"No, no, no?—"
Hands were on me. Everywhere.
They weren't gentle. They couldn't be. I was a wild animal caught in a trap, snapping and biting at the metal teeth. Fingers hooked into the collar of my oversized sweater, my armor, my shield against the world.
Rrrrip.
The sound of the wool tearing was deafening. The cool air hit my damp skin like a chemical burn, stripping away the onlything protecting me from their gaze. I gasped, arching my back, my spine bowing off the cold floor.
"Get the leggings," a third voice said. This one was different. It was rougher, darker, smelling of burnt sugar, dark chocolate, and graphite. It sounded like the scratch of charcoal on paper, gritty and addictive. "She's burning up from the inside out. The fabric is trapping the heat."
"Don't strip me!" I sobbed, kicking out. My foot connected with the graphite one, but he didn't even grunt. He just caught my calf in a grip that felt like steel wire, his fingers long, dextrous, and calloused from years of gripping a stylus. "I'm the Valedictorian! You can't do this!"
"You're dying, Tessa," the bourbon one said, his face swimming into view above me. He wasn't a security guard. He was… blonde. Golden hair, neatly styled. Piercing icy-blue eyes that assessed everything for risk. It was Anders Svinton. The Class President. He had returned to punish me for ruining his perfect schedule. "And I am not losing my investment to a fever. Simon, the pads. Now."
My leggings were dragged down. The friction of the fabric against my sensitized skin was agony. The humiliation was total. I was naked, exposed, a writhing mess of biological failure on the floor while the authorities watched.
"Applying cooling tech," the graphite one, Simon, muttered.
I braced for the pain of a blow, but what came was worse.
Something freezing, impossibly, violently cold, slapped against the inside of my thigh. Then another against my stomach, right over the cramping void of my womb. Another at the base of my throat.
Hiss.
The sensation wasn't relief. It was a shock to the system so profound my vision went white. The cooling pads, Designation-Adaptive Tech, whispered a rational corner of my dying brain,didn't just cool; they reacted. They sucked the heat out of the skin with a chemical hunger.
"Ah!Ahhh!"
My body, starved of touch for years, starved of anything but cold keys and colder screens, didn't know how to interpret the input.
The nerves fired all at once. The extreme cold registered as a burn, but the pressure? The pressure felt like hands.
The withdrawal had stripped my nerves bare. The heavy suppression I’d lived on, the Omegablock XR-9, had hollowed me out, leaving a screaming, empty void in my center. Now, that void was being shocked awake.
The spice one, Daniel, shifted his weight, his forearm pressing down across my hips to keep me from bucking the pads off.
The pressure of his arm against my lower belly didn't hurt. It grounded. It pushed against the empty, cramping ache where the heat was trying to ignite.
I stopped screaming. A low, guttural noise tore out of my throat, half sob, half moan.
"She's seizing," Simon said, his voice tight with panic. I could feel his dark gaze on me, intense and observant, cataloging every tremor. "Anders, she's twitching."
"It's the thermal shock," Anders replied, his hand pressing a cold pad firmly against my sternum. His palm was warm on top of the gel, a confusing mix of fire and ice that made my head spin. "Hold her steady."
But I wasn't seizing.
I twisted my hips, grinding my pelvis upward against Daniel's heavy forearm.
The friction sent a bolt of lightning straight down my spine. It was agony. It was ecstasy. It was the only thing in the world that felt like it might plug the hole where my dignity used to be.
"Please," I gasped, my head thrashing side to side on the concrete. The smell of rotting blackberries, old parchment, and brine coming off my skin was suffocating, thick and heavy, the scent of a library left open to a storm. "Please, it hurts. It’s so empty."
"We know," Daniel soothed, his voice a low, resonant rumble near my ear. It was the voice that launched a thousand audiobooks, designed to disarm. "The medicine is working. Just breathe."
"No!" I clawed at his shirt, gripping the soft flannel that smelled of safety. "Not that. The… theache. Push down. Harder."
I bucked my hips again, wild and desperate, seeking the pressure. I squeezed my thighs together, trapping Simon’s hand where he was trying to adjust the femoral pad.
