Chapter 107: Too Much Feeling

"I asked for my thumb, not every shame I ever stored under my ribs."

Corra Pell said it from the temple wash room floor with both arms wrapped around herself and her dress unlaced to the waist because fabric against her skin had become unbearable. She was thirty-two, a seamstress with ink stains on her fingers, narrow shoulders, and a scarred right thumb she had burned numb years ago on a tailor's iron. She had volunteered after Darel's partial success, signed every line, eaten, mapped, and agreed to no sexual testing.

Now she was sweating through her shift while Isolde knelt three feet away, hands visible, and Lina felt the cost of success settle like wet wool on her tongue.

"Where are you?" Isolde asked.

"Wash room. Temple. Thirty-two. Corra. I hate everyone kindly."

"Tell me what you feel."

"Everything. My thumb, yes. The floor through my knees. The air touching my nipples. My old apprenticeship room. Mistress Halen saying good girls do not squirm when men come for fittings. My own wanting from when I was sixteen and thought wanting made me dirty. I agreed to thumb. I did not agree to that room."

Tamsin, standing by the door, went still in the way Lina recognized as anger being leashed before it bit the wrong person. "Forbidden memory bleed."

Corra laughed, ragged. "Name it worse. It deserves worse."

Lina kept her voice low. "The dose was one drop weaker than Darel's."

"Bodies are not cups," Isolde said. "Do not hide behind measures."

The words hit and stayed. Lina wrote them immediately because shame without use became rot.

Corra pressed her palms to her thighs and gasped. "I am wet. I hate saying that. I am wet and frightened and I want someone to put weight on me, but if anyone touches me I will bite until I taste blood."

"No touch," Isolde said. "Arousal is present. No touch is the rule."

"I know the rule. My body does not care."

Tamsin stepped into Corra's line of sight without approaching. "Bodies care slowly. That is why mouths work faster. Say what you want that is allowed."

Corra's breath hitched. "Cool cloth. Not on breasts. Back of neck. I want the lacing off my dress because it feels like rope. I want someone to say Mistress Halen was a dried-up coward who measured girls with dirty eyes."

Old Pero's voice came from the hallway, where he had been delivering broth and pretending not to guard the door. "Mistress Halen was a dried-up coward who measured girls with dirty eyes."

Corra burst into a laugh that became a sob. "Who is that?"

"Kitchen," Tamsin said. "Occasionally a public service."

With Corra's consent, Isolde loosened the dress from behind, touching fabric only. Lina soaked a cloth in cool lavender water and handed it to Tamsin, who handed it to Isolde, because every extra step reminded the room that urgency did not own them. Isolde placed the cloth at the back of Corra's neck. Corra moaned, full and sexual and miserable.

"Sound not consent," Corra said immediately, teeth clenched.

"Heard," Lina said.

Corra dug her fingers into the floor rushes. "I want to put my own hand between my legs because the feeling is too loud. I also know if I do, I will not know whether I chose it or the dose shoved me there. That is the part I hate. I used to sew through needle pricks because numbness made me useful. Now my thumb is alive and every other part of me wants payment for years of quiet."

Isolde accepted that with a careful nod. "Self-touch is not forbidden forever. It is forbidden until choice is louder than flood."

"How long does that take?"

"Sometimes minutes. Sometimes years. Today we do not guess with your body."

Tamsin crouched near the door, far enough to remain outside the care circle. "Do you want pressure that is not touch? Wall behind your back? Wrapped blanket? You said weight. We can give weight without a person using you."

Corra considered that through shaking breaths. "Wall. Blanket over shoulders. Not tight."

Mara brought the heaviest wool blanket from the hall. Isolde asked again before laying it around Corra's shoulders. Corra leaned back against the wall and groaned, this time less sexual, more relieved.

"That," she said. "That is closer to what I wanted than a hand."

The Mire Batch had restored her thumb. That part was undeniable. Corra could feel the scarred pad when she rubbed it against linen. But the return had not stopped at injury. It had flooded the roads around the injury, waking old shame and adolescent desire and the memory of being looked at like cloth on a table.

Mara arrived with the confessional cloth Isolde had described but not yet built: a plain gray sheet hung from a wooden frame, open at the bottom, wide enough to make a private corner without closing a door. "This is temporary," Mara said. "Ugly, but useful."

"Ugly is fine," Corra said. "Pretty makes me feel like I owe someone grace."

They gave her the corner. Corra sat behind it and spoke through the cloth. That helped more than Lina expected. The cloth let her be heard without being watched. Desire became less performative when no one could use her face.

"I touched myself after fittings," Corra said after a while, voice small but clear. "Not because I wanted them. Because being looked at woke me and I hated being alone with that. I thought the wanting proved they had taken something."

Isolde sat outside the cloth. "Wanting proves you had a body. Harm proves someone mishandled it. They are not the same ledger."

Corra cried again, softer.

Lina pressed her nails into her own palm. She wanted to apologize until apology became useful. It would not. Not yet.

"I need this recorded," Corra said. "Not my name."

"Initials only," Tamsin said.

"No, my rule. Write this: returning sensation can return the shame that grew around its absence. If you sell the first without room for the second, you are selling a trap."

Lina wrote every word.

Corra did not take a second dose. She did not touch herself. She did not let anyone touch her body beyond cloth and practical care. After bread, cooling breath, and an hour of ugly honesty, she could wear her dress again.

Before she laced it, she asked for the mirror to be turned around.

"I am not ready to watch my face decide what today means," she said.

Lina turned the mirror herself. The back was plain wood with a crack down one side. Corra looked at that instead while fastening the bodice.

"Better," Corra said. "Wood does not ask me to look brave."

Tamsin made a note. "No mandatory mirrors in care rooms."

"Gods, yes. If a woman is falling apart, do not hand her an audience shaped like her own face."

At the door, she looked at Lina. "My thumb works."

"I am glad," Lina said carefully.

"I am too. I also hate you a little today."

"You may."

"That makes me like you less cheaply."

When she left with Mara, Tamsin stayed behind. She waited until the hall was empty before speaking.

"Your cure has teeth."

Lina nodded once, already measuring the consequence. "I felt them."

"No. You saw them. Feeling comes when you stop trying to file them into a product."

Lina closed the ledger slowly. "Then we build the room before the bottle."

Isolde touched the gray cloth. "Yes. Before the next dose."

Lina looked at the temporary cloth, the loosened dress hooks on the floor, the cooling bowl gone cloudy from use. "I wanted to help Darel and built a door under Corra."

"No," Isolde said. "You opened a door without knowing the floor changed underneath it. Then you stopped walking and listened when someone fell. That is not innocence, but it is better than defense."

Tamsin leaned against the wall, tired and blunt. "Also, no more volunteers because they have tidy injuries. Corra's thumb looked simple. It was attached to a whole woman. We apparently need that written down because inventors like pretending thumbs travel alone."

Lina wrote: No isolated injuries. Every injury belongs to a life.

Corra, from the hall, called back, "And some lives are rude."

"Rudeness included," Lina added.

Isolde took the slate and underlined the last rule. "This also means no one qualifies for care by being pleasant. Flooded people may curse, refuse gratitude, and change their minds. Helpers who need to be liked should carry soup, not authority."

Old Pero, still in the hall, said, "Soup accepts imperfect affection."

Corra answered, "Then soup may be the only holy thing in this building."

"Finally," Old Pero said. "Theology improves when it admits lunch and stops pretending stomachs are footnotes in sacred ink forever, obviously."

The cloth moved though there was no wind, as if the room had exhaled through it.