There was no body in the alcove.
Mara had braced for one. She had walked the length of the cold room toward the lit alcove with her heart going hard and her hands in fists in her coat pockets, and she had told herself, step by step, there will be a body, you will look at it, you will not look away. And there was no body.
The alcove was a recess in the wall, the size of a narrow bed, lined with frost. A cryogenic alcove, Eshel said, behind her, reading a plate on its edge: a place built to keep something cold for a long time. Its light was a single panel in its ceiling, white, steady. And in it, on a steel cradle shaped to hold a body, there was a harness.
Leather and fine wire. Like the harness in her mother’s trunk. The same pattern: straps to go over the shoulders and across the back, a flat pocket down the front, the fine bright wire woven through the leather in long diagonals. But this one was burned. The leather at one end was scorched black and cracked, and the wire there had gone black too, fused into the leather in a tangle, as though something very hot had run along it. The other end was whole.
