The visitor badge said L. CALLOWAY — VISITOR — ESCORT REQUIRED, and Teresa from Clinical Ops printed it herself at the front desk at 8:41 on the morning of the eighth of October, and handed it to Lea across the counter without meeting her eyes, and then, after a second, did meet them.

“It’s good to see you, Ms. Calloway,” said Teresa.

“Thank you, Teresa.”

“I’m supposed to walk you up.”

“I know the way.”

“I know you do,” said Teresa, and came round the desk anyway, and walked beside her to the elevator, and pressed the button for three, and stood with her in the car with her hands folded, and didn’t say anything else. On the way up, the car passed four. Lea didn’t look at the number. She felt it go by anyway, the way she’d once felt the pulse go round the collar.

The lab was at the end of the corridor on three. The same lab. The same door.

She’d stood behind the glass on the other side of it in June, in the dark, with a short bar between her knees and a clipboard in her hands, and initialed fourteen lines while a man she’d been married to for nine years was taken apart on the table in front of her.

She’d never been on this side.

Teresa opened the door for her and stood back.

There were two tables.

Someone had moved the second one in for the morning. They stood side by side in the bright white room, two metres apart, parallel, both with their foot-ends toward the long dark pane of the observation window. Each had its own steel tray. Each had its own lamp on its own arm. They looked like a pair of beds in a very expensive, very clean hospital, and between them there was nothing. No curtain. No screen.

Craig was already on the left one.

He was strapped down — ankles, thighs, waist, wrists — on his back, naked, with a folded sheet over his chest and nothing over the rest of him. He was thinner than he’d been at the café. Much thinner. The cage sat between his thighs exactly as she remembered it from June, the slim dark curve of it, the ring at its base, the bright steel bead of the rod’s eyelet at the tip. His face was turned toward the door. He’d heard it open.

He saw her.

She watched him see her. She watched his eyes go to her face, and then to the visitor badge on her lapel, and then back to her face, and understand nothing, and then — slowly — begin to.

Beside his head, in a chair, in dark green, with her reading glasses on their cord and her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands folded on her knee, sat Pauline Ward.

“Ms. Calloway,” said Pauline. “Good morning. You’re looking well.” She turned her head a little, toward the table. “Both of you are.”

Behind Pauline, at the steel counter along the wall, Ms. Ostrova stood with her black-gloved hands clasped in front of her, and didn’t move, and didn’t speak. At the console under the observation window, Priya sat with a tablet in her lap and her eyes on it, and didn’t look up.

Anand came in through the scrub-room door behind them, drying her hands. She looked at Lea. She looked at the second table.

“Behind the curtain, please,” she said. “Gown’s on the chair.”

“I won’t need the gown,” said Lea.

She undressed in the middle of the room.

She hadn’t planned to. She’d planned the curtain, and the gown, and the table, and a sheet over her the way there was a sheet over his chest. She’d planned to give him that, at least: not to have to see.

But Pauline was watching her. Pauline had booked this room, and this morning, and that table two metres away, so that Lea would have to undress in front of her ex-husband or be seen to hide from him. And Lea understood, standing in the doorway, that the curtain was the thing Pauline wanted. The curtain would be a flinch. Pauline would see it, and keep it, and find somewhere to use it.

She’d stood naked in a glass room in another city in front of a table of strangers with money. She could stand naked in front of one man she’d once been married to.

She unbuttoned her coat. She took off the navy dress. She stood in the bright white room in front of the two tables, in front of Pauline and Ms. Ostrova and Priya and Anand and Craig, and let them see.

She didn’t look at Craig while she did it. She looked at the window.

But she heard him. She heard his breath go in, once, sharp, the way it had the first time he’d ever seen her naked, a lifetime ago, and then stop.

When she turned to climb onto the table, she let herself look at him.

He was staring. Not at her face. At her breasts, swollen and dark above the gunmetal rings. At the black stones in her nipples. Down, at the bands, the stubs of the bar. At the rings in her lips. At the small bright triangle. He was staring at all of it with his mouth slightly open and an expression she had never once seen on his face in nine years of marriage, and it took her a moment to recognize it.

It was recognition.

He knew. Not what any of it did. Not what it cost. But that it was the same. That whatever had been done to him on this table in June had been done to her first, and longer, and deeper, and that she’d sat across a café table from him in August with all of it on her and in her, and watched him lie about his, and said nothing about hers.

He looked up at her face.

She held his eyes for one second. Then she took the black phone out of her coat pocket, and climbed onto the table with it in her hand.

“Well,” said Pauline, very softly, to no one, and smiled.

“Straps?” said Anand.

Lea lay on her back on the cold vinyl with her heels in the steel stirrups and her knees apart, and looked at the lamp.

It was the protocol question. Anand asked it before every procedure. Participant’s preference: restrained / unrestrained. In January, on the five days, Abby had answered it for her before she could open her mouth.

There was no one to answer it for her now.

She thought about lying still on her own. Holding herself open on her own, by will, while Anand worked at the most intimate place on her body, in front of him, in front of Pauline. Being the one who made herself not move.

She thought about being held.

“Yes,” said Lea. “Please. Not my right hand.”

Anand looked at her over her glasses, and at the black phone in Lea’s right fist, and didn’t ask. Then she buckled them herself. Ankles, in the stirrups. Thighs, wide, just above the bands. A strap across the waist. Her left wrist, at her side. Not the right. Not the forehead. Lea lay in them and felt them close, one after another, and felt something in her chest that had been clenched for thirty days let go.

She hated how much it let go.

“Mine first,” said Pauline pleasantly. “If you don’t mind, Doctor. He’s been waiting longer.”

Lea had decided she wouldn’t watch. It was the one thing she’d decided on the train, in the dark, under the quilt: she’d be in the room, because she couldn’t stop that, but she’d keep her eyes on the lamp.

She watched.

She couldn’t not. He was two metres away. She turned her head on the vinyl and watched Pauline take a small black fob from the pocket of her green coat and press it, and watched the cage loosen at its base with a soft sound she’d heard once before through an intercom. Watched Ms. Ostrova step forward in her black gloves and draw the cage off him, slowly, along the rod, and set it in a steel dish.

Watched him swell.

He couldn’t help it. Lea knew exactly how much he couldn’t help it. Out of the cage, even for a minute, after a hundred and eighteen days of it, with the room full of women, with her on the next table naked and strapped open, he swelled in seconds, thick and dark and helpless around the rod still threaded through him, until the eyelet stood at the tip of him like a bead of light. His face went scarlet. He turned it away. Away from Pauline. Toward Lea.

“Look at that,” said Pauline mildly. “Craig. In front of your wife.”

“Ex-wife,” said Craig, through his teeth.

“Mm,” said Pauline. “Spray, please.”

Ms. Ostrova sprayed him with something from a canister. He made a sound like he’d been punched, and his whole body went rigid on the table, and the swelling went down, slowly, under the cold, while he lay there with his jaw clenched and his eyes shut, and Lea watched every second of it, and felt her own cunt clench, wet, on nothing, and hated herself with a clean, bright, perfect hatred.

Anand unlocked the rod at the eyelet. She drew it out of him. Eight centimetres of hollow steel, slowly, glistening, and Craig breathed through his nose in short hard pulls, and his hands opened and closed in the wrist straps.

The new one was on Anand’s tray. Lea could see it from where she lay. It was the same diameter. It was nearly twice the length. Fourteen centimetres of polished steel, with a slightly thicker band of darker metal a centimetre from its tip, like a ring on a finger.

“U-2,” said Anand, in her clinical voice. “Extended configuration. The valve seats at thirteen centimetres, short of the external sphincter, well short of the bladder neck. It does not enter the bladder.” She glanced at Pauline. “I’ll go slowly.”

“Go at whatever speed you like,” said Pauline. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Anand went slowly.

Lea watched fourteen centimetres of steel go into the man she’d married. Watched Anand thread it through the anchor in the head of his cock, and feed it, a few millimetres at a time, down, and down, past where the old one had stopped, into a part of him that nothing had ever touched. Watched his back come off the table against the waist strap. Watched his mouth open with no sound coming out. Watched his eyes come open and find hers across the two metres of bright white air between the tables, and hold on.

She didn’t look away. She thought she owed him that. She didn’t know why.

“Seated,” said Anand. “Valve closed.”

Ms. Ostrova slid the cage back over the rod. Pauline pressed the fob. The cage locked at its base with the soft final sound. Craig lay on the table with his chest heaving and tears running sideways out of the corners of his eyes into his hair, and didn’t make a sound.

“There,” said Pauline. “Now, Craig. What do we say?”

He said nothing. He was looking at Lea.

“Craig.”

“Thank you,” he said, to Lea. Not to Pauline. His voice broke on it. “Thank you.”

Pauline’s smile didn’t move. “Close enough,” she said. “Doctor. Hers.”

Anand moved her stool to the second table, between Lea’s strapped knees, and pulled the lamp down, and put on fresh gloves.

“Lidocaine,” she said. “It’ll sting, then it won’t.”

The gel was cold. Anand’s fingers parted her — the labia rings shifting, the lips held open — and found the small place below the triangle, and Lea felt the cold go in, a little way, and sting, exactly as promised, and then go numb at the very surface while everything around it stayed horribly, vividly alive.

She was wet. She’d been wet since the coat came off. She could feel it, slick around Anand’s gloved fingers, and she knew Anand could feel it, and she knew Pauline could see it from her chair, because Pauline had moved her chair. At some point while Lea was watching Craig, Pauline had stood, and lifted her chair, and set it down again at the foot of the second table, a metre back, angled, so she could see everything between Lea’s strapped thighs without moving her head.

“Dilator, three,” said Anand.

It went in. Thin. A line of pressure. The urge to pee came up hot and enormous, as it had on Monday in the pale green clinic, and her thighs strained against the straps.

“Four.”

Wider. Deeper. Lea made a sound.

“Five.”

She couldn’t stop it. The stretch at the numb rim and the deep live ache behind it and the strange, unbearable fullness of a place that had never been full, and Anand’s other hand flat on her lower belly, pressing, steady, clinical — it went straight through her, down into her cunt and up into her clit, and her hips jerked once against the waist strap and the rings in her labia chimed against the steel of the dilator.

“She’s very responsive,” said Pauline, to the room. “Isn’t she, Craig? Look at her. You never managed that, did you. Nine years.”

Lea turned her head on the vinyl. She couldn’t help it.

Craig was watching. He was lying on his side as far as his straps would let him, his caged cock lying against his thigh with the eyelet bright at its tip, his face wet, and he was watching her. Watching Anand’s fingers between her legs. Watching her hips move against the strap. She saw his cage tighten. She saw him feel it tighten.

She felt herself climb.

She couldn’t stop that either. It wasn’t the dilator; it was all of it. It was Pauline’s chair at the foot of the table, and the straps she’d asked for, and Anand’s flat palm on her belly, and the man she’d married watching her be opened and not being able to look away. It was the first time she’d been touched by anyone in thirty days. Her body didn’t care how. It climbed, fast, faster than it had any right to, and she felt the edge come up toward her, and knew, and couldn’t do anything, and—

The twinge.

Cold, bright, deep, from the top of her. Her pelvic floor slammed out of rhythm around the dilator. The white flash at her clit. Her whole body arched against the straps, and the stubs of the bar knocked against the stirrups, and she cried out, once, loud, in the bright white room.

The climb was gone.

Silence.

“Oh,” said Pauline, very softly. “It still does that. On its own. How thorough of her.”

Anand didn’t look up. Her hands hadn’t moved. “Insert,” she said.

It went in in one slow, steady push. Twenty-four millimetres. Lea felt every one of them. She felt it seat — a small, final, internal settling, like a key turning in a lock she hadn’t known she had — and then Anand’s fingers at the very rim, fitting the flange, and a tiny metallic click as it keyed to the lower bar of the triangle.

“Seated,” said Anand. “Flange locked. Valve closed. Pressure sensor live.” She sat back on her stool and stripped her gloves. “That’s all.”

Lea lay in the straps and breathed.

It didn’t feel like much. That was the strangest part. A faint fullness, low, just at the edge of her attention. A small cool weight at the rim, against the triangle. She’d expected — she didn’t know what she’d expected. Something louder.

Then she understood that she would feel it every time she needed to pee, for as long as it was in her. And that she wouldn’t be able to.

“Priya,” said Anand.

She looked down at the black phone in her right hand.

Owen Pratt had couriered it to Dana’s house on Monday night in a plain padded envelope: matte black, no logo on the back, no apps on it but one, and a card in Owen’s careful hand. Northlight’s gateway. Nobody at Halo touches it. Not engineering. Not the doctor. Only you. — O.P. She’d kept it switched off for two days. She’d slept with it on the nightstand anyway. She’d held it in her fist through all of Craig’s, on the vinyl, against her hip, and Anand had buckled every strap around her except that wrist and never once looked at it.

It was awake now. It had woken on its own, the moment the flange clicked.

HCP-2 — New element detected: urinary element U-1.

Gateway (external). Body network unadministered.
Elements found: platform (1), breast elements (2), nipple elements (2), labia elements (4), clitoral element (1), lingual element (1), urinary element U-1 (1).
Pair as administrator?

At the console under the window, Priya looked up for the first time.

“Doctor,” Priya said. “The gateway should be registered through Halo. Protocol is that engineering pairs any new—”

“Not this one,” said Anand, without turning round. “Condition Two. The board resolution’s in your inbox.” She didn’t move toward Lea. She didn’t look at the phone. She sat on her stool between Lea’s strapped knees with her bare hands in her lap, and waited, the way you wait for a patient to sign something you aren’t allowed to sign for them.

Priya looked back down at her tablet. Her face didn’t change. Lea, strapped on the table, watched it not change, and filed it.

Then she put her thumb on the back of the phone.

Nobody told her to. Nobody’s hand was on hers. She’d pressed I ACCEPT on a kitchen counter a year ago with Abby’s eyes on her, and on a toilet lid in March, and on a toilet lid in August, and every time there had been someone at the other end, waiting. There was no one at the other end of this. That was the point of it. She pressed her thumb flat on the cool black glass, and held it, and the screen went white, and then blue.

Administrator: L. Calloway (self).

Previous administrators: removed (Board resolution, 30 Sept; Purchaser Condition 2).
Co-administrator keys: revoked.
No valid prior configuration. Restoring factory settings…

She felt the roll call first. The ticks she remembered from the stage in March — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve small cold points of attention waking up in her body in sequence, and settling, and listening. To her.

Then everything let go.

The rings went first. She felt them open — not a click, a long slow exhale, both bands at once loosening around the base of her breasts for the first time since the twenty-third of August — and the blood came back. All of it, all at once, a hot heavy prickling rush up into breasts that had been held at two for forty-six days, and she gasped and arched against the waist strap, and her nipples stood up hard and aching around their bars, and the black stones trembled. It hurt. It was the best thing she’d felt in a year. It went on and on.

Breast elements: 0. Floor: none.

At the foot of the table, Pauline Ward sat very still in her chair, and watched her own floor come off Lea’s body.

Lea turned her head on the vinyl and looked at her. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to see Pauline’s face.

It didn’t change much. Pauline didn’t let it. But for one second — exactly one, the way she looked at mirrors — her mouth went thin. Then it was smooth again.

Platform: factory configuration.

Interruption: off.
Induction: available (administrator).
U-1: closed (default). Pressure safety: enabled (clinical, locked).
Perfusion safety: enabled (clinical, locked).

Interruption: off.

She read it three times. Then she understood it with her body, which had understood it before her eyes finished the line.

Nothing was stopping her.

Not the platform, not the ring at the top of her, not a line, not a woman downtown, not a floor. For the first time since March, the thing inside her had been told nothing, and so it would do nothing. She was strapped open on a table with her cunt slick and swollen from the dilators and Anand’s flat hand, with the blood still roaring into her breasts, with her ex-husband two metres away and Pauline at her feet, and if she climbed now — if she so much as let herself — she would go over. All the way. On her own.

And under her thumb, in a small grey box, Induction: available. She wouldn’t even have to climb. One touch, and it would take her there, the full, rolling, unbearable release she’d cried for under her grandmother’s quilt nineteen times.

She could feel her body knowing. She could feel the twelve small points waiting. Her free hand was shaking.

Pauline had leaned forward, very slightly, in the chair at the foot of the table, with her reading glasses in her hand. Craig was watching. At the console, Priya was looking at her tablet, very still, the way you look at something so you won’t be seen looking at something else. Anand sat with her bare hands in her lap and looked at nothing.

She thought: I could. In front of all of them. Nobody in this room could stop her.

And then she’d be a woman who’d done that. Who’d been given her own body back for one minute and spent it on herself in front of Pauline Ward.

She’d told a table of strangers in a glass room that she wasn’t going anywhere.

She closed the grey box.

She found the platform settings. She found the line that said Interruption: off, and the small switch beside it. And she lay there with her thumb over it, and the climb already starting in her, unbidden, from nothing but knowing she could, and she counted. She’d always count.

Ninety-one seconds.

Then she turned it on.

She felt it. A single small tick, from the very top of her. The ring, settling. Listening again. Her own no, in her own hand.

Interruption: on. Set by administrator (self).

She left the rings at zero.

She opened the menu at the top, the one marked with three small dots, and found the line she’d drafted herself, in Schedule 5.3, in August, for someone else’s diligence. Transfer administrator.

Transfer administrator to: Northlight Holdings LLC (Purchaser).

You will no longer be able to change settings, approve requests, or view administrator data. This cannot be undone by the participant.
Transfer?

This cannot be undone by the participant.

She pressed Transfer. Then, one line further down, Send participant access to another device, and typed in, from memory, the number of the cheap phone from the pharmacy, which was in her coat pocket on the chair by the door.

The screen in her hand went grey, and then white, and then said, in small plain letters: Administrator device. Hand to administrator.

She undid the strap on her left wrist herself, with her right hand.

Then she sat up, and undid the waist strap. Then the thighs, reaching down past her own knees, one buckle and then the other. Then the ankles, in the stirrups, bent nearly double, with the flange cool at the top of her and the ache of the dilators deep inside and her breasts still burning with returned blood. Nobody helped her. Anand watched her do it and didn’t move. It took a long time.

She stood up, naked, on the cold floor of the lab, with the black phone in her hand.

She walked past Pauline’s chair. She walked past the foot of Craig’s table, and didn’t look at him. She walked to the narrow door at the end of the observation window, the one she’d gone through in June with a short bar between her knees, and opened it, and the dark little room behind the glass was exactly as she remembered it, the shelf, the stool, the black carpet.

Owen Pratt was standing in it, with his back to the wall. He’d been standing there for three hours.

She held out the phone.

He looked at it. He looked at her face. Not lower. He hadn’t looked lower since section nine.

“You don’t have to—” he began.

“I know,” said Lea. “That’s why it’s me.”

He took it.

She felt it go. Not in her body; her body felt nothing at all, the twelve points just went on quietly listening, to someone else now. She felt it go somewhere under her breastbone, where the thing had let go when the straps closed. It let go again. All the way, this time.

She’d been afraid of being fine. She’d been afraid of being in control. She stood in the dark little room in front of a tired lawyer with her body in his hand, and was neither, and could breathe.

“Thank you,” said Owen. She didn’t know what for.

When she came back into the bright room, Pauline was standing.

She had smoothed her coat. She stood beside her chair at the foot of the empty table and looked at Lea walking back toward it, naked, with her breasts flushed and loose for the first time in six weeks, and the flange bright against the triangle.

“You turned it back on,” Pauline said. “Yourself. And then you walked it to him.” She put her glasses on their cord. “Abby will be so proud.”

Lea said nothing.

“I’d have used it,” said Pauline. “I want you to know that. I’d have pressed it in front of all of you, and enjoyed every second, and then turned it back on, and given it away.” She smiled. “That’s the difference between us, Ms. Calloway. Not the giving. The enjoying.”

She turned to the other table.

“Craig,” she said. “Ms. Ostrova will take you home. You’ll ask me in the usual way.” And she went to the door, and paused, and looked back at the observation window, at the dark glass, at the place where Owen stood behind it. One second. Then she went out, and Ms. Ostrova went after her, and the door closed.

Priya went back to her console. She sat down. She put her tablet in her lap. She didn’t look up.

Anand went to Craig’s table and unbuckled him. Then she picked up her tablet and went into the scrub room, and the door swung shut behind her.

Lea sat down on the edge of her table, naked, with her hands on the vinyl either side of her. Craig lay on his, two metres away, with the straps open, and didn’t get up.

She looked at the lamp. She could hear him breathing. She could hear Priya’s tablet, faint, a soft click every few seconds.

“Did you ask for it?”

His voice was hoarse. She didn’t turn her head.

“Yes,” said Lea.

He didn’t say anything else.

After a while she heard him sit up, slowly, the way she knew he’d have to now, and swing his legs down, and stand, and stop, with his breath catching. She heard him go to the chair where Ms. Ostrova had left his clothes. She heard him dress. She didn’t look. He didn’t say goodbye. He went out through the door Pauline had used, walking carefully, and it closed behind him.

She sat there a while longer. Then she got up, and found the navy dress where she’d dropped it, and put it on, and did the zip herself, arms bent up behind her back.

Three tries.

Priya didn’t look up the whole time.

At 3:48 that afternoon, in Dana’s car, at a red light four blocks from Dana’s house, Lea needed to pee.

It came up the way it always had — gradually, then not. A small pressure, low. Then larger. And with it, now, at the rim, against the triangle, the cool small weight of the flange, and the knowledge, very precise, very bodily, that nothing would happen when she wanted it to.

She took the cheap pharmacy phone out of her bag. It had one app on it now.

Request release.

The words from the first week. From the disabled stall on twenty-nine. From a year ago, when it was a plug, and Abby, and she’d had to ask three times, politely, before it was granted.

There was a free-text box. Reason.

She sat at the red light with her thumb over it. Dana glanced at her and looked back at the road.

She typed: I need to use the bathroom.

She looked at it.

She deleted it. She typed: I need to pee. Please.

She sent it.

Request pending.

The light changed. Dana drove. Lea sat with the phone in her lap and her knees a hand’s width apart and the pressure growing, and watched the word pending, and didn’t know who was reading it. Owen. Daniel. Someone at Meridian. Someone with a phone in a city that wasn’t hers, who had seen her naked at the end of a long pale table and would now, for as long as this lasted, decide when she could empty her bladder.

Eleven minutes. Dana pulled into the driveway. Lea didn’t get out.

Fourteen minutes.

Request approved.

Window: 5 minutes.
Approved by: Northlight Holdings LLC (administrator).

She didn’t know who’d pressed it. She would never know. That was in the agreement too; she’d drafted it.

“Thank you,” she said, aloud, to the phone, in Dana’s car, in the driveway.

Dana looked at her.

Lea got out of the car, and went inside, and up the stairs, and into the bathroom with the rubber duck on the edge of the bath, and closed the door.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L-01.
Day: 208.

Excluded from the procedure and from her data by Board resolution. Seconded by me.

08:38. Car park. I watched her cross it from my window. Navy dress. Flat shoes. No bar; I could see from the fourth floor that there’s no bar. She walks with her knees apart anyway.

She didn’t look up.

08:41–11:52. Blinds down. Office. One floor above.

I didn’t watch. I want that written down. I could have walked into the observation room; the board resolution is about data, and nobody would have stopped me at the door. I sat at my desk for three hours and eleven minutes and did nothing.

11:36. Teresa’s system, the only line it shows us now: L-01: external gateway paired. Administrator assigned (self).

11:38. L-01: administrator transferred (Northlight Holdings LLC).

No data. Not to Halo. Not to Priya. Priti says nobody touched the phone but her. Not engineering. Not Priti. Teresa says Priya asked twice.

11:37. Previous administrators removed. Factory configuration restored. My settings. A year of them. P.'s floor with them.

Two minutes. She had it for two minutes. She had everything I’ve ever had of her, and she gave it to someone else in two minutes.

I don’t know whether she used it first.

That’s the first thing I’ve ever not known about her body.

P. was in the room. Priya was in the room. Craig was in the room.

I was one floor up, with the blinds down, keeping a promise she didn’t ask for.