<em>The Store Room </em><br/><br/>Bandage crisscrossed over and under Michelle's bosom to swaddle her burned flank and hide it away in virgin white. Once Corinne's fingers had taken hers for comfort, Michelle was not inclined to let go. Her eyes followed Corinne, anxious, waiting for something, oblivious to how intensely these two women of science were instead focused on one another.<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Corinne's History</div><div class="spoiler_body">Corinne has heard the names Heinrich and Schweinfurth from the densely forested Core. It follows that a Heinfroth might hail from the same region.</div></div><br/><br/>"Are you looking for the way to tempt me?" asked Rehner. "A doctor's hands are busy, there is no time for such distraction."<br/>Rehner's eyes were green as lush summer growth in the old forest, and smiling on Corinne. She did not look away- she could not. Here was a woman confident in her superiority, convinced of averting the eyes to be a signal of weakness.<br/>"There was a woman in Gundarak. We were simple people." Rehner snipped the bandage, and played with the spool of it over and over in her hands. "She was very plain, but a good woman, a dutiful woman. I remained to patch the rebels because I loved her. It was lunacy. She belonged to another, with many happy years between them."<br/>A trail of bandage whisked by Corinne's backside, like a switch to a donkey, but there was no force to the gossamner, only a whisper. "If you must know."<br/><br/>There was little need for huddle for warmth anymore. Sopping bodies soon dried, and Rehner's lamp helped sustain the summer temperature even in such a shadowy alcove of the ship. Still, Zoe and Sage and Margaret Hotspur congregated together, and listened to the doctor's account.<br/><br/>"When one hunts wolves," said Rehner to Aloisa, "one must take care not to go too deep, or find herself racing on all fours and howling at the moon as the woods demand."<br/>At once Margaret recoiled from this with a scoff, but Rehner continued.<br/>"It is possible to pull a woman from the deep and return her to sanity. The thing is difficult. For a wolf, no, impossible. To make a woman of a wolf would break it, spirit and mind. So, I do not think there is a place for true monsters."<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Corinne's Insight</div><div class="spoiler_body">From Doctor Rehner's behavior, a number of things could be deduced by the keen of mind.<br/><br/>Between unburdening the ladies of the <em>Charlotte </em>of their nightclothes and following no protocols of privacy, the doctor was quick to reduce her patients beneath her. There seemed to be a psychosexual element to her treatment, and given her intimate attention, a keenness to visit it upon the castaways.<br/><br/>In the course of this pursuit she did not shy from causing distress nor pain, and indeed provoked it. The heart of a sadist beat in her chest, which could not be easily reconciled with her role as a healer of Saint Ezra. Doubtless she projected that hypocrisy onto Michelle with her talk of strange desires.<br/><br/>How unusual, too, that a doctor on a vessel at sea would carry nothing at all to remedy pain. It ought to be a large part of her job to dose opium and keep the crew in working form.</div></div><br/><br/><em>The Hold</em><br/><br/>Colleen pulled with only meager protest down the forbidden companionway, and into the dim underneath of the ship's hold. There was some slip to the stairs, from the sailor who had just emerged wet to the knees, but there was no standing water in the hold. Only drips on dry wood, gradually evaporating as sunlight cast yellow rays through the deck grating into dusty shadow.<br/>"Yes, Lady," Colleen deferred, and turned into Jacqueline's touch, affection her currency. "No, Lady, I won't disappoint." After a moment, she shielded her mouth and nose against a bitter chemical odor, which irritated the senses.<br/><br/>"If this is surely the necessary place for it."<br/>Colleen gauged the lay of well-balanced cargo heaved to port and starboard, and the low avenue between. Up onto the avenue's shelf she turned her eyes, in expectation the deep alcove would soon contain her. Her bare feet were restless, there on the threshold. She was willing to be fooled.<br/>"I am your cabin girl to command, Lady. I'm relieved you don't mince any words."<br/><br/>Behind the companionways, opposite that alcove, the hold ended abruptly at mizzenmast, straddled by a pair of heavy doors the likes of dungeon cells, secured with blackened smokehouse padlocks. No noise from the other side, no light through the gaps, but that chemical smell there concentrated in a miasma. Colleen avoided them rightly.<br/>"Where is your crew? Up there?"<br/><br/>Colleen tilt her face in the path of a thin sliver of light from the store room, and blinked away the dust rained by slow footsteps above. Voices, too muffled and indistinct except to lend tension. Her hand pressed back the drape of her rags, all the way to the tops of her thighs, and let a ray of light catch unblemished skin spared all the toils of the hard sailor's life, devoid even any mark of her lover.<br/>"They must be hungry, too."