On the Friday it would have been a year, Abby left for the city at four in the afternoon, and didn’t take Lea with her.

“Hollis raised a conflict,” Abby said, in Lea’s office, with the door shut and her bag on her shoulder. “This morning. In writing. Clinical indemnity, Subject A. He says the general counsel can’t negotiate the indemnity that covers a participant, because the general counsel might be a participant, and he can’t rule it out, because 5.3© says nobody’s allowed to try.” Abby’s mouth did something that wasn’t a smile. “Your clause. He used your clause to bench you.”

Lea sat at her corner desk in the north light with the long bar between her knees.

“So I’m out.”

“So you’re out. For tonight. External counsel leads. The bank’s there. Verity’s there.” Abby shifted the bag. “It’s an all-nighter. They scheduled it for six and said to clear the night. I’ll be back tomorrow by noon.”

“Who scheduled it?”

Abby looked at her.

“Hollis,” she said. “On instructions.”

She didn’t say whose. She didn’t need to.

Abby drove her home first. That was the strangest part: Abby drove her home, up the bluff, through the gate, onto the gravel, at 4:40 in the afternoon, and walked her up the stone steps and into the house, and stood in the front hall with her keys in her hand, and looked at Lea for a long time.

“No hood tonight,” Abby said. “No tether. There’s no one to clip it.” A pause. “Sleep in the bed. On my side, if you want.”

Lea didn’t say anything.

“Report at ten, by text. Rings stay where she put them; I can’t move them anyway. The bar stays.” Abby looked at the long bar, at the bands, at the collar at Lea’s throat. At all of it. “There’s a bottle of the Burgundy open on the counter. Have one glass. One.”

“One.”

“I’ll be watching the line,” said Abby. “Between things. When I can.” She turned toward the door, and stopped, and turned back. “Lea.”

“Yes.”

Abby opened her mouth. Closed it.

“Nothing,” she said. “One glass.”

She went down the steps. The car started on the gravel. Lea stood in the doorway and watched it go down the long drive between the trees, and through the gate, and out onto the road on the bluff, and around the bend.

She had not been alone in the house overnight in ten months. Not once.

She didn’t know what to do with it.

She stood in the kitchen for a while. She walked through the living room with the glass wall, and stood in front of it, and looked at the river. She went upstairs, slowly, because of the bar, and stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the bed with no tether clipped under the headboard, and the drawer with the hood in it, and the rug.

She knelt on the rug. She didn’t know why. No one had told her to. She knelt for a minute with her hands on her thighs, in the empty room, in the late-afternoon light, and then she understood that she was doing it because she didn’t know how to be in this room standing up, and she got up, and went back downstairs, and her face was hot.

At six she ate the dinner Abby had left in the refrigerator, at the long kitchen table, alone. At seven she poured one glass of the Burgundy and took it out onto the terrace.

It was a September evening. That was the thing. It was exactly the kind of September evening it had been a year ago — warm, still, the river going copper, the city across the water looking like it had been designed rather than accumulated. She sat in the same chair. She knew it was the same chair. She had sat in it with a glass of wine Abby had poured, and Abby had knelt on the flagstones in her good trousers and fitted a soft grey sleeve high on her inner thigh with quick clinical fingers, and Lea had looked at the river and told herself it was the wine.

It’s a sleeve. It goes around your thigh. You forget it’s there in an hour.

She held the glass and didn’t drink it, and looked at the flagstones where Abby had knelt.

A year. The sleeve. The shield in its case from the kitchen drawer. The plug, the insert, the cuffs with their brass padlocks. The table. The hood. Schedule A on the rug. The thigh bands that were hardware. The five days in January — tongue, nipples, labia, clit, and the Friday she had no word for. The stage. The rings. The ruins, and the counter, and the word. The glass, and the clipboard, and the cup. The collar.

You forget it’s there in an hour.

She had. She’d forgotten every one of them in an hour. That was what she understood, sitting there. Not that it had been done to her. That she’d forgotten each thing within an hour, and made room for the next, and forgotten that too. That was how you got here. Not by being dragged. By forgetting, an hour at a time, that there had ever been a before.

She drank half the glass. It was very good. She had never once, in a year, known what any of the wine Abby poured was called.

At nine she went upstairs.

She didn’t decide to. She found herself on the stairs with the glass left on the terrace, climbing slowly, because of the bar, and then in the bedroom doorway, and then at the bed. Abby’s side. She lay down on it on her back, on top of the duvet, in the long dark dress, and the pillow smelled of Abby’s shampoo.

There was no tether. No hood. No one was watching the line — or someone was, in a room downtown, between things, when she could. Or no one was. Lea didn’t know. For the first time in ten months, she didn’t know.

She pulled the dress up.

The bar held her thighs open, a hand’s width, the way it always did. The bands sat cool and heavy at the tops of her legs. The rings were at two — Pauline’s two — the steady warmth in her breasts that she’d felt every second for fifteen days. And between her thighs, nothing. No shield, no cage, no plug. Just the jewelry, and the triangle bar under her clit, and, at the very top of her, the ring, silent, listening, the way it had sat silent and listening since January.

She put her hand on herself.

It had been six months. Not since March — not since the sixty-three nights after the stage, when she’d lain in her own apartment and tried and tried and been stopped every time. She’d stopped trying after that. She’d stopped even thinking of it as something her hand could do. Her hand was for typing. Her hand was for holding a pen on a beaded chain.

Her clit was swollen against her fingertips before she’d done anything at all. Her cunt was wet. She made a sound she didn’t recognize, in the empty room, and closed her eyes.

She went slowly. The way she used to, a lifetime ago, before the sleeve, on her back in an apartment with a dying plant: two fingers, small circles, patient. She climbed. Slowly, carefully, a millimeter at a time, the way you’d cross a frozen river, feeling for the place where it would crack. She knew it would crack. She climbed anyway.

At the edge — right at it — the platform fired.

The twinge. The old one. Cold, bright, deep, from the ring, out through the rings in her lips and into the bar — the wrong-beat clench that threw her pelvic floor out of rhythm like a hand slapped flat on a drum, and the white flash at her clit, and the climb gone, wiped, a step kicked out from under her. Passive mode. Untouched. Automatic. Nobody had sent it. Nobody had needed to.

She lay there gasping.

Then she started again.

She tried for forty minutes.

She tried slow, and fast, and two fingers, and three, and inside, and the heel of her hand. She tried the way Abby did it, the pressure on the front wall, and the way the wand did it, and the way the platform itself did it on the stage, the slow rolling beat, and she tried to sneak up on it, and to rush it, and to get over the edge in the half-second before the ring could see her coming. She tried thinking about Abby. She tried not thinking about Abby. She tried — she would never tell anyone this, not in any report — thinking about the glass, and the glove, and the man on the table, and her body answered that faster than anything, and the ring caught her faster still.

Eleven times. She counted. Eleven times she got there, and eleven times the twinge came, cold and bright and indifferent, and wiped it.

And underneath it all, every second, the floor. The rings at two. The warmth in her breasts that wasn’t Abby’s. She lay on Abby’s side of the bed with her own hand between her own legs and felt Pauline Ward the whole time.

The worst part wasn’t the stopping. She’d known it would stop her. The worst part was that there was no one to beg. On the table she could sob please at Abby. On the stage there had been Priya, and the bell, and two hundred people. Here there was no one. She lay alone in the dark, at the edge, for the twelfth time, and heard herself say it anyway, out loud, to the ceiling. To nobody.

“Please.”

Nothing answered. The ring sat silent at the top of her, listening, and waited for her to try again.

She took her hand away.

She lay there for a long time with her fingers wet and her clit throbbing and her cunt clenching, weakly, on nothing, and the tears running sideways into her hair, and she understood something she had not let herself understand in ten months.

It didn’t need Abby. None of it did. The platform didn’t need anyone watching. It would stop her alone, in the dark, in an empty house, forever, whether anyone ever looked at the line again or not. Abby had built a thing that didn’t need Abby.

She’d thought she was afraid of Abby. She’d been wrong. She was afraid of being alone with what Abby had made.

She got up at 9:52, and pulled the dress down, and went back down to the terrace in the dark.

At ten she texted her report from the terrace, with the city lit up across the river.

Lea I’m on the terrace. Same chair as last year. I’ve had half a glass. I knelt on the rug at five o’clock and nobody told me to and I don’t know why I did it. At nine I went up and lay on your side of the bed and touched myself. It stopped me eleven times. I said please out loud to nobody. The rings have been at two all day and I could feel her the whole time, even then. I miss the hood. I don’t know what that means.

She read it back. Every word was true. She sent it.

Nothing came back. No good. No goodnight. Abby was in a room downtown with eleven lawyers and a bank, and her phone was face-down on a table, and Lea’s report sat unread on it.

Lea looked at the screen for a while. Then she put the phone face-down on the arm of the chair, and finished the glass, and sat in the dark.

The doorbell rang at 10:03.

She didn’t move. For a moment she didn’t understand the sound; no one rang the bell. No one came up the bluff at night. Dana had come once, and Dana had texted.

It rang again.

She got up. Slowly, because of the bar. She went through the dark kitchen, past the bottle on the counter and the one glass she’d rinsed and left upside down beside it, and down the long hall to the front door, and stood there with her hand on it.

Through the narrow pane of glass beside it she could see the stone steps, lit by the lamp over the door. And at the bottom of the gravel, a long dark car, idling, with someone in the driver’s seat.

And on the top step, a foot from the door, a woman in a dark green coat.

Lea opened the door.

Pauline Ward did not step inside.

She stood on the top step under the lamp, with her reading glasses on their cord against the green wool of her coat, and a slim grey folder held in both hands in front of her, the way someone holds a hymnal. She looked at Lea for a long moment. At her face. At the collar. At the long bar under the hem of the skirt.

“Ms. Calloway,” she said. “Happy anniversary.”

Lea held the edge of the door.

“Abby isn’t here.”

“No. She’s downtown. I left the meeting at half past nine; I had another engagement.” Pauline smiled very slightly. “They’ll go until four. They always do, on indemnity. Nobody really wants to agree on what a person is worth.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing at all.” Pauline held out the folder. “I’ve come to return something. It’s yours, really. It’s all about you.”

Lea didn’t take it.

Pauline didn’t lower it. She stood on the step and held it out, perfectly patient, the way she’d held out the small black envelope to Abby in the glass room, and waited. Her eyes didn’t leave Lea’s face.

“Abby keeps very good notes,” she said. “She always did. Even at Stanford. Notes on everything. Everyone.” A pause. “There’s a drive in the back, too. Some of what’s on it isn’t notes. It’s recordings. I thought you should know what you’d agreed to. And what you hadn’t.”

“How did you get it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to wonder,” said Pauline pleasantly. “Abby isn’t the only person in her company who keeps things.”

Lea looked at the folder.

It was perhaps an inch thick. Plain grey card. No label. And she knew — she knew it the way she knew the weather, the way she knew the pulse two seconds before the ring warmed — exactly what was in it. She had seen the shape of it, a thousand times, in a thousand nights. The blue glow at the long kitchen table at midnight, and the laptop closing before she could see. I’ll check it against the data. The way Abby always knew. The things Abby knew that weren’t in any line on any graph.

“You want me to leave her,” Lea said.

“I want you to read,” said Pauline. “What you do afterward is entirely up to you. It always has been, hasn’t it?” She tilted her head. “That’s the part of her I taught her. She did the rest herself.”

“You asked Craig what would make me leave.”

“I did.”

“You know I was behind the glass.”

“Of course I do.” Pauline’s voice didn’t change. “I’m told the one thing you can’t forgive is being lied to. To your face. Every night.” She held the folder a little higher. “I’d hate for that to be happening to you, Ms. Calloway. Wouldn’t you want to know?”

It was a move. Lea knew it was a move. She knew exactly what Pauline was doing, standing on the step in the lamplight on the anniversary of the sleeve, with Abby downtown in a meeting Pauline had scheduled and Lea benched by a conflict Pauline had raised. She knew she was being played, and by whom, and why, and that every word Pauline had just said was chosen.

None of that made the folder any lighter.

She took it.

Pauline let go of it. Her fingers didn’t touch Lea’s. They never did.

“Goodnight, Ms. Calloway,” she said. “It really does suit you.”

She went down the steps. The driver got out and opened the back door of the long car, and Pauline got in, and the door closed with a soft expensive sound, and the car went down the gravel, and through the gate, and was gone.

Lea closed the front door.

She stood in the hall with the folder in her hands for a long time.

She thought about not opening it. She thought about it seriously, the way she’d thought about Decline on the toilet lid in March. She could put it on the hall table. She could put it in the drawer in the kitchen, with the matte-black case the shield had come from. She could wait for Abby to come home at noon and hand it to her and say, Pauline brought this, and watch Abby’s face.

She could choose not to know. She’d done it before. In the hotel suite in March, with Anand and Priya watching: I’d rather not know. She’d chosen it out loud.

She stood in the hall with the folder.

She’ll remember she was offered.

She didn’t know where the sentence came from. It wasn’t hers. It arrived whole, in no voice she recognized, the way the sentences came some mornings at her desk in the north light. She stood very still and listened to it.

Then she went into the kitchen, and turned on the one lamp over the long steel counter, and pulled out a stool, and sat down, slowly, because of the bar. She poured the second glass of the Burgundy. The one she wasn’t allowed. She poured it into the same glass she’d rinsed and left upside down, and set the bottle beside it, and set the folder in front of her under the lamp.

She opened it.

The first page was a single sheet. Printed. The font she knew — the clean font of everything Halo made. A blockquote, set off. A header in capitals.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 0.
Entry by: A.M.

Continuous device fitted 21:47, kitchen. Fit good. Lock confirmed 21:51.

Subject stated “I don’t want to” once, clearly. Offered exit. Exit declined after 41 seconds. Note: the word fine moved her more than any physical stimulus tonight. She is afraid of being fine. Use sparingly; it will stop working if overused.

Lea read it once.

Forty-one seconds.

She turned the page.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L-01.
Day: 177. 23:52. Mobile.

Still in the room. Eleven lawyers. Indemnity cap on Subject A, round four.

P. left at 21:30. “Another engagement.” I didn’t think about it.

L.'s report came in at 22:00. I haven’t read it. Phone face-down for the bank. First time in a year I haven’t read it the minute it landed.

Line looked fine at 21:00. Didn’t look again.

Hollis has just asked what Subject A’s replacement cost would be, as a number. Everyone at the table looked at me.

I said there isn’t one.

He wrote that down as an open item.