Monday

She didn’t sleep. She lay in Abby’s bed with her wrists tethered and the thigh bands locked high on her legs, holding her open even in the dark, and every time she started to drift her knees tried to come together and the steel clicked and she woke.

At 6:55 Abby unclipped her and said, “Back room,” and Lea went, in the short wide-legged steps the bar allowed, down the hall in a robe.

Dr. Anand was already there. The tray was laid out. The hard light was on. There was music playing, very softly, from somewhere — strings, something Baroque — and the room smelled of eucalyptus and, under it, of something sharper. Antiseptic.

“Good morning, Lea.” The doctor was washing her hands at the steel sink. “Robe on the chair. You can keep everything else on today. Sit on the edge of the table for me, please. Facing me.”

Everything else. The shield. The chain at her throat. The thigh bands. She sat on the edge of the leather table with her legs hanging, held apart by the bar, and her robe folded on the chair, and the hard light on her, and waited.

Keep everything else on. So it wasn’t — whatever this was, it wasn’t down there. Not today. She felt the relief go through her and despised it.

Dr. Anand dried her hands, pulled on gloves, and came to stand in front of her with a small steel bowl.

“Open your mouth. Tongue out, all the way. Like Friday.”

Oh.

Twelve millimetres. She’d forgotten. No — she hadn’t forgotten; she’d filed it, the way she filed everything she couldn’t afford to think about, in some back drawer behind the nipples and the labia and the ultrasound and the two mouths moving soundlessly above her, and now Dr. Anand was standing in front of her with a bowl and the drawer slid open.

She put her tongue out.

The doctor swabbed it with something that tasted of chemical mint, and then something cold and bitter that made it go thick and distant, as if it belonged to someone else. Then a clamp. Lea saw it coming — a slim pair of steel forceps with oval windowed tips — and felt it close around the middle of her tongue, firm, not painful through the numbness, and Dr. Anand drew it gently forward so that Lea’s tongue was held out of her mouth, stretched, and Lea’s eyes watered and she could not swallow and a thread of saliva escaped her lower lip and ran down her chin and she could do nothing about it.

“Abby,” Dr. Anand said, “would you hold her head?”

Abby had been standing at the cabinet. She came around behind the table, and Lea felt her climb up onto the leather behind her, kneeling, and then Abby’s hands, one on her forehead and one under her jaw, drawing her head back against Abby’s chest and holding it there. Firm. Utterly immovable.

“Breathe through your nose,” Abby said into her hair.

Lea breathed through her nose. She was looking at the ceiling. She was looking at the hard white light. She could feel Abby’s heartbeat against the back of her skull — slow, even, sixty, perhaps less — and her own, which was not. Her tongue hung out of her mouth in the clamp, numb and huge, and drool ran down her neck onto her collarbone, and she thought, with a strange crystalline clarity: This is the first time she’s held me since this started. Really held me. With both hands. And it’s so that I’ll keep still for a needle.

“Small pressure,” said Dr. Anand.

It wasn’t small. Even through the numbness. It was a deep, blunt, impossible push, down through the center of her tongue, top to bottom, a thick dull thing through her, and then a pop and a strange slithering pull as something followed it, and Lea’s whole body jerked and Abby’s hands held her and her eyes overflowed and she made a sound in her throat like a trapped animal, and then it was done. The clamp came away. Her tongue came back into her mouth, and there was something in it.

Something hard. Something round, on top, and another round thing underneath, and a bar between them, through her. She tried to close her mouth and the bottom ball clicked against her lower teeth.

“Barbell’s titanium. Top ball’s a little larger than usual,” Dr. Anand said, stripping her gloves. “It houses a small module. Don’t worry about it. It’s inert for now.” She was already writing on the tablet. “Swelling will peak on day three. Cold liquids, soft foods. Saline rinse after everything you eat. No kissing for four weeks.” A glance at Abby. “No anything in the mouth for four weeks.”

“Understood,” said Abby.

Lea tried to say what module. What came out was wha’ mo’ule, thick and wet and ridiculous, and the tiny ball clicked against her teeth on the m.

“You don’t ask,” Abby said, and climbed down off the table, and handed Lea her robe. “Go and get dressed for work. Car’s at eight.”

She went to work. Of course she went to work.

By ten her tongue had begun to swell and by noon she sounded drunk. She lisped. She couldn’t help it — her tongue was too big for her mouth and the bar held it rigid in the middle so that every s came out as a wet th, and every t clicked. She took a call from Okafor’s general counsel in Lyon and said thubthection and thtatutory and heard the polite pause on the line, and closed her eyes, and kept going. Priya came in at two with a question about data retention and listened to her answer it, and said “Thank you,” and nothing else, and didn’t look at her mouth even once, which was worse than if she had.

She couldn’t stop touching it. That was the thing. Her tongue kept finding it — the ball on top, smooth and slightly too large, the bar, the ache. She caught herself running the ball along the backs of her front teeth, click-click-click, in a meeting, and stopped, and three minutes later caught herself again. And every time she did it, she thought: module. Inert for now. And her stomach turned over.

For now.

That night she wrote her report in full sentences because she could not have said them out loud.

Tongue. I didn’t know it would be my tongue. I thought because of the measurements on Friday it would be my nipples first. I thought I’d worked out the order. I was relieved this morning when she said I could keep the shield on, and then she said “open your mouth.” You held my head. That’s the first time you’ve held me with both hands since September. I thought about that the whole time. I’m afraid of tomorrow. I’m afraid that it’s over, and I’m afraid that it isn’t, and I can’t tell which one I’m more afraid of.

Abby’s reply: Seven a.m.

Tuesday

She knew, this time. Fourteen millimetres. Horizontally. Across the base. She had known since Friday, really. She walked down the hall at 6:55 with her mouth throbbing and her tongue swollen to twice its size against the stud, and when Dr. Anand said “Robe off, and the top of the table, please, on your back,” she was almost — not calm. Resigned. She had worked it out. She had been right about this one.

That made it worse, somehow. To lie down knowing.

They strapped her wrists out to the sides on the arm boards, and her waist, and her forehead — “you’ll want to arch,” Dr. Anand said, “I’d rather you didn’t” — and left her legs, in their bands, hanging over the end. Abby stood at her head. Dr. Anand swabbed her right breast in cold brown iodine, round and round the nipple, and then rolled it between finger and thumb until it stood up hard, as she had on Friday, and Lea’s back tried to arch against the waist strap and couldn’t, and the doctor said “good” and held it erect and laid a clamp across its base. Horizontal. Steel jaws closing on either side.

The clamp itself was the first shock. It bit. Not cruelly — firmly, a steady, rising, crushing pressure that made Lea’s breath stop. There was no numbing cream today. “It doesn’t help much, here,” Dr. Anand had said. “Better to be quick.”

“Breathe in,” said Abby, above her.

She breathed in.

“Out.”

On the out, the needle went through.

It was white. That was all she could have said about it afterward. Not hot, not sharp — white, a blank flash that started in her nipple and went straight down through her chest and belly into her cunt, into the shield, into the ridge, as if the needle had gone through all of her at once. She heard herself scream. Her back fought the waist strap. Her bound legs kicked against the bar. And underneath the white, absurdly, appallingly, there was something else — a wrench, a hot terrible pull, low down, an answering clench of her cunt around nothing so hard and sudden she thought for one wild second that she was going to come.

She didn’t. It passed. The white faded to a deep throb. Something cool slid through the hole behind the needle, and Dr. Anand screwed something on at either end, quick and deft, and took the clamp away, and the blood rushed back into the crushed tissue and that was its own white, and Lea sobbed.

“One,” said Dr. Anand, mildly. “Lovely. Very straight.”

She did the left. Lea knew it was coming this time and it was worse for the knowing. The clamp. Breathe in. The pull, the white, the scream, and again — oh God, again — that obscene hot wrench low in her belly, her cunt clenching on nothing, the ridge suddenly unbearable against her clit. She felt herself flood behind the shield. She felt Abby feel it — a glance down at the phone on the tray, the line lifting — and heard Abby make a small sound, almost a laugh.

“Did you see that?” Abby said to the doctor.

“I did. It’s common.” Dr. Anand was screwing the second end on. “The nerve pathways overlap. Some women come, the first time.” She glanced at Lea. “Some get very close.”

When it was done, Abby held a hand mirror over her.

Two fine bars, through the base of each nipple, horizontal and dead straight. At each end, a small round setting. Gunmetal. And in each setting, a single tiny stone, dark, almost black, catching the hard light with a faint green fire.

They were beautiful. That was the thing that undid her. She lay strapped down with her nipples throbbing and swollen and bruised-looking, tears running into her ears, and looked at herself in the mirror, and they were the most beautiful things she’d ever had on her body. Delicate. Expensive. Exactly what she would have looked at, in a changing room, on another woman’s body, and felt a sharp private twist of envy, and looked away.

“Black tourmaline,” Abby said. “From a mine in Brazil that closed in 1990. There isn’t any more of it.” She put the mirror down. “Nobody else will ever have these.”

She couldn’t wear a bra. Dr. Anand had said so. She went to work in a soft silk camisole under a loose blouse under a jacket, and one of the full skirts Abby had ordered, the bar hidden beneath it, and by eleven she understood that it didn’t matter what she wore.

Everything touched them. The silk touched them, every time she breathed. The blouse touched the silk. When she reached for a file, the jacket shifted and the blouse shifted and the silk dragged across the bars and the swollen tips and she had to stop with her hand in the air and wait for it to pass. When she turned in her chair. When she laughed — she didn’t laugh. When the HVAC kicked on in her office and a cold draft came down from the vent and went through the blouse and she felt both nipples tighten around the steel at once, and the tightening pulled, and the pull went down — straight down, the same wire, the same overlap — and her cunt clenched behind the shield and her thighs tried to close and the bar caught and held them open.

She sat at her desk in the north light with her thighs held apart and her nipples on fire and her tongue too swollen to speak properly, and she thought: Tongue. Nipples. And then: Inner labia. Mid-point. Eight millimetres from the edge.

Tomorrow.

She knew. She knew. And she knew there was one more after that — triangle, she’d looked it up, Friday night, under the duvet, and lain awake for an hour. She could see the whole shape of it now, like a road at night when the headlights finally reach the curve. Tongue. Nipples. Labia. Triangle. Four things. She’d counted the measurements. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The ultrasound she put away, carefully, in the back of the drawer: a check, a scan, something doctors did. It had to be. Nothing had been measured there that she could name.

She put it in her report. I think I know the rest now. I think it’s two more. She was proud of having worked it out. She thought it gave her something back — some small sliver of control, of being a person who knew things.

Abby’s reply took half an hour.

You’ve been wrong once already this week.

And then nothing. Lea lay in bed with her wrists tethered and her nipples throbbing against the sheet and read it forty times.

Wednesday

Labia. She’d been right.

She lay on the table with the leg sections spread and the thigh bands still locked, and Abby unlocked the shield and lifted it away, and the plug came with it, and the air hit her, and Dr. Anand swabbed her in cold iodine, all of her, inside the lips and out, so that she shuddered against the straps. Then the doctor took her right inner labium between gloved fingers and drew it out, gently, stretching the thin skin away from her body, and Lea looked down the length of herself and saw it held out, pink and wet and pathetic, between a stranger’s thumb and finger, and closed her eyes.

“A little numbing today,” said Dr. Anand. “It’s thin tissue. It’ll help.”

A sting. A cold spreading. Then the clamp, and the pull, and the white — less white than the nipples, more of a deep hot twist — and the strange slithering of the ring following the needle, and a tiny, precise click.

“One.”

The left. The same. Click.

“Two.”

Abby brought the mirror again. Two small rings, gunmetal, perfectly round, one through each inner lip, mid-way, hanging. And they had not closed with a ball, the way rings did. They had closed with a clasp — a tiny hinged segment, flush, almost invisible. The click she’d heard.

“They lock,” Lea said. It came out they loth. Her tongue was still enormous.

“They do.” Abby leaned on the edge of the table. “Not to each other. Not yet. But they lock. You can’t take them out.” She reached down and touched one with a fingertip — just touched, the ring, not Lea — and Lea felt the weight of it shift against the raw new hole and whimpered. “Which brings us to the shield.”

She didn’t put the shield back on.

She took something else from the cabinet. It was the same shape as the shield. Same hip band, same Y-strap. But where the solid gunmetal plate had been there was a cage — an open, curved lattice of fine steel bars, standing proud of the body on a padded rim, like a fencer’s mask in miniature. Lea looked at it and didn’t understand, and then did.

“Healing configuration,” said Abby. “Nothing can touch the piercings while they heal. Not cloth, not metal, not you. So nothing touches you at all.” She fitted it, and the padded rim settled on Lea’s skin around the outside of her, around her lips and mound, and the lattice stood off from her body, a centimetre clear of everything. There was no ridge. There was no lining. There was nothing at all against her clit, or between her lips, or anywhere. The rings hung free inside the cage, in the air. Click. The second click.

Lea lay there and felt — nothing.

It was the worst thing yet. She had been wrong to think the needle was the worst thing. For four months there had been something — the ridge, the pressure, the faint indifferent weight against her clit, so constant she’d stopped noticing it except when it moved. And now it was gone. She was locked, and caged, and her cunt was in open air, and her clit stood out swollen and aching from its hood with absolutely nothing on it, nothing, not a breath, and the thigh bands held her legs open so that she couldn’t even press them together for the ghost of a pressure, and the want came up through her and up through her and found nothing to push against anywhere, and kept coming.

“How long,” she whispered.

“Until it heals,” said Dr. Anand, from the sink, as if Lea had asked her.

“How long.”

“With the protocol? Seven weeks. Perhaps eight.” The doctor dried her hands. “Halo has a very good wound-healing compound. It’s still in trials. Without it you’d be looking at four months.”

Seven weeks. With nothing touching her. With her clit hanging in a cage in the open air. Lea started to laugh, and it came out wrong — wet, lisped, high — and turned into something else, and Abby came and stood by her head and watched her do it, and didn’t touch her either.

Thursday

She woke up at four and lay in the dark and thought: Triangle.

She had looked it up, the Friday before. She knew exactly what it was. A horizontal bar through the base of the clitoral hood, behind the clit itself — not through the glans, behind it, under the shaft, so that the bar sat beneath the clit and lifted it, pressed it, from below, all the time. Among the most intensely stimulating of genital piercings, the website had said. Not every anatomy can accommodate it. And she had lain under the duvet and remembered Dr. Anand’s voice — Good depth behind the shaft. Triangle’s viable. Very good anatomy for it, actually — and understood that her anatomy had been inspected and approved.

She knew exactly what it was, and she knew she was getting it today, and she knew she was getting it into a cage where nothing would touch it for seven weeks.

She knew, at four in the morning, lying in the dark with her wrists tethered and her thighs held open by steel, what the bands will matter on Thursday had meant.

She would not remember the procedure well. Abby holding her head again — both hands, from behind, Lea’s skull against her chest. Dr. Anand’s fingers drawing back the hood, pinching it, feeling for the space behind the shaft. The cold of the numbing, which did not numb enough. A clamp — smaller than the others, curved — and the sensation of it closing, there, around the base of her clit, so that for one long moment her entire existence was a single held point between two steel jaws.

“Breathe in,” said Abby.

The needle.

It was not white. White had been for the nipples. This was a colour Lea had no name for. It went through her clit — not through the glans, she knew that, she knew the anatomy, but her body didn’t, her body had no idea, her body only knew that someone had driven a needle through the single most sensitive point in it — and the scream came out of her before the needle was halfway, and kept coming after, and her whole body convulsed against every strap at once, and the thigh bands wrenched against their bar, and somewhere under the colour with no name, impossibly, the same thing as Tuesday, the hot obscene wrench — but magnified, enormous, a hundred times — and she came.

She almost came. She was sure, for the length of a held breath, that she was coming — her cunt seized, her hips fought the strap, the wave lifted and crested and she was there, she was over, after six weeks she was —

And it fell back. The pain caught up with it and swallowed it whole, and the wave broke into something that was not release at all, only a long, shuddering, emptying cramp, and the colour faded to a deep, sick, pulsing throb right at the base of her clit, and she lay there sobbing in Abby’s hands, and understood that she had been on the very edge of coming from being pierced and had been denied even that, by her own body, by the pain.

“Close,” said Abby softly, looking at the phone. “So close. Look.” She held it where Lea could see it. The line. A spike like a cliff, and then, just short of the top, a collapse. “That’s the closest you’ve been since the release. And it was from a needle.”

The bar went in. Tiny balls screwed on, either end. Dr. Anand withdrew. The cage went back on, fitted, locked — click, click.

Lea lay with her clit throbbing in the open air inside the lattice, lifted, pressed from beneath by a bar she could feel with every heartbeat — not touched, not touched, nothing in the world touching it, but held up and out by the steel through its base as if offered — and she tried, without thinking, to close her thighs against it. To press them together, for anything, for the faintest shadow of a pressure.

The bar caught. Held. A hand’s width.

She understood the bands then.

She started to cry in earnest — not sobbing, just crying, steadily, helplessly, with her eyes open, the tears running down into her hair — and Abby unstrapped her head and held her face in both hands and looked at her for a long time, and Lea saw something in Abby’s eyes that she had not seen before. Not tenderness. Something hungrier than that, and further away. As if Abby were looking at something she’d designed on a whiteboard, years ago, and was seeing for the first time, built.

“One more,” said Abby. “Tomorrow.”

Friday

One more.

She lay awake all night with it. Everything that had been measured had been done. Tongue, nipples, labia, triangle — she went through them again and again in the dark, like beads, and there was nothing left on the string. There was nothing left to pierce. She’d counted. She’d been right about Tuesday; she’d been right about Wednesday; she’d been right about Thursday.

And then, at about three in the morning, she saw it again: the hard white light, the wand deep in her, and two faces lit grey-blue from below, and their mouths moving. Talking. About her. While the sea hissed in her ears.

She didn’t know what they’d said. She would never know what they’d said. She only knew that they’d said it a foot from her face, about the deepest part of her, and that Abby had looked straight at her at the end of one sentence, and that whatever came next had been decided in that sentence.

She had no word for it. No shape. Nothing to file it under. That was the worst of it. Monday through Thursday she’d been afraid of things she could picture. Now she was afraid of a blank.

She walked down the hall at 6:55 with her tongue swollen and her nipples on fire under the robe and her clit lifted and throbbing in its cage and her thighs held apart by the bands, in the small wide-legged steps the bar allowed, and Abby walked behind her.

“You can still say it,” Abby said, at the door. Quietly. Not a taunt. “Last time it’s free.”

Lea stopped with her thumb over the pad.

She thought about it. She really did. She stood in the hall in her robe and thought about the word, and Dana’s kitchen, and her own apartment, and the dead plant, and being fine. She thought about walking out of this house with four sets of locked, healing, beautiful jewelry in her body that nobody else would ever have — tourmaline from a closed mine — and being fine. Going to an ordinary piercer, some kid with sleeve tattoos in a strip mall, and asking him to cut the rings off.

She put her thumb on the pad. The door clicked.

The speculum. Cold, and the slow mechanical spread, and the doctor’s light. Then a sizing ring — Dr. Anand slid it in, deep, and turned it, and took it out, and tried another — and Lea lay strapped with her eyes squeezed shut and felt them go in, one after another, up and up, to the very end of her, and touch something there that she had never felt touched in her life. A pressure so deep it was almost not a pressure, almost a sound.

“Forty,” said Dr. Anand. “As you said.”

Then the thing itself. Lea didn’t see it until it was in the doctor’s hand, and then she wished she hadn’t. A ring, but not a ring — a thick torus of something pale and smooth, silicone over something darker, the diameter of a small orange, with a fine seam running round its outer edge. Dr. Anand folded it in half between her gloved fingers, the way you’d fold a contraceptive ring, and it folded, and she slid it into the speculum, and Lea felt it go.

Up. Past where the insert went. Past where anything went. The doctor guided it with two fingers and then with a long slim instrument, and Lea felt it travel up inside her, felt it reach the end, felt it unfold — a slow, round, opening pressure, deep, all around the very top of her — and settle.

“Now,” said Dr. Anand. “Abby?”

Abby held up something. It was small and steel and looked, Lea thought distantly, like a tuning fork with a magnet at the end. She touched it to the outside of Lea’s belly, low, just above the cage, and pressed a button on its side.

Inside her, the ring expanded.

She felt it. She would feel it for the rest of her life. Not much — a few millimetres, a slow even swelling all the way around, firm and certain, pressing out into the walls around it until it was snug, seated, wedged into the deepest part of her as if it had grown there. Then a tiny, final sound that she felt rather than heard, from deep inside her belly. A click.

Abby took the tool away. She lifted the chain from around her neck — the one with the shield key, and the small brass key to the padlocks — and threaded the tool onto it, and put the chain back on, and the tuning fork lay against her breastbone with the keys.

“Everything that locks on you,” she said, “in one place.”

The speculum came out. The cage went back on. Click, click.

Lea lay on the table and breathed. She could feel it. Not pain — the piercings were pain, the triangle was a constant hot pulse, her tongue was a throb — but this wasn’t pain. It was presence. A weight, deep in her, at the very end of her. When she breathed in she could feel it. When she clenched — she clenched, experimentally, and felt her own muscles close around it and hold it and it did not move, at all, not a hair — she could feel it.

It wasn’t doing anything. She could tell that. It just sat there. Inert. Heavy. Hers.

“What is it?” she said.

It was the fourth time. She knew it was the fourth time as the words came out. She didn’t care. She lay on the table with a ring of silicone and metal wedged against her cervix that only one person on earth could remove, and she asked.

Abby looked down at her. She didn’t reach for the cabinet. She didn’t reach for anything.

“It’s the sensor platform,” she said.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all you need.” Abby bent down and, for the first time all week, kissed her — on the forehead, briefly, dry, the way you’d kiss a child who’d been brave at the dentist. “It doesn’t do anything yet. It just sits there and listens.”

“Listens to what?”

Abby straightened. She picked up her phone from the tray and looked at it, and whatever she saw there made her smile.

“You,” she said. “It’s already started.”

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Days: 39–43 (cycle 2).
Entry by: A.M.

Fitting complete. Tongue (Mon). Nipples (Tue). Inner labia, locking (Wed). Triangle (Thu). Platform, 40 mm, seated and locked (Fri). All placements excellent. Anand pleased. Healing cage fitted Wed; nothing to touch any site for est. 7 wks.

Order deliberately broke her prediction on day 1. She predicted nipples; got tongue. Spent the rest of the week trying to work out the shape of it, and on Tuesday thought she had. She was right. Being right gave her no relief at all. Note: certainty is not comfort for her. Only control is. She has none.

Nipples, Tue: near-climax on the needle, both sides. Triangle, Thu: closest approach since release (est. 96%), from the needle alone. Pain caught it before she went over. She knows. She saw the line.

Friday, at the door: offered the free exit one last time. Thumb on the pad in 41 seconds — the same as the first night. I don’t think she knows that.

Asked a fourth time, on the table, with it seated. Did not punish. She had paid enough this week, and I want her to remember that I didn’t.

Platform: passive mode. Listening. All four piercing sites registering on the array. She has no idea they’re on the array.

Seven weeks. Verity: March 14.