed into a steady, automatic rhythm by a tiny, implanted clockwork regulator of his own design a perpetual motion machine fed by her own residual metabolic energy. It ticked softly beneath her ribs, a ghostly metronome counting out a hollow time.
His true masterpiece, however, was not the body, but the Aetheric Projector. If the Resonator was a listener, a stethoscope pressed to the chest of the soul, the Projector was a shouter, a cannon designed to fire a specific, spiritual payload. It dominated the far end of the laboratory a monstrous sculpture of ambition and terror. A central Tesla like coil, taller than a man, was wound with miles of hair-thin, silver plated wire. It was surrounded by banks of Leyden jars, glass vessels filled with swirling, luminous fluids that glowed with a sickly, captive light. Thick, rubber coated cables snaked across the floor like veins, connecting it to a vast bank of chemical batteries that hummed with latent power. Its purpose was singular: to generate and shape a field of immense bio electromagnetic energy, tuned to the exact frequency and harmonic signature he had mathematically derived from Yelena's Release. It was not a tool for healing, but for a forced metaphysical insertion an attempt to reboot the conductor, to re install the stolen software of the soul.
The night of the attempt was a sacrament of blasphemy. The air grew thick with the scent of ozone, sharp and metallic, as he powered the sequence. Arcs of blue-white electricity, like captive lightning, danced between the Projector's terminals with a sound like tearing silk. The strange, coppery sweetness he now recognized as ionized blood and charged ether filled his nostrils. For hours, there was nothing but this storm of his own making. He would pulse the sequenced energy, watching the body on the slab through the crackling air, then consult the Resonator for any change in the ambient field. Nothing. Only the inert, awful stillness. Frederick, hollow eyed and trembling not from cold but from a bone deep exhaustion of spirit, repeated the sequence. Again. And again. He became a machine himself, his hope a fading coal.
As a grim, grey dawn began to bleed at the edges of the lab's blackout curtains, staining the darkness a hopeless purple, he slumped forward onto his console. Despair, a cold and heavy liquid, filled his veins. It was over. He had bridged every gap but the final, essential one. He was a master of the vessel, but the tenant was forever gone.
Then, a finger twitched.
It was a minute, spasmodic curl of the index finger on her left hand. A galvanic reflex, he told himself, a random firing of nerves stimulated by the residual energy in the air. A phantom. He stared, unbreathing.
Then, her chest rose. Not with the gentle, autonomic rhythm his clockwork regulator produced, but with a sudden, shuddering, intentional inhalationva gasp that ripped through the silent laboratory. It was the sound of a vacuum being filled.
Her eyelids fluttered open.
Elation, pure and volcanic, erupted in Frederick's heart. It was a feeling so vast it was pain, a geyser of triumph that scalded him from within. He had done it. He had spanned the unspanable gulf, solved the final equation. A sob choked in his throat as he stumbled from behind the console, the world narrowing to the form on the slab. He leaned over her, tears finally blurring his vision, obscuring the details he was too ecstatic to see. He reached a trembling hand to brush a strand of hair from her waxen forehead. "Yelena?" he breathed, the word a prayer and a victory cry.
The eyes that slowly turned to meet his were her perfect, crystalline blue. But they were windows to an empty house. There was no recognition, no dawning curiosity, no spark of love, not even the fear he had grown accustomed to seeing in his other subjects. They were the eyes of his first frog moist, functioning orbs that perceived light and shadow but comprehended nothing. They held no history, no memory of sunlit gardens or shared whispers in the dark. They were utterly, profoundly void.
A low, guttural sound emerged from her throat, a wet vibration of air through uncoordinated vocal cords. It was not a word, but a noise of pure, confused biological distress. Her limbs began to move, but with the jerky, uncoordinated spasms of a newborn, yet trapped in an adult's weakened frame. The movements were aimless, pathetic a hand flopping against the restraint, a leg bending at the knee only to stiffen again. She was a blank slate, a consciousness factory-reset to a pre-installation state. He had not resurrected Yelena. He had not retrieved the soul. He had merely jump-started the organic hardware, accidentally imbuing it with the basest, most rudimentary form of cellular awareness an awareness now trapped in a horrifying, inappropriate vessel, screaming silently behind those familiar blue eyes.
The horror of his success crashed down upon him, a wave of icy clarity that extinguished the volcanic elation in an instant. This was his masterpiece. This mewling, empty thing was the fruit of his genius, the answer to his life's question. A profound and devastating wrongness filled the room, thicker than the ozone.
It was in this moment of absolute, soul crushing realization that the door to his laboratory shattered inwards.
The explosion of splintering oak was a violent punctuation to his silent horror. The King's guards, tipped off by a terrified assistant whose conscience had finally overridden his awe, flooded the room. They did not see a genius at the pinnacle of discovery. They saw a dungeon of nightmare: the monstrous, sparking Projector casting hellish shadows; the pale, moving body on the slab, its movements all wrong; the banks of recorded glass plates, each neatly labeled with the names of the dead and missing a library of stolen deaths. Their faces, hardened by duty, contorted in primal revulsion. They saw not a philosopher, but a monster who had rummaged in God's own trash heap.
He offered no resistance as they seized him, his arms pinned roughly behind his back. He did not hear their shouted accusations of witchcraft and abomination. His gaze was locked on the slab, on the thing that had been Yelena, which now let out a soft, continuous mewl of confusion, a sound like a wounded kitten, lost and alone in the corner of the ruin he had made. They dragged him from the wreckage of his own dreams, and the last thing he heard as he was forced into the dawn's bleak light was not the shouts of men, but that small, helpless, and utterly empty sound.