The gateway logs came on the twenty-seventh of October, at 4:15 in the afternoon, in a zip file eleven megabytes long, under a cover email from Ferris that said only Per your diligence request no. 41. Regards.

Lea had written request no. 41 herself, on Sofia’s desk, on the night after the glass room. She’d buried it in a list of sixty, between insurance certificates (product liability) and lease, warehouse, Unit 4, where she knew from twelve years of experience that the eye slid fastest.

41. Gateway audit logs, HCP-2 program L-01, January 1 through September 8: all access events, all exports, all certifications, with user IDs.

Nobody at Halo had looked twice. Why would they? It was confirmatory diligence. The purchaser owned the program’s data now, under Condition Two. It was the purchaser’s own history it was asking for.

She opened the zip at Sofia’s desk at a quarter to five, while Sofia did spelling homework at the kitchen table downstairs and sang the words under her breath, and Lea read logs the way she’d once read the folder: by what they proved.

It took her forty minutes.

Most of it was noise. Hundreds of thousands of lines. Sensor heartbeats every thirty seconds. Telemetry uploads. Firmware checks. A.MADDOX — view — live. A.MADDOX — view — live. A.MADDOX — view — live, every few minutes, every day, for eight months, at two in the morning and at seven and during board meetings and, once, in May, every ninety seconds for six hours on a Sunday, which Lea looked at for a long time before she remembered that it was the day of Luca’s.

She made herself go on.

She filtered for exports. There were forty-one. She almost laughed. Then she didn’t.

Export — audio — necklace module — transcript (auto) — user: P.RAMAN — destination: local.

The first was in January. The twelfth. The week after the five days. Two minutes of audio from the necklace, transcribed by the gateway’s own speech engine, exported to a local machine by the user P.RAMAN.

Then another in February. Two in March. Then, from April — from the week Pauline had first walked into the building in green suede pumps — one every few days. Each one a transcript. Each one a different moment of Lea’s life that Lea had spoken aloud, believing no one heard it. Her mother on the phone. Dana at Luca’s. Marcus Bell in August, telling her about her own money.

Destination: local. Then, from the twenty-third of August, a new destination.

Destination: VERITY-DILIGENCE-OBS-01.

The observer channel. The one Lea had drafted the terms for herself in Schedule 5.3. Read-only. Telemetry only. The one that should have carried her heart rate and her temperature and her settings and nothing else, to a woman in green who would never touch her.

Audio had gone down it. Every day. From the morning of the collar until 03:41 on the eighth of September, when Dana’s bolt cutters went through the hinge.

And then, at the very bottom of the filtered list, one more line, not an export at all.

Certification — access matrix (collar module, v4.0 co-administration) — “Audio channel excluded at gateway: confirmed.” — user: P.RAMAN — 18 Aug.

Priya reviewed the access matrix last week and signed off, Abby had written, on the day of the collar. Audio is excluded at the gateway. Priya’s signature is on it.

Lea sat back in Sofia’s chair.

Downstairs, Sofia sang n-e-c-e-s-s-a-r-y, and got it right, and Rob said Nice.

Abby isn’t the only person in her company who keeps things.

She didn’t tell Nadia that night. She didn’t tell Daniel. She printed four pages — the certification, the first export, the first export to the observer channel, the last — on Dana’s printer in the laundry room, and numbered them LC-0413 to LC-0416, and put them in the back of the folder.

Then she asked Teresa, by email, to book her a room at Halo for the following afternoon. One specific room. She gave Teresa the reason she’d give a court: A diligence interview with a member of the engineering team, to be conducted privately.

Teresa booked it. Teresa didn’t ask why that room. Teresa had stopped asking Lea anything at all.

The observation room behind the lab was exactly as she remembered it. Black carpet. Black walls. The narrow shelf under the window, and the two stools. The intercom panel by the door, with its small dark switch. Through the one-way glass, the lab: bright, white, empty. Both tables gone back to wherever tables went. The lamp on its arm, folded up against the ceiling.

Lea sat on the stool she’d sat on in June. She put the folder on the shelf where she’d put the clipboard. She left the lights off. The only light came through the glass, from the empty bright room on the other side, the way it had come through on the morning of the fitting, and it lay on her hands.

Priya came in at 3:00 exactly.

She stopped in the doorway when she saw the room. Lea watched her stop. Watched her look at the black walls and the shelf and the glass, and understand where she was, and why she’d been brought here instead of a conference room, and then make her face do nothing, the way she’d made it do nothing on the eighth of October at the console while Anand said Not this one.

“Ms. Calloway.”

“Close the door, please, Priya.”

Priya closed it. She didn’t sit. There was another stool. She looked at it and stood beside it.

“You were here,” said Lea. “In June. Weren’t you. Not in this room — at the console, out there. You ran the telemetry on him. You ran the telemetry on me, through the glass. You had both of us on one screen.”

“Yes.”

“Did you watch us? Or the screen?”

Priya didn’t answer.

Lea opened the folder and took out four sheets of paper and laid them on the shelf in a row, in the light from the glass, the way she’d laid out the counter.

Priya didn’t look down at them. She didn’t need to. Lea watched her not need to.

“Forty-one exports,” said Lea. “Starting January twelfth. The certification on the eighteenth of August. Audio to Verity’s observer channel from the twenty-third of August until the cutting tool.” She kept her voice exactly as level as it had been in Daniel’s glass room. “And the folder. The notes. Abby’s laptop at the long kitchen table — you’ve been in the house. Twice, for firmware. You’d have needed eleven minutes with it. You’d have needed fewer.”

“Six,” said Priya.

It was the first thing she’d said that wasn’t yes or Ms. Calloway. Her voice was perfectly flat.

“Six minutes,” she said again. “In July. The Saturday before your sister came to dinner. She wanted the table firmware updated before anyone was in the house, so I came up the bluff with a toolkit at ten in the morning. You were both on the terrace. I was in the back room, which was true. The laptop was on the long kitchen table on my way out. Her password is the date she founded the company. It always was.” Priya looked at the glass. “I copied the notes folder to a drive in six minutes. You came in for coffee once and walked right past me.”

Lea remembered the Saturday. The terrace in the sun, Abby going over the seating for the dinner. Priya in the hall on her way out, in a Halo fleece, with a toolkit, saying All done, Ms. Calloway, just a patch, and Lea, kneeling to tie her shoe because the bar made it hard, saying Thank you, Priya without looking up.

“Why,” said Lea.

Priya was quiet for a long time.

“I own the stop,” she said finally.

Lea waited.

“That’s what she told everyone. On the stage. In the suite. To Anand. To you. Priya owns the stop. It’s in the demo protocol; it’s in the consent form; it’s in every slide deck we’ve ever shown Verity. An independent engineer monitors vitals and owns the stop.” Priya’s flat voice didn’t change. “I’ve stood behind you for a year with my hand on that stop. On the stage. In the suite. At the fitting. On the eighth. I’ve watched your heart rate go to one fifty-two and your sats go to ninety-four and your skin conductance go off the chart, and I’ve stood there with my hand on it. And I’ve never once been allowed to use it. Not once. Because you never needed it. Because she never let it get that far. Because she’s careful.” A pause. “She’s very careful. She’s the most careful person I’ve ever met. She was careful with you the way you’re careful with a very expensive instrument.”

“And Pauline?”

“Pauline asked me what I wanted.”

Lea sat very still on the stool.

“In April. In the lobby. After her first meeting. She stopped by the console in the lab — she said she’d taken a wrong turn — and she looked at the screen, at your line, for exactly one second, and then she looked at me and said, You must know her better than anyone. And I said yes. Because I do.” Priya’s eyes came back from the glass to Lea’s face. “I know your body better than anyone alive except Abby. I know your resting heart rate. I know how many seconds before an edge your skin conductance turns. I know what you sound like at three in the morning in the hood. I know when you’re lying in a report. I’ve known for a year. Nobody ever asked me what any of it was like.”

“And she asked.”

“She asked what I wanted,” said Priya. “And I told her.”

“What did you tell her?”

Priya looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked through the glass, at the empty lab. At the place on the floor where the left-hand table had stood on the eighth of October, two metres from Lea’s.

“One of my own,” said Priya.

Lea didn’t say anything for a while.

She sat on the stool in the dark observation room with the four sheets on the shelf and the light from the empty lab on her hands, and she looked at Priya Raman. Thirty-one. Careful. Good at her job. Who’d stood behind her on a stage for thirty-four minutes with her hand on a stop she was never allowed to press. Who had listened to her at three in the morning in the hood, saying things Lea had no memory of saying, and transcribed them, and sent them to Pauline Ward, because Pauline Ward had asked her what she wanted.

One of my own.

Lea had stood at the end of a long pale table a month ago and said I am the only person in this room who gets to decide who buys me. She’d meant it. She’d stood there with every cell in her body pulling toward the carpet, and stayed standing, and called it holding.

She thought: I’d have done it too. If someone had asked her. If someone had looked at her for one second in a lobby and said You must know her better than anyone, and meant it, and asked her what she wanted.

She thought: Somebody did. On a terrace. With a glass of wine.

“Craig,” she said.

Priya didn’t answer.

“She promised you Craig. After the sale. Verity’s keyholder rights on HCM-2 transfer with the program, and she’d see to it that they went to you.” Lea watched Priya’s face. “Didn’t she.”

“She said,” said Priya, very precisely, “that when this was over, M-10 would need a keyholder at Halo, and that she couldn’t imagine anyone better qualified.”

Pauline’s exact words. Lea could hear them in Pauline’s pleasant voice. I can’t imagine anyone better qualified. Every word true. Not one of them a promise.

“She hasn’t promised you anything,” said Lea.

For the first time, Priya’s face moved.

“Are you going to tell Abby?” said Priya.

“No.”

Priya looked at her.

“I’m going to tell the board,” said Lea. “On the thirteenth of November. At closing. In the room. With you there.” She gathered the four sheets off the shelf, one by one, and squared them, and put them back in the folder. “Until then you’re going to do your job. You’re going to come to work, and run telemetry on every participant except one, and you’re not going to export anything to anyone. You’re not going to speak to Pauline Ward, or Hollis Grant, or anyone at Verity. If you do, I’ll know.” She closed the folder. “You know how I’ll know. You built half of it.”

“And on the thirteenth?”

“On the thirteenth,” said Lea, “you’ll find out what you want.”

She drove home in Dana’s car with the folder on the passenger seat.

Halfway down the expressway, at 4:40, she needed to pee. She took the pharmacy phone out of the cup holder at a red light and typed Please in the box and sent it, and drove on with the pressure building low against the flange, and the folder beside her, and Priya’s flat voice in her head. I know when you’re lying in a report.

Twenty-two minutes. She was in Dana’s driveway with her knees pressed as close together as the stubs would let them, gripping the wheel, when the phone lit.

Approved.

She sat in the car for a moment longer before she went in, breathing.

Somebody she’d never meet had made her wait twenty-two minutes. She didn’t know who. She didn’t know if they’d been in a meeting, or asleep, or watching the word pending and taking their time. She’d never know.

She’d asked for that. She’d written it in. She sat in her sister’s car and understood that she’d done to herself exactly what Priya had wanted to do to someone, and that the only difference was that she’d put her own name at the bottom of it.

That night she lay under her grandmother’s quilt with her knees apart and touched herself, for the first time since the eighth.

She’d stopped trying after the nineteenth time. She’d stopped after she’d learned there was no one at the other end. But there was, now. And the thing at the top of her had been told no — not by Abby, not by a line or a woman in another city, but by her own thumb, on a table, with nothing stopping her.

She wanted to know what that felt like.

She went slowly. Two fingers, flat, over the triangle. Small circles. The other hand at her breast, at the loose ring, the bar, the black stone; she rolled the nipple and her back came off the mattress and she bit her lip for Sofia’s sake. She climbed. She let herself climb. She didn’t try to sneak past it or rush it or think of anything but what she was doing, and who had decided how it would end.

At the edge, the twinge came.

Cold, bright, deep. The wrong beat. The white flash. The climb, wiped.

She lay there gasping. And waited for the grief. The grief that had come nineteen times on this quilt, the sobbing into the pillow, please, to nobody.

It didn’t come.

Something else did. She lay in the dark with her fingers wet and her cunt clenching on nothing and her clit throbbing against the triangle, and felt — she didn’t have a word for it. Not relief. Not pleasure; the pleasure had been taken. Something closer to the feeling of a signature. Of a clause holding. Of having said no to someone and having it obeyed.

She’d said it to herself. And it had been obeyed.

She did it again. Eleven times. She counted. On the eleventh, at the very top, with the twinge coming and her whole body straining up into it, she heard herself whisper into the quilt, not please this time, but something else.

“Good.”

She lay very still afterward.

It was the word Abby had written down in May, from a bathroom stall on four, and played back four times.

She’d said it to herself.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Day: 227.

No subject line. I’ve stopped writing one. There is no L-01 on any screen I can see.

Side letter signed. Ferris has it. On the thirteenth, everything I’ve written about her goes to Purchaser’s counsel and I don’t keep a copy. Paragraph two. Not retained in any form.

So this notebook goes too. Whoever’s reading this, at Northlight, in a conference room, with a coffee: hello.

And whoever’s reading it after them.

Teresa says Ms. Calloway booked the observation room on three this afternoon, for a private interview with engineering. Priya was out of the building from 14:55 to 15:40. Priya came back and sat at her desk and didn’t open her laptop for an hour.

I don’t know what that means. I haven’t known what anything means since September. I’m writing it down anyway.

I’ve been doing this a long time. I used to write down what she did and know why.

Now I write down what she does, and wait.