Violet Harmon's clone body lay still inside the incubation chamber. The girl's skin was deathly pale, without a trace of color.
"How are you feeling, Miss Harmon?" Bella asked through the glass of the chamber.
Having grown alongside the clone body, the bond between Violet's soul and the physical form had deepened considerably—a significant advantage for gaining control of the body. But because the clone was still in a dormant state, her response time was several beats slower than normal.
After a long pause, the little ghost's voice finally drifted out: "Comfortable... sleepy..."
Bella's tone hardened a fraction. "Listen carefully. To keep your soul and body balanced at the right equilibrium, I need to activate the clone body now. If you keep sleeping, the synchronization rate will climb even higher, but the one who wakes up might not be you anymore."
What Bella called clone resurrection was a far cry from true resurrection. At best, it was a form of possession that married science to sorcery.
"Miss Harmon, get ready. I'm starting. Step one: you need to rebuild the connection between your soul and the heart and brain. Listen to my voice. There's a lake in front of you now. The water is cool, and because of the light, a little blinding. Reach out your hand. Touch the surface. Feel how cold it is..."
Bella's mental suggestion was leagues beyond any hypnosis technique used on Earth. After a few rounds of guided imagery, the spectral glow belonging to the ghost's soul began to be absorbed by the body. A full year of sleeping together had pushed their synchronization far above what any ordinary possession could achieve.
"Good. Miss Harmon, step one is complete. You've done well. At this point, technically speaking, you're already alive again. Now we move to step two. You need to breathe the way humans do. You need to maintain a steady rhythm, because I'd rather not watch you suffocate yourself."
This was the hardest part. When ghosts first died, they struggled with everything—walking through walls, having no need for food, the gnawing emptiness. By the time they'd fully adapted to all of that, returning to a human body meant adapting all over again.
The process was maddening. Bella and Root watched as the little ghost's breathing pattern lurched like a roller coaster—surging up, plunging down. She'd clearly forgotten to breathe, held it until she nearly suffocated, then gasped in huge desperate lungfuls to compensate.
"Will Shaw have to go through all this too?" Root asked from the sidelines.
"Yes, though Shaw was an elite field agent. Her control over her own body should be well above Violet's. But she'll still need time to adjust—breathing has to become an automatic reflex again before anything else."
It took the better part of a day for the little ghost Violet Harmon to remaster the simple act of breathing.
Bella moved on to the final step. "Miss Harmon, the only memories inside the clone body should be fragments from your life before death. They're residual imprints the body carried on its own. Don't resist them. I'm going to release the memory region of the clone body now, and I need you to accept those memories back. Ready? Ten, nine, eight... begin."
She lifted the psionic lock on the clone body's memory cortex.
Memories, in many ways, were the sum total of a person—personality, habits, preferences, values, all encoded within them.
And a ghost's perception was fundamentally different from a human's. The line between life and death, the boundary between before and after—these things looked entirely different from the other side.
Now Bella opened the floodgates, and two sets of identical memories, recorded from two utterly different angles, began to merge.
Being bullied at school. The screaming matches at home. Her mother's bitter recriminations. Her father's affair. Her own decision to end it all. Fragment after fragment of her living days poured into Violet Harmon's mind. She already knew every single one of these memories—her soul carried them all—but experiencing them again from a new angle, reliving them fresh, was enough to break her heart all over again. The grief, the despair, the devastation hit her with full force.
Root watched the little ghost's reactions intently. Seeing Violet writhing in pain inside the life-support apparatus, tears streaming, she couldn't help asking, "We're just going to stand here? Shouldn't we do something?"
Bella thought about it for a long time before finally shaking her head. "Memory is a heavy thing. You don't honestly believe that being alive means being happy every single day, do you? Right now, she has to get through this on her own."
Violet Harmon's life experience hadn't been particularly complicated. Strip away the painful parts, and after a night of integration, she was back to normal.
...
"This is what you call normal? Shaw isn't going to end up like this too, is she?" Bella and Root stared in speechless bewilderment at Violet Harmon, who had been kneeling on the floor in prayer nonstop, thanking the Lord for saving her life.
The devotion on her face was absolute. Her fair, clean features radiated a kind of luminance—something neither Bella the psion nor Root the killer-slash-hacker possessed. That luminance was called faith.
She kept reciting scripture, palms pressed together, kneeling motionless on the ground, and Bella could only stare in blank confusion.
Wasn't I the one who saved you? What does God have to do with any of this?
Bella pulled up the experiment data and combed through the entire resurrection protocol. Nothing out of the ordinary. Had Violet been a devout believer before she died?
She didn't know enough about the little ghost's past to judge whether this was a side effect of resurrection or an extreme personality trait surfacing under intense stimulus.
Bella grew hesitant. Her relationship with Shaw was considerably closer. If this clone resurrection process had side effects, it would have to be put on hold.
She brought in several doctors and scientists to investigate the issue, but the next day, an even more explosive piece of news left her stunned.
"Violet is gone? What do you mean, gone?" she demanded of the female security guard outside the ward.
The guard, terrified of losing her job at Weyland, stammered through a rambling, disjointed account. The gist of it was simple: Violet Harmon had vanished. Without a sound, without a trace.
Weyland soldiers combed every inch of the island. Nothing.
"She left the island?" Bella cast a divination, and this time the answer came back: the subject had indeed departed.
Had Violet Harmon awakened some kind of teleportation ability after coming back from the dead?
Repeated use of the Time Stone had elevated Bella's understanding of time well beyond its former level. Practice, in many cases, outweighed theory. She no longer had the Time Stone in hand, but she could use the spell of the same name that the Ancient One had taught her—the Eye of Agamotto—to observe the past and future within a localized area.
She closed her eyes and searched. Moments later they snapped open, and she cursed under her breath. "I should have known. It was an angel."
Following the faint trail of holy energy, she gave chase through a series of portals.
When she stepped out of the last one, she found herself face to face with a middle-aged man dressed as a priest. He regarded her with a blank expression. She studied him right back, trying to place him.
"You're... oh! No wonder you looked familiar. Castiel? You really are Heaven's eager little point man, aren't you? Another new body this time?"
Bella glanced at their surroundings. Not far off stood a monastery. "Looks like you're headed in there. What is that place?"
Castiel's voice was flat. "Saint Carta Monastery, in Romania."