A Cold Legacy

She laid out the rat, gathering several vials and surgical tools from the various cabinets around the room. “No,” she said, flicking her eyes toward me. “I’m going to reanimate it. You’re going to observe and not touch anything. It isn’t a complicated procedure, but it’s a dangerous one, even with a subject so small. Now fetch that clamp, will you?”

 

 

I handed her the metal clamp, and she used it to secure several metal wires to the end of the lightning rod, then attached them to sections of the rat. Next, she inserted a syringe of murky liquid into its heart. I took in every detail with wide eyes. It wasn’t unlike my own plan for awakening the water-tank creatures: the principle difference being, of course, that those creatures had been alive in a state of stasis, and this rat was quite dead.

 

Anticipation rushed up my throat, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek. I was going to watch the impossible happen. Death, defeated.

 

“But it isn’t raining anymore,” I said. “There won’t be any lightning.”

 

“The windmill provides enough power to reanimate small creatures,” she said. “Rats, rabbits, birds. When I reattach a human’s limb, it also requires a small jolt of electricity to stimulate the dormant nerves. I’ve performed such minor procedures dozens of times. The lightning rod . . . well, there’s only one time when we would need that much power all at once.”

 

I dropped my voice. “For a body, you mean. An entire human.”

 

“Yes. The rod hasn’t been used since the professor brought Hensley back to life thirty-five years ago.”

 

I watched as she finished connecting the wires. After years of studying science out of books, I itched to do the work myself. I had to clasp my hands together.

 

She glanced up at me. “You might wish to cover your ears. They scream when they come back to life. Even the rats.”

 

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My every muscle was riveted to that little dead body on the table. Elizabeth went to the wall, where a lever and dial were attached to the electrical wiring from the windmill outside. “I warned you,” she said.

 

She flipped the lever.

 

The entire room hummed in a soft vibration, like crackling in the air before lightning strikes. I could feel electricity in the wires and in the metal inlay of the table. For a few breathless moments, nothing happened. I didn’t take my eyes from the rat. Such white fur, motionless now. Such black eyes, dulled with death.

 

Would it be very different with a human subject? Humans shared the same basic neurological systems with animals, after all. The same major nerves and synapses. It was how my father had been able to twist animals into creatures that walked and talked.

 

A spark snapped, and I jerked. Sweat broke out on my forehead as though Father was peering over my shoulder.

 

Elizabeth adjusted the dial, and electricity popped again on the wires connected to the rat. Movement caught my eye—just a flinch. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. But there was no mistaking what I had seen. There—it came again. The rat’s little paw, curling with the pulses of electricity. Suddenly I wasn’t in the tower at all. I was back in King’s College with Lucy, watching students vivisecting an unanesthetized rabbit. Its back leg had twitched just like the rat’s. Only back then my body had shaken with rage, not thrill. Those boys had been torturing that rabbit, ending its life slowly and painfully. Now, before my very eyes, Elizabeth was doing the exact opposite. Bringing a creature back to life. Righting its wrongful death. If there was pain involved—well, what was pain, in the face of new life?

 

Its body was warming, twitching back to life as the electrical currents jolted the heart. Elizabeth cranked the dial once more and the entire rat convulsed.

 

Its scream was far too human for something so small. I flinched but didn’t cover my ears. I wanted to hear that scream. I liked it. It was the scream of life fighting back into the world, the scream of the impossible finding a voice, the scream of death’s last stand before being banished back into the shadows.

 

Elizabeth lowered the lever, and the crackling in the air faded. She came to the table, where we watched the rat twitching back to life. Gently, she removed the wires and withdrew the needle from the creature’s heart. A tiny drop of crimson marred the rat’s perfect white fur.

 

Blood.

 

Or rather, life.

 

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