The flatline didn't stop.
It climbed. Jagged, violent, wrong. Like a machine that had forgotten the rules of what a heartbeat was supposed to look like and was making it up as it went.
Koshva stood there, staring at the monitor. He'd expected nothing. He'd half-expected an explosion. He had not expected this. This felt worse somehow, more real, more irreversible.
"That's not a normal revival signature," Wrench said. She was already at her wrist display, fingers moving fast. "That's not even close to normal."
"Define normal," Koshva said.
"Not that."
Pod 7 was doing the same thing. Jax's flatline had turned into something that looked less like a heartbeat and more like a seismic reading. Both pods were shaking slightly, a fine vibration that Koshva felt in his back teeth before he heard it.
Vance hadn't moved from the doorway. He was watching the pods with the expression of a man watching a chess game he already knew the outcome of. Interested, but not surprised.
Riko hadn't taken his eyes off Vance's hands.
"We need to go," Wrench said.
"We can't just leave them," Koshva said.
"The diagnostic team has nine minutes. We absolutely can just leave them."
"They're waking up."
"They're having a catastrophic biological event and we used a Class 4 catalyst on two beings it was not designed for. There's a difference." She grabbed his arm. "We go. Now. We come back when it's safe."
"And him?" Koshva jerked his chin toward Vance.
Vance looked at them both. That small, pleasant smile had returned. "I didn't see anything," he said simply. "I was never here. Neither were you." His white eyes drifted back to Pod 12. "Though I would very much like to be here when he opens his eyes."
"Why," Riko said. It wasn't a question. His voice was flat and hard in a way that didn't belong to a twelve year old.
Vance looked at him. Really looked, the way his eyes moved when they were doing something other than pretending to be normal eyes. He studied Riko for a moment with that quiet, cataloguing attention.
"Because I've never seen a god wake up before," he said. "Have you?"
Riko said nothing. He held Vance's gaze for three full seconds, which was two more than most grown men managed.
Then Wrench physically pulled them both out of the room.
They waited in the service tunnel behind the medical wing. Wrench had looped the diagnostic team's comms feed through her wrist display so they could listen. Koshva sat with his back against the cold wall. Riko sat across from him, knees pulled up, saying nothing.
The comms were a mess of confused technical language. Words like 'spontaneous cellular regeneration' and 'unregistered energy surge' and, once, from someone who sounded much younger than their rank suggested, 'what the hell is that.'
"It's working," Wrench said. She didn't sound happy about it. She sounded the way people sound when something works exactly as they feared it might.
"Both of them?" Koshva asked.
"Both signatures are climbing. Jax first, slower. Your guy second, faster." She pulled up two energy readouts on her display. Jax's was a steady, climbing line. Dokja's was not a line. It was a shape that kept changing, like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. "The catalyst is interacting differently with each of them. Jax is a standard reboot. Clean, linear."
"And Dokja?"
Wrench stared at her display for a moment. "You know how I said using a Class 4 catalyst on a Class 2 Deviation was like trying to restart a patient's heart with the defibrillator pads you use on a small child?"
"Yes."
"I was wrong about what would happen. I assumed it would be too weak. That we'd get a flicker and nothing else." She turned the display to face him. The energy signature for Pod 12 was now doing something that the display's graph clearly wasn't designed to represent. The line had gone vertical. "It wasn't too weak. It was too small. The catalyst dissolved on contact with his divine essence. It didn't restart him. It fed him. Like throwing a match into a fuel tank."
Koshva looked at the graph. "Is that bad?"
"I genuinely don't know," Wrench said, which from her was more alarming than any answer she could have given.
A burst of noise from the comms. Someone in the morgue was shouting now, not in panic, but in the clipped, urgent tones of someone trying very hard not to panic. 'Pod 12 is showing full neurological activity. Full. Not partial. Repeat, full neurological function on a body that was declared biologically terminated six hours ago.'
A pause.
'Also the pod is cracking.'
Koshva was on his feet.
"Don't," Wrench said.
"The pod is cracking."
"I know."
"He's going to wake up in a room full of Authority medical staff."
"I know."
"They're going to immediately re-classify and re-contain him."
"I know that too," Wrench said, completely calm in the way that meant she had already calculated every outcome and found all of them equally terrible. "Which is why we're going to wait exactly four more minutes until the shift change pulls two of the three staff in that wing, and then we're going in through the maintenance access behind Pod 12, and we are getting him out before he does something catastrophic."
"Four minutes," Koshva repeated.
"Four minutes."
Riko spoke for the first time since the morgue. "He's already awake."
They both looked at him.
"How do you know that?" Wrench asked.
Riko pointed at the comms feed on her wrist. The shouting had stopped. The corridor outside the morgue had gone very, very quiet.
Then, from somewhere deep inside the medical wing, muffled through three walls and a sealed door, came a voice. Familiar, hoarse, and carrying the specific energy of a man who had just woken up somewhere deeply inconvenient and was already forming an opinion about it.
"...is anyone going to tell me why I'm in a bag."
Koshva put his face in his hands.
"Three minutes," Wrench said. "We do this in three minutes."