A quenched heart never woke all at once. It took load in stages.
Notebook II was clear about it, and Orison, when Mara asked, agreed: bring the loads on one at a time, smallest first, and hold each until the heart has settled before you bring on the next. A heart given all its loads at once will choke on them. So when the quench was done, and Sera had let go of the brake and taken the rescue line back from Lisan, and the white light had faded from the cradle to a dull glow, Mara stayed in the cradle with the rests at shoulder and hip and knee, and her right hand on the cradle’s load panel, a set of six levers Orison had unlocked for her, one for each channel, and her left arm hanging on the rail where she could see it and not feel it.
“First step,” she said. “Dock and weather. The smallest.”
She eased the sixth lever. The sixth channel opened to its load: the one ring and its one ship and its broken crane, the weather engines running at a quarter. Through the cradle she felt the heart take it. A slight change in the chord. A heaviness, settling.
