Freeing the six semi-independent testers around the black bronze pillar was not accomplished in a single dramatic hour. It was a long, cold marathon of careful medicine that stretched across the entire night of Day 5 and throughout the daylight hours of Day 6.
Because each of the six youths—Sela on couch six, seventeen-year-old Borin on couch five, fifteen-year-old Dren on couch four, sixteen-year-old Kori on couch three, fourteen-year-old Yul on couch two, and seventeen-year-old Neth on couch one—had been coupled to the summit pillar for weeks, no two of them had the exact same pulse interval or the exact same pattern of spirit vein bruising.
If Mina had tried to rush them off the wire on a fixed factory schedule—say, one child every twenty minutes—she would have been repeating the Aperture Court’s own sin in reverse. That forced exhausted human bodies to conform to a rescuer’s impatience.
Instead, she gave each child the exact hours their pulse needed.
Sela came off couch six late on the afternoon of Day 5 and was bundled onto a warm birch litter beside Halin and Maren. Then, Mina spent three hours under the lantern light of the fifth night warming seventeen-year-old Borin’s stiffened shoulder channels with ginger healing wraps and shallow copper boundary needles before touching his collar pin.
