she had derived at great cost some forgotten way of preserving and puppeting the bodies. She had found a nasty, forbidden little book in the great Ninth repositories of nasty, forbidden little books, and all the Houses would have had a collective aneurysm if they knew she’d even read it. She hadn’t executed it very well—her parents were fine from the shoulders up, but from the shoulders down they were bad—though she had, admittedly, been ten.
