She didn’t remember the elevator. She remembered hands — Priya’s, Abby’s — and the carpet of a corridor under her bare feet, and a robe being put around her shoulders, and someone saying careful, she can’t feel her legs yet, and her own breath roaring in the hood. Then a door. Then the suite, and the click of the door behind them, and silence.

Dr. Anand checked her first, before anyone took anything off. Two fingers on her wrist. The blood-pressure cuff. A penlight shone through the thin leather of the hood into her eyes, and the doctor’s voice, close: “Lea. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” Lea squeezed. The bell was still in her other fist. She found that she couldn’t open it. Her fingers had locked around it so long that they wouldn’t uncurl, and Anand had to do it for her, one finger at a time, gently, and take the bell away, and Lea made a sound when it left her hand that she didn’t understand.

“She held it,” Anand said, to someone. “The whole way through. Even the jolt to the tongue.” A pause. “I’d have stopped it if she’d dropped it, Abby. You know that.”

“I know,” said Abby.

“I’m not sure you do.” The doctor’s voice was perfectly calm. “Level four on the nipples. Without a warm-up. In front of two hundred people. I let it go because she was in range, and because she agreed to this, and because it’s her choice to hold that bell. But I’d like it noted that I’d have stopped it.” A pause. “I’ll see her Wednesday.”

The door opened and closed.

Priya ran the slim white pen over her once more — tongue, nipples, rings, triangle — six soft tones, and Lea felt nothing, and on the tablet six green dots stayed lit. Nobody unpaired anything. There was nothing to unclip. Priya closed the tablet and picked up her laptops and went to the door.

“Good data,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Best we’ve had.” And she was gone too.

Then it was just Abby.

The laces came loose at the back of her skull, one cross at a time. The hood peeled away. The light of the suite hit her eyes — not hard, just the warm afternoon light off the water through the big windows — and she squeezed them shut, and tears ran out of the corners, and she felt the cool air on her wet face for the first time in two hours.

The ring gag came out. Her jaw wouldn’t close. Abby pushed it closed for her with two fingers under her chin, the way she had after the release, and held it.

Lea opened her eyes.

Abby was crouched in front of her, very close. She’d taken off her suit jacket. Her shirt was open at the throat, and the chain lay against her sternum with its three keys, and her face was — Lea didn’t have a word for it. Lit. The way she’d looked on Thursday of the fitting week, with the triangle in, looking at something from a whiteboard, built.

“Hello,” said Abby.

Lea’s tongue lay thick and throbbing in her mouth. It took her two tries.

“She sent regrets.”

“An email said she’d sent regrets.” Abby’s thumb was still under her chin. “I showed it to you. You struck her name yourself. I never told you she wasn’t coming, Lea. I told you board members almost never do.” A pause. “Almost.”

“You knew her.” It came out in pieces. “The way she said your name. She called you Abby—”

“She was my doctoral advisor. At Stanford. Three years, before she went into industry.” Abby said it simply, as if it were a line on a résumé. “I’ve known her for twenty years. She’s the only person I’ve ever been afraid of.”

“At Hadley. Did you—” Her voice was ruined, a rasp. “Did you tell her to watch me?”

Abby looked at her for a while.

“I told her you’d be there,” she said. “I told her you were someone I’d been thinking about for a very long time. I asked her to tell me what she saw.” A pause. “I didn’t tell her to go to Halloran.”

“But she did.”

“She did.” Abby’s thumb moved, once, along Lea’s jaw. “Pauline always looks carefully. And she always says what she sees. I’ve known that about her for twenty years.” She tilted her head. “Did I know she’d go to Halloran? I’d have put it at seventy percent.”

Seventy percent. Lea sat in the hotel chair with the robe around her shoulders and her thighs falling open, bare, unlocked, and turned the number over. Seventy percent. Abby hadn’t told Pauline to end her career. Abby had only set Lea down in front of the one person on earth most likely to do it, and waited, and watched the line.

And Lea had been — I’d keep an eye on that, Abby had texted, in the stall on twenty-nine. As if it were a warning. As if Abby were on her side.

“That’s not—” Lea started, and stopped, because she was about to say that’s not fair, and she had said that so many times now, to Abby, about so many things, and it had never once mattered.

“No,” Abby agreed. “It isn’t.” She stood. “Would it have been better if I’d lied?”

Lea thought about it. She really did. She sat there with her tongue throbbing and her nipples burning and her cunt raw and wet and twitching in the cool air of the suite, and she thought about whether she’d rather have been lied to.

She didn’t know.

She would never know. And Abby had told her the truth precisely so that she would have to sit here, not knowing, for the rest of her life.

Abby dressed her. That was new. Lea stood in the middle of the suite and Abby put her clothes back on her as if she were a doll — the camisole, the blouse, the trousers, the jacket — with the same unhurried care she’d used to fit the sleeve, a lifetime ago, on the terrace. Then she unlocked the wide leather collar at the back and took it off, and put the fine gunmetal chain back on, and locked its tiny padlock at Lea’s throat. Then the cuffs, one by one, the small brass key turning four times. The thigh bands stayed. They always stayed.

Then she picked up the matte-black case — the shield’s case, the long one, the one that had sat in the kitchen drawer since September — and set it on the table, and opened it, and laid the shield in its grey foam cutout, and laid the healing cage beside it, and closed the lid.

Lea stood there with her hands at her sides and looked at the closed case.

“You’re not—”

“No.” Abby snapped the catches. “You don’t need them anymore. You have the bands, if I want you held. You have the ring, for everything else. You heard me down there. The shield was always a demonstration.” She picked up the case. “From now on you go home like this. Unlocked. Every day.”

Under her trousers, under the silk, Lea’s cunt was bare. Nothing on it. Nothing over it. Her clit, still swollen, lifted on its bar, brushed the seam of her trousers when she shifted her weight, and she gasped, and her knees nearly went — a real touch, fabric, the first casual touch in fifty-seven days — and at the very top of her, the ring sat, listening. She could feel it. She could feel it not doing anything. Waiting to.

“I could—” she said. She didn’t finish.

“You could touch yourself. Yes.” Abby put the case under her arm. “Any time you like. In the car. At your desk. In the stall on twenty-nine. I won’t stop you. There’s nothing to stop.” She went to the door, and opened it, and looked back. “Go on. Try it tonight. I’ll watch.”

She tried it that night.

She didn’t want to. She lay on her back on Abby’s bed — no cuffs, no tether; Abby hadn’t put them on; Abby was sitting in the chair across the room with a book and a glass of wine and her phone face-up on the arm — and she told herself she wouldn’t. She told herself she’d lie here with her hands flat on the sheet, the way she had on the very first night, in September, and prove something. To Abby. To herself. She didn’t know what.

Her hand was between her legs within four minutes.

It was the easiest thing in the world. That was the horror of it. There was nothing there. No plate, no cage, no lock. Just her — bare, wet, swollen, and her own two fingers, exactly where they’d always gone, before September, before any of it. And her clit leapt to meet them like something that had been waiting at a window for a hundred days, and the bar beneath it pushed it up into her fingertips, and she gasped, and her hips came off the mattress, and she was there. Instantly. The edge. Right there —

Twinge.

Cold, bright, deep, from the ring, out through the rings and the bar — the wrong-beat clench — the wall — her clit going hot and blank and buzzing under her own fingers so that for one second she couldn’t feel them.

And down. Falling back.

She lay there gasping with her fingers still on herself. She waited for the static to drain. She could feel herself again. She started again — slower, she thought, slower, maybe if she went slow enough, maybe it couldn’t tell — and she climbed, slow, slow, careful, creeping up the face of it a millimetre at a time —

Twinge.

Faster, then. Maybe if she went fast enough, she could get past it, she could get over the edge before —

Twinge.

She tried everything. She lost track of time. She tried slow, fast, two fingers, three, circles, side to side, pressing down hard on the bar, pinching her nipples with her other hand so that the bars pulled and the wire went down. She tried rolling onto her front and grinding against her own hand. She tried not breathing. She tried breathing. She tried, crying, thinking about something else, about the Brennan deposition, about clause fourteen, so that maybe the platform wouldn’t notice — and it noticed. It noticed every time. Four seconds. Always four seconds. Twinge, wall, blank, fall. Over and over, every single time, the wall went up inside her made of her own muscles, and she broke against it, and fell, and climbed back up, and broke.

At some point she realized she was sobbing out loud. At some point she realized she’d been saying please — to no one, to the ring, to her own hand. At some point she looked across the room, through her tears, and Abby had put the book down and was watching her over the rim of her wine glass, and her phone was lit on the arm of the chair, and the line on it was going up and down, up and down, like a heartbeat, like a cardiogram, like a woman running into a wall over and over in the dark.

Lea’s hand stopped.

She lay there with her fingers still resting on herself, wet, trembling, and her whole body shaking, and the want — not one degree less. Not one. Worse. Worse than the stage. Worse than the cage. Fifty edges? A hundred? Her own fingers, the most familiar thing in the world, the thing she’d known how to do since she was fourteen, efficient circles on her back in the dark, four minutes and done — and it would never, ever work again. Not for her. Not unless someone she couldn’t see, who wasn’t touching her, decided.

She had been free all evening. Unlocked. Nothing on her. And she’d never been less free in her life.

“How many?” she whispered.

Abby glanced at the phone. “Sixty-three.”

Lea closed her eyes.

“I’ll tell you something,” Abby said. She set the wine glass down. “Since you’ve worked so hard tonight.” She stood, and came across the room, and sat on the edge of the bed, and looked down at Lea — at her open thighs, her wet fingers, her tear-streaked face. She didn’t touch her. “You came twice today. On stage. In front of everyone. Induction, both times, start to finish.”

“I know.”

“Do you remember what that felt like?”

Lea opened her eyes. She did. She’d never forget it. Pulled up out of herself by the root. A recording played on her body, on a metronome, while two hundred people watched. She hadn’t wanted it. She’d come harder than she’d ever come in her life.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. Hold on to it.” Abby reached over and picked up Lea’s phone from the nightstand and turned it so Lea could see the screen. The Halo app. The big white number, centered, enormous, the same font as always.

1.

And beneath it — new, small, grey, in a line Lea had never seen before:

Releases: 2. Full: 2. Ruined: 0.

Lea stared at it.

She read it again. Ruined. She knew the word. She’d come across it in October, at three in the morning, under the duvet, on a forum she’d closed in a hurry and never opened again. She knew exactly what it meant.

Ruined: 0.

As if it were a counter. As if it were waiting to go up.

“Why is that there?” Her voice cracked. “Abby. What does that — why is there a—”

“That,” said Abby, and set the phone back down on the nightstand, face-up, so the number glowed in the dark, “is a question about the third product.”

She turned out the lamp.

In the dark, Lea lay on her back with nothing on her and nothing holding her and her hands flat on the sheet beside her — she’d put them there herself — and felt the ring at the top of her. Listening.

Her phone buzzed once on the nightstand. She turned her head. Not the app. A text. A name she hadn’t seen on her screen since Christmas.

Dana Saw something weird online about your company today. Are you okay? Call me. I mean it.

Lea looked at it for a long time. The glow of it lit the ceiling.

Then she reached out, and turned the phone face-down, and lay back.

Across the bed, in the dark, Abby didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Somewhere a line was lifting, and she was reading it.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 100 (cycle 2) / Day 1 (cycle 3).
Entry by: A.M.

HCP-2 live demonstration. 31 interruptions (manual: 12; wand: 19). Corrective, nipples L4: 1. Corrective, tongue L3: 1. Induction: 2, both complete. Bell held throughout. Anand objected to L4 without warm-up. Noted. She’s right. I did it anyway, and I’ll do it again, and she’ll keep being right, and that’s why I hired her.

Verity: signed in the room. Exclusive, 40 countries, Q3. Okafor cried. So did the Italian.

Pauline came to the stage after. Spoke to her. Told me afterward, in the corridor, that it was the best thing I’d ever made, and asked if I’d ever tell her. I said no. Pauline said, “Good. She’d never forgive you, and then where would you be?” I said, “Exactly where I am.” She laughed.

Told L. the truth about Hadley. 70%. She couldn’t decide if she’d rather have been lied to. She won’t ever decide. That’s the gift.

Shield retired. Sent her home bare. Self-stimulation attempts tonight: 63, all interrupted. She stopped on her own at 02:14. Didn’t tell her to. HR at the moment she gave up: 72. Lowest in four months. Note: surrender drops her floor faster than release does.

Showed her the new counter. Ruined: 0. She knows the word. I watched her know it.

Sister texted at 23:40. Verity’s press release went out at 18:00 — “exclusive partnership in intimate wellness technology” — and the trade press picked it up by nine. Halo’s name in a headline next to the word intimate. Dana doesn’t know what she read. But she’s started looking.

On stage, between segments, the hood ran the sleep loop — static, my voice under it. Anand thinks it was for calming. It was partly for calming.

L. turned the phone over without reading it twice.

Cycle 3 begins.

She’ll come whenever I like now. I just haven’t decided yet whether she’ll get to feel it.