Halo Biometric occupied the top three floors of a converted textile mill on the east side, all brick and steel and frosted glass, and on her first day Lea was given a badge, a laptop, a corner office with north light and a door that locked from the inside, a small black dome in the ceiling she never looked at, and a stack of FDA correspondence eighteen inches high. Under her blouse, against her throat, a fine gunmetal chain with a padlock for a clasp. People complimented it. Nobody looked at her twice. To sixty employees she was the new general counsel, a serious woman in good suits who had come from a serious firm, and if she walked a little carefully, or sat a little carefully, or sometimes stopped in the middle of a corridor with one hand on the wall and her eyes closed, nobody mentioned it.

The demo was on the Saturday of her first week. Day eighty.

Abby told her about it on Friday night, at the kitchen island, the way she’d told her about everything. Matter of fact. Already decided.

“Verity Wellness. They distribute in forty countries. Two of their people are flying in — their CEO, Marguerite Okafor, and their head of product. They’ve seen the specs. They’ve seen the trial data. They want to see it work.” She sipped her coffee. “On a person.”

Lea set her fork down.

“Priya will be there,” Abby went on. “My lead engineer. She’ll run the telemetry and watch your vitals the whole time. Everyone’s under NDA. Everyone knows exactly what they’re there to see — they’re in the business, Lea; this is what they do. And nobody will see your face. Nobody will ever know who you are.”

“No.”

“You’ll be hooded the whole time. You’ll be—”

“No, Abby. I’m not doing it. I’m not being — displayed — in front of strangers—”

“You already volunteered.” Abby set her cup down. “On your knees. In your own words. Paragraph six.” She let that sit. “Take it back if you like. That’s a broken rule. That’s December’s vesting — I’ll tell you the number, it’s a nice one.” A small pause. “And then I’ll show them your data instead. Eighty days of it. Every edge, every Wednesday, the cushion, the night Daniel came for dinner. Anonymized, of course.” Another pause, longer. “Mostly. It’s very distinctive data. Pauline Ward sits on Verity’s board.”

Lea stared at her.

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s the alternative.” Abby picked the coffee back up. “You don’t have to like it. You only have to pick.”

Lea sat at the island for a long time. Her pulse was going. She knew Abby could see it, and she knew Abby was letting her watch her see it.

“I’ll do it,” she said, finally, and hated the way her voice sounded. Small. Already obedient.

“Say it properly.”

“I’d like to volunteer for the demo tomorrow.”

“Thank you.” Abby slid her plate back toward her. “Eat. You’ll need it.”

The lab was on the top floor, at the back, behind a door with a keypad. It was white and clinical and very bright, and in the middle of it was a chair.

It was not quite a dentist’s chair and not quite an examination table. Reclined, padded black, with arm boards that angled out from the sides and leg rests that split and raised and spread, and at every joint a strap: upper arms, forearms, wrists, waist, thighs, knees, ankles. A padded headrest with a steel ring at its center. Beside it, a cart of monitors. Across from it, at a polite distance, chairs arranged in a shallow arc, with bottles of water set on the floor beside them.

Priya was already there — a small, brisk woman in her thirties with her hair scraped back — and she nodded to Lea without curiosity, as though Lea were a piece of equipment that had arrived on schedule. Lea, in a robe, her hair still wet from the shower Abby had supervised, stood in the doorway and could not make her feet move.

“Robe,” Abby said.

She took it off. She stood naked in a bright white lab in front of a woman she had never met, wearing only a gunmetal shield and a thick leather collar, and Priya glanced at her once, assessing, the way a nurse glances at a patient, and went back to her monitors.

“In the chair.”

The straps went on one by one. Abby did the arms; Priya did the legs, quick and professional, checking each strap with two fingers. The leg rests rose and parted, and parted further, until Lea’s thighs were spread wide and her hips were tilted up toward the empty arc of chairs, and the strap across her waist cinched her flat to the padding. Then her head was pressed back into the headrest and the collar’s back ring clicked onto the steel ring there, and she could no longer lift it at all.

“Insert,” Priya said.

Abby unlocked the shield. The air of the lab hit her, cold, and Lea flinched against every strap. Priya handed over the insert — the thick curved one from the night Daniel came — already lubed, its lead sheathed in clear tubing that ran to the cart, and Abby worked it into her cunt slowly, seating its curved head hard against her G-spot, while Priya watched a screen and said, “Contractions logging. Good signal.” The shield went back over it. The plug was already docked; the app had ordered it at six that morning and had not released it since. Priya clipped a sensor to Lea’s finger, pressed electrodes to her chest, cinched a band around her upper arm.

“Bit gag, I think,” Abby said. “She drools on the ball.”

The bit went between her teeth and the leather panel buckled tight over her mouth. Lea’s breath went fast and high through her nose.

“Easy.” Abby held the hood where Lea could see it. “Nose ports. Nothing over the airway. Priya has your pulse ox on screen the entire time, and if it so much as dips, she stops everything. That’s her job, not mine. She doesn’t care about the sale.” She pressed the brass bell into Lea’s strapped right hand and closed her fingers over it. “Drop it, and everything stops. Priya will hear it. Priya stops it — not me. She’s been told, and she’ll do it whatever I say. Do you understand?”

Lea nodded as far as the collar allowed. The bell rang faintly.

“Good.” Abby leaned in, close enough that Priya couldn’t hear. “And if you drop it, the Verity people go home, and they don’t sign, and sixty people who don’t know your name lose the year they’ve been working for. I’d want you to be very sure.”

The hood went on. The laces drew tight. The world went black.

She heard them come in. Footsteps. A woman’s voice, low and dry, saying Well — just the one word. A man clearing his throat. Chairs scraping. Abby’s voice, in its investor register, warm and smooth: Thank you both for coming out. Can I get you anything? No? Then let’s begin.

Lea lay in the dark with her legs spread wide toward them.

“What you’re looking at,” Abby said, “is the Halo Continuous system, consumer configuration, on a subject who has been in uninterrupted wear for eighty days.”

“Eighty,” the woman repeated. Okafor. “Continuous?”

“Removed twice a week, under supervision, for hygiene. Never for more than an hour. Never unlocked by the subject. The subject has not had an orgasm in eighty days.”

A pause. Lea felt it on her skin, every millimeter of it. She felt them looking.

“Screen two,” Abby said. “Live telemetry. Heart rate, HRV, skin conductance, core temperature from the rear module, pelvic floor activity from the insert. Priya — baseline?”

“Resting seventy-four,” Priya said. “Pre-trial resting was sixty-four.”

“So her floor has risen ten beats,” Abby said. “We see it in every long-duration subject. The body stops coming down. We call it baseline drift. For your market, it’s the selling point.”

The man — the head of product — asked about battery life. Abby answered. He asked about materials. She answered that. He asked about the lock, and Abby explained the tamper lockout, the seventy-two hours, the physical and authenticated keys. She did all of it, Lea could tell by her voice, standing directly between Lea’s spread knees.

“Let’s show them the haptics.”

It came from inside her first. The insert, low and deep, a single slow throb that went through her like a struck bell — and her whole body jerked against the straps, and the straps held, and the only movement she could make was a shudder from her ankles to her collar and a muffled grunt through the bit. Inside the hood her own breathing roared.

“Contraction,” Priya said. “There. And there.”

“Now the external.” The tap on her clit, through the lining, precise as a fingertip. Again. Then the rolling flutter, and the insert in counterpoint, and Lea was climbing — fast, so fast, eighty days fast — the edge coming up at her blind and enormous in the dark with strangers watching it come —

“This is what we wanted you to see,” Abby said, and her voice did not even quicken. “The threshold algorithm. Priya.”

“Engaging.”

And it changed. Lea didn’t understand how, at first. It didn’t stop. It eased — a fraction, exactly a fraction — and then came back, and eased, and came back, and she was at the edge, right at it, the wave cresting and cresting, and it wasn’t breaking and it wasn’t receding. It held her there. It read her. Every time her body tipped toward over, the device felt it before she did and pulled back by exactly enough, and every time she began to slide down it pressed in again. She hung there. She hung there and hung there, rigid in the straps, a long thin continuous keening leaking out around the gag that she could not stop.

“The system predicts climax from the combined signal,” Abby said, “four to six seconds before the subject would. It modulates to hold her at approximately ninety-five percent. Indefinitely, if we choose.”

“Indefinitely,” Okafor said.

“We’ve held her for twenty-six minutes in testing. Battery isn’t the limit. She is.”

The man said, “Is she — is she all right?”

“Pulse one thirty-one,” Priya said, flatly. “SpO2 ninety-eight. She’s fine. She’s holding the bell.”

“She’s holding the bell,” Abby agreed.

Lea, in the dark, held the bell. Her hand was slick with sweat and her fingers were cramping around it, and every time her body convulsed against the straps she felt the little brass ball shift toward slipping. She thought about sixty people. She thought about Pauline Ward. She thought — she couldn’t stop herself — about Abby standing between her knees, watching her, and about how Abby’s voice had not changed at all, not once, and that thought did something in her that the machine felt before she did and pulled back from.

“Contraction spike,” Priya said. “Held.”

“Does the subject know who we are?” Okafor asked. Curious. Clinical.

“The subject knows nothing I haven’t told her,” Abby said.

Then, much closer — her mouth almost against the leather over Lea’s ear, so quietly no one else could hear:

“They’re going to sign. Because of you. Because of how good you look like this.”

The machine held her through the rest of it. Pricing tiers. Regulatory classification — Lea’s own work, she realized distantly; the FDA strategy they were discussing was the memo she’d drafted on Wednesday. Distribution exclusivity. A Q3 launch. It went on for twenty minutes, then thirty. Somewhere in it Lea stopped making noise. She had no breath left for it. She lay strapped and open and hooded at ninety-five percent and held the bell and listened to her own body being sold.

She didn’t hear them leave. The hood was too thick and her pulse was too loud. She only knew they were gone when the machine released her, all at once, and the wave she’d been hanging from for thirty-four minutes collapsed — not over, never over, but down, a slow agonizing sinking — and she sobbed into the gag in great heaving gulps while somebody unclipped the sensor from her finger.

The hood came off. The lights were blinding. Priya was unbuckling her ankles, efficient, not looking at her face.

“Thirty-four minutes,” Priya said, to the strap she was undoing. “That’s a record. Good data.” She gathered her laptop, nodded to Abby, and left.

Abby unbuckled the gag. She didn’t touch the shield. She didn’t unclip the collar from the headrest, either, so Lea lay there with her arms and waist still strapped, her legs freed and shaking, unable to lift her head, staring up into the white light with tears running into her ears.

“They signed,” Abby said. “Letter of intent. Okafor did it in the hallway.” She was coiling the insert’s cable neatly around her hand. “She asked if the subject would be available for their regional sales meeting in March. I said I’d have to check.”

Lea couldn’t speak.

“I’m checking,” Abby said.

“Please,” Lea managed. It came out a croak. “Please, Abby. I can’t — not again — not in front of—”

“March is a long way off.” Abby set the cable on the cart. She looked down at Lea, strapped and wrecked and wide open in the chair, for a long, unhurried time. “And by March there’ll be the second product.”

“The—” Lea’s voice cracked. “What second product?”

Abby didn’t answer. She unclipped the collar from the headrest, finally, and unbuckled the waist strap, and then the arms, one at a time, checking each wrist for color.

“Get dressed,” she said. “We’re going home. I’ve decided something.”