The term sheet came on the nineteenth of August, eleven days before exclusivity ran out, and it was four pages long, and three and a half of them were about money.

The last half-page was about Lea.

She read it in the glass room with Abby, with the blinds down, at 8:15 in the morning, the way they’d read the LOI. Verity would extend exclusivity by thirty days. Verity would hold its price — nine hundred million, all cash — through the extension, despite, the term sheet noted in a tone of great generosity, material open items in clinical diligence. In return, Halo would agree to a short list of interim covenants. Ordinary things. No new debt. No new hires above a certain grade. No amendments to the equity plan.

And covenant 4(f).

4(f) Program L-01 — Interim Co-Administration. Pending Closing, the Company shall designate Purchaser’s nominee as a co-administrator of all devices associated with Subject A, with such permissions as are customary for a co-administrator under HCP-2 v4.0, and shall fit any accessory reasonably required to give effect to the foregoing.

Lea read it three times.

Customary. There was no custom. HCP-2 v4.0 was three weeks old. She had read its terms on a toilet lid in nine seconds. Accessory sold separately. Fitting required.

Reasonably required.

She looked up. Abby was looking at the window, at the blinds, at nothing.

“You’re going to sign it,” Lea said.

It wasn’t quite a question. She didn’t let it be one.

“The board meets Thursday,” said Abby. “Daniel’s fund will vote to take the extension. So will two of the others. If I refuse 4(f), I have to tell them why. I can’t tell them why.” She was still looking at the blinds. “If I lose the extension, Verity walks. If Verity walks, I have nobody, because there’s nobody else who’d pay half of this, and the board will spend the next year asking why I let nine hundred million dollars walk out of the room over a covenant about one trial participant.”

“Subject A.”

“Yes.”

“You could tell them,” said Lea. “What Subject A is.”

Abby turned her head and looked at her.

“I could,” she said. “And then everyone in that room would know what’s in you. And what you signed. And what I made you do to get the job you have.” She held Lea’s eyes. “I’m not going to do that to you. That’s the one thing I’m not going to do to you.”

Lea sat very still with the long bar between her knees.

“So you’ll do this instead.”

“So I’ll do this instead,” Abby agreed. “Co-administration. Read the v4.0 matrix. Co-administrators can’t remove anything. Can’t fit anything. Can’t touch you. They can see, and they can adjust within ranges I’ve set. That’s all.” She picked up the term sheet. “It’s a key, Lea. It’s just a second key.”

The accessory arrived on the twenty-second, in a slim matte-black case the size of a book, by courier, to the house.

Abby opened it in the kitchen. Lea stood at the counter and watched.

It was a collar.

It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and she hated that it was. A slim band of brushed gunmetal titanium, no wider than her little finger, shaped — she could see it at once — to her. To her neck. Its curve was not a circle; it was an oval, slightly flattened at the front, slightly deeper at the back, exactly the shape of a throat that had been measured, many times, without being told it was being measured. It was lined inside with something soft and black. It had no clasp that she could see. No padlock. No ring at the front to clip a lead to, nothing crude. At the back, where it would sit against the nape of her neck under her hair, there was a short flat section with two small, flush keyways side by side, each the size of a grain of rice, and between them a fine seam.

That was all. It would look, on her, like the kind of thing other women saw in a magazine and wanted.

“Dual-key,” said Abby. “Two physical keys, both needed to open the seam. And an electronic interlock behind them: both administrators have to authorize, in the app, within the same sixty seconds.” She turned it over in her hands. “It runs on Verity’s firmware. Their interlock. That’s the price of 4(f): their hardware on you, so their key means something.”

“And the necklace?”

Abby looked at the fine chain at Lea’s throat. The tiny padlock in the hollow. Schedule A, paragraph seven. Lea had worn it since November, every day, every night, in the shower, in the hood, on the stage. She had stopped feeling it months ago. It was just part of her throat.

“The necklace comes off,” said Abby. “The collar replaces it. The telemetry module transfers.”

Lea looked at her.

“Telemetry module.”

“Location. Skin temperature. Pulse at the carotid. It’s been in the padlock since November.” Abby said it the way she’d said it just sits there and listens, on the table in January, about something else. “It’s how I know where you are. You knew that.”

She had not known that. She had assumed. Somewhere, in the place where she filed things. She had assumed the necklace was what Schedule A said it was: a reminder, worn at work, so she’d always know. She had never once thought of it as something that knew anything back.

“I didn’t know,” said Lea.

“Now you do,” said Abby, and put the collar back in its case, and closed it. “Thursday. Halo. Ten o’clock. She wants to be there.”

The board voted on Thursday at nine. Lea took the minutes. It was her job.

Resolved, that the Company’s entry into the Term Sheet with Verity Wellness, Inc., dated August 19, including the interim covenants set forth therein, be and hereby is approved. Five votes for. Abby’s against. One abstention. Daniel, on the screen from his office in another city, said, “Abby, I know you hate this, but it’s the right number,” and Abby said, “I know it’s the right number, Daniel,” in a voice so level that Lea, typing, stopped and looked up.

At ten, Pauline Ward came to the glass room.

She brought no one. No Ms. Ostrova. No Hollis Grant. She came in alone, in dark green, with her reading glasses on their cord and a very small black envelope in her hand, and she sat at the far end of the long table, by the window, and folded her hands on it, and looked at Lea.

Not at Abby. At Lea.

“Ms. Calloway,” she said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“I’m told you drafted 4(f).”

“I reviewed it,” said Lea. “Your counsel drafted it.”

“Mm. Customary. That was your word, I think, in the markup. Hollis had appropriate. You changed it.” Pauline smiled very slightly. “It’s a better word. It sounds like there’s a custom.”

Lea said nothing.

Abby stood at the head of the table with the matte-black case open in front of her.

“Lea,” she said. “Come here.”

Lea went. She stood beside Abby at the head of the long table with her back to the window and the blinds down and the river invisible behind them, and Abby reached up and lifted her hair off her neck, and held it there, and took the small key from the chain around her own neck, and unlocked the padlock at Lea’s throat.

The click was very small.

And the necklace came away.

She hadn’t been ready for that. She hadn’t been ready for anything. Her throat was suddenly bare — bare for the first time since November, since the rug, since the night she’d signed — and the air of the glass room lay on the skin there, cool, exactly where the chain had been, and she felt it like a hand. Her breath went in hard. Her hands came up toward her throat on their own, and stopped, and she didn’t know what to do with them.

For four seconds her neck was hers.

She felt every one of them.

Then Abby lifted the collar out of its case.

It went on cold. Abby opened it — it opened at the back, on the seam between the two keyways, a fine hinge Lea hadn’t been able to see — and laid it around Lea’s throat from the front, the flattened curve settling against the hollow where the padlock had been, the soft black lining warming instantly against her skin. Then Abby’s fingers at the nape of her neck, under her hair. Closing the two halves. Pressing.

The seam met.

There was no click. That was the worst thing. The padlock had clicked. The bands had clicked, and the rings, and every lock on her body had made that small final sound. The collar made none. The seam simply met, and held, and was gone, as if the titanium had grown together. Lea put her hand up and touched the back of her own neck and could not find where it had opened. It was one smooth band. It fit her throat exactly. It was not tight. It would never be tight. It would never be anything but exactly this.

“Now,” said Pauline, from the far end of the table. “Mine.”

She held out the small black envelope.

Not to Lea. To Abby.

Abby looked at it.

“I’d rather not touch her,” Pauline said pleasantly. “I never do. You’ll do it for me, won’t you?”

Abby crossed the room. She took the envelope out of Pauline’s hand. She came back. She opened it, and tipped out into her palm a key — tiny, black, the size of a grain of rice on a short black shaft — and stood behind Lea, and lifted her hair again.

Lea felt Abby’s fingers at the nape of her neck. Felt them find the left keyway. Felt them hesitate there.

“Turn it,” said Pauline.

Abby turned it.

Lea felt it. Not the key itself. Something behind it — a faint warmth that spread around the whole band, from the back of her neck to the front, like a pulse going round, and then settled. And then her phone, face-up on the table where she’d left it, lit.

A co-administrator has been added to your device.

Verity Wellness — P. Ward
Access: co-administrator.

And beneath it, before she could read it twice, another.

Setting changed by co-administrator.

Breast elements — constriction floor: 0 → 2.
This setting requires both administrators to change.

The rings closed.

Not to seven. Not a clamp. Just — two. The same steady, firm, warming pressure Abby left them at most days. Lea’s breasts lifted a little in their rings and began, slowly, to fill, and her blouse lay against her nipples with its faint, familiar drag.

It was nothing. It was where she lived most days.

But it was a floor now. Not a setting; a floor. She read the words again. Constriction floor. Abby could take the rings up from here — to four, to seven — and bring them back down again. But not below two. Never below two. Never zero, the way they’d been for five days in July, when her heart rate had come down eleven points and she’d lain in bed with her hands on her own light, naked breasts and not understood why she wanted to cry.

This setting requires both administrators to change.

Lea looked at Abby.

Abby was looking at her own phone. At the same notification. Lea watched her thumb go to the setting. Press it. Try to drag it down. Watched the small grey line of text appear under her thumb.

Requires co-administrator approval.

Abby put the phone in her pocket.

“Customary,” said Pauline. She stood up from the far end of the table, and smoothed her dress, and picked up her reading glasses and let them fall on their cord. “Thank you, Abby. Thank you, Ms. Calloway. It suits you.” She looked at the collar for a moment, and then at Lea’s face, and then — for the first time, for one second — at Lea’s breasts under the blouse. “Both of them suit you.”

She left. The door closed. The elevator came and went.

The rings stayed at two all day. They stayed at two at her desk, and in a call with Hollis Grant about the extension, and in the car going home at 6:30, and at the long steel counter while Abby cooked. They stayed at two at ten o’clock on the bedroom rug, while she knelt with her wrists cuffed behind her and the collar at her throat and gave her report.

At 10:14 this morning Pauline Ward set a floor on my breasts and Abby couldn’t take it off. They’ve been at two for twelve hours. I can’t stop thinking about her. I can feel her. Every second. I hate that I can feel her.

Abby read it on her phone, sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed. She read it for a long time.

“Every second,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Not me.”

Lea looked up from the rug.

“You’ve been at two for me a hundred days this year,” Abby said. Her voice was very flat. “You’ve never once written that you could feel me every second.”

Lea didn’t know what to say. It was true. She had never written it. She had felt it — she’d felt Abby every second of every day for a year, in every steel thing on her body — and she had never once thought to say so, because it had never felt like feeling someone. It had felt like weather. It had felt like being alive.

Pauline felt like a hand.

Abby stood up.

“Then let’s see,” she said, “who you feel.”

She didn’t use the back room. She used the bed. She uncuffed Lea’s wrists and recuffed them to the rings under the headboard, arms stretched up over her head, and unbolted the long bar and bolted on the bed rings at the foot, so that Lea lay spread on the duvet with the collar at her throat and her breasts lifted in their rings and her legs held wide. Abby stayed dressed. She sat on the edge of the bed beside Lea’s hip with her phone in one hand and the wand in the other, and she didn’t switch the wand on yet.

She took the rings up.

Three. Four. Five. Lea’s breasts swelled and darkened, the skin going tight and flushed, the tourmaline stones trembling with her pulse. Six.

“Who,” said Abby.

“You.”

Abby laid the wand on her clit, on low, and switched it on.

It went on for two hours. Lea would never know how long; the clock was on Abby’s side of the bed. Abby edged her with the wand and with her fingers and with the platform itself — the slow pulse from the ring that Abby could call up from her phone now, the rolling deep beat that walked Lea up from the inside — and took her to the edge and held her there and let her down, over and over, and every time Lea was at the very top, gasping, straining against the cuffs, Abby asked the same word. Who. And Lea said you, every time, and meant it, every time. The rings stayed at six, at seven, above anything Pauline had touched. Abby’s hands were on her. Abby’s voice was in her ear. Abby was everything there was.

And then, every so often, Abby let the rings down. To show her. Slowly — seven, six, five, four, three —

— and at two, they stopped.

They wouldn’t go lower. Abby’s thumb was on the setting; Lea watched it slide and stop. Requires co-administrator approval. And in that moment, every time, with the wand off and Abby’s fingers still and the climb ebbing out of her, Lea lay on the bed and felt the floor. The steady, firm, warm pressure that wasn’t Abby’s. That had been set at 10:14 that morning by a woman in green at the far end of a glass table who’d never touched her and never would.

She felt it under everything. Under the wand. Under the fingers. Under Abby.

“Who,” said Abby, at two.

Lea didn’t answer.

Abby looked at her for a long time. Then she put the phone face-down on the nightstand, and switched off the wand, and lay down on the bed beside Lea, on top of the covers, fully dressed, without touching her. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. Lea lay cuffed and spread and aching beside her, with the floor at two.

Neither of them said anything for a long while.

“Go to sleep,” said Abby, finally, and didn’t unlock the cuffs, and didn’t lace the hood, and didn’t move.

She lay in the dark with her wrists cuffed above her head, and the rings at two, and the collar at her throat, smooth and seamless and warm, and Abby breathing beside her on top of the covers.

She couldn’t reach it. She turned her head on the pillow instead and felt it against her jaw, against the side of her throat, all the way round to where it met the pillow at the back. No seam. No keyway — they were too small to feel. Just the band. It had already stopped feeling cold. In a week, she thought, it would stop feeling like anything at all. It would just be part of her throat, the way the necklace had been.

It’s how I know where you are. You knew that.

She lay with the collar against her jaw and thought about the necklace. The tiny padlock in the hollow of her throat. Every day since November. In the shower. In the hood. At Christmas, in her mother’s pink bathroom, with her forehead against the cold tile. At Luca’s. In the end stall on four.

She thought about what Abby had said. Location. Skin temperature. Pulse at the carotid.

She thought about it for a long time, in the dark, and she didn’t know why it frightened her, and then she was asleep.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L-01.
Day: 162.

Board approved the term sheet 5–1–1. I voted against my own company’s best offer. Daniel said it’s the right number. It is.

Collar fitted 10:09. Necklace off 10:08. Her throat was bare for four seconds. HR 64 → 101 in those four seconds, without anything touching her.

P. made me turn her key. I’d rather not touch her. I turned it.

10:14: P. set a constriction floor of 2. Requires both of us to change. I tried at 10:15. Refused.

Telemetry module transferred to the collar. Location, temp, carotid pulse, audio. Verity’s interlock firmware wraps it. Priya reviewed the access matrix last week and signed off: co-admin gets control channels only. Audio is excluded at the gateway. Priya’s signature is on it.

I told L. what the necklace did. Location, temp, pulse. I didn’t say the fourth.

Her report: I can feel her. Every second.

She has never written that about me.

22:10–00:20. Bed. Cuffed, bed rings. Rings at 6–7, above anything P. can touch. Wand, fingers, platform pulse. Every edge I asked her who. Every edge she said me.

Every time I brought the rings down, they stopped at 2. At 2 I asked again. She didn’t answer.

PF jumped at 2 on every descent. Every one. She feels the floor.

I lay down next to her afterward. I didn’t plan that either.