The observation room was the size of a closet.

Lea had drafted the lease rider that created it — Suite 4B, procedure room with adjoining observation alcove, one-way glazing to ASTM spec — and had never been inside it. It was dark. That was the first thing. Dark on purpose, painted black on all four walls, so that nothing on this side of the glass would show on the other. Two chairs, black. A narrow black shelf under the window, with a clipboard on it and a pen on a beaded chain. A speaker grille in the ceiling. And the window itself: six feet wide, four high, perfectly clear, so clean it seemed not to be there at all, so that the procedure room on the other side looked close enough to touch. Bright. White. Every surface lit.

On their side it was night. On his side it was noon.

“Sit,” said Abby.

Lea sat. Slowly, because of the bar. Abby had put the short bar on her that morning in the kitchen, without explanation — the rigid swivel bar, a hand’s width, locked between the permanent bands at the tops of her thighs — and a full skirt over it, navy, to the knee, and Lea had understood, as the bolt went home, that she was meant to sit through this with her thighs held open. That whatever happened behind the glass, she would not be able to press her legs together against it.

The rings were at one. They had been at one since six.

Abby sat beside her. Not close. Abby had her tablet face-up on her knee, and on it, Lea could see, sideways, the familiar line — her line, her heart rate, her conductance, the slow grey wave of her pelvic floor. Abby wasn’t going to watch Craig. Lea had known that since the dinner. I want to see your face when she does.

On the other side of the glass, the procedure room was empty except for the table.

It was not the back room’s table. It was harder. Black vinyl, not leather. A steel frame. Stirrup sections for the legs, hinged wide. Straps — Lea counted — at the forehead, the chest, the upper arms, the wrists, the waist, the thighs, the knees, the ankles. A second, separate strap low across the hips, with a gap at the center. A steel tray on a rolling stand, covered with a blue cloth. A monitor on an arm. A stool. And, set back from the table by about eight feet, facing it, a single upholstered chair. Dark green velvet. Lea had never seen it before. It didn’t belong in a procedure room. Someone had brought it in.

She looked down at the clipboard.

HALO BIOMETRIC — HCM-2 PHASE I

Fitting Record — Configuration B (Keyholder-Elected)
Participant: WHITFORD, C. A. — ID M-10
Keyholder: WARD, P.
Clinician: ANAND, P.
Legal witness: CALLOWAY, L.

Below it, a numbered list. A box beside each line for her initials.

1. Participant identity and consent confirmed
2. Withdrawal procedure explained
3. Examination and measurement
4. Restraint applied
5. Anchor piercing exchanged
6. Urethral element placed
7. Base ring fitted and locked
8. Element function test (haptic / electrical)
9. Rear module placed
10. Keyholder calibration session
11. Keyholder interview (participant)
12. Configuration B enclosure fitted
13. Maintenance procedure (initial)
14. Keys transferred to keyholder

She read it twice. She’d drafted this form in March — the template, the numbering, the font. She knew every line on it.

Except eleven.

Eleven was in the same font, the same size, perfectly aligned. But it hadn’t been there in March. There had been thirteen steps in March. Somebody had opened her template and added a line between calibration and enclosure and renumbered the rest, cleanly, so cleanly that you’d never know unless you’d written the original.

Keyholder interview (participant).

“Abby.”

Abby looked at the clipboard. Looked at eleven. Lea watched her see it — watched something very small happen at the hinge of her jaw.

“Initial what you witness,” Abby said. “Nothing else.”

At 8:58 the door on the far side of the procedure room opened, and the ceiling speaker clicked, and the room came in.

It came in loud. That was the shock of it. Lea had expected a tinny, distant intercom — a voice through a box. Instead it was as if the glass had dissolved. Footsteps on the vinyl floor. The squeak of the door’s closer. Somebody’s breath. The faint electrical hum of the monitor. All of it, close, clear, present, as if she were standing in the corner of the room with them.

Priya came in first, with her laptop, and set up at a side bench without looking at the glass. Then Dr. Anand, in navy scrubs, washing her hands at the sink with her back to the window. Then a young woman Lea didn’t know — mid-twenties, tall, hair scraped back hard, black scrubs, black nitrile gloves already on — who went and stood by the tray with her gloved hands clasped in front of her and her eyes on the floor, and did not move again, and did not speak.

Then Craig.

He came in in a paper gown and hospital socks, holding the back of the gown closed with one hand, grinning. He was talking — to Priya, to the room, to no one — the easy, over-friendly, slightly too-loud chatter of a man in a paper gown who’s decided to be a good sport about it. “Morning, morning. So this is where the magic happens. Bit chilly. Do I just—? Where do you want me?”

Nobody answered him.

He stopped grinning, a little.

And then Pauline Ward came in behind him and closed the door.

She was in dark green again. A dress, simple, with a narrow belt; the reading glasses on their cord; low green pumps that made no sound at all on the floor. She was carrying nothing. She walked across the room past Craig without looking at him and sat down in the velvet chair, and crossed her legs, and folded her hands on her knee, and only then looked up — not at Craig, but past him, at the glass. At the black, blank mirror that was all she could see.

She looked at it for exactly as long as she’d looked at the dome in Lea’s office. One second. No expression.

Then she reached down beside the chair — there was a small panel in the wall there, Lea saw, at knee height, a single switch — and pressed it, and a small green light came on above the mirror.

“For the witness,” Pauline said, pleasantly, to no one.

Craig glanced at the mirror. Glanced away. “Is someone—?”

“Legal requires a witness for your configuration,” said Pauline. “Don’t mind it. Get on the table, Craig.”

1. Participant identity and consent confirmed.

Dr. Anand did it. Name, date of birth, participant ID, a question — “Have you had the opportunity to read and ask questions about the consent document?” — and Craig, sitting on the edge of the table in the paper gown with his bare feet dangling, said, “Yeah, yeah, all good,” and signed the tablet she held out to him without reading the screen.

Lea watched him sign it without reading it.

Four seconds, she thought. He took about four seconds.

She initialed the box. LC. Neat.

2. Withdrawal procedure explained.

Pauline did this one herself. From the chair. She didn’t raise her voice; the room was quiet enough not to need it.

“You have a word, Craig. It’s withdraw. One word. If you say it, at any point today, everything stops. Dr. Anand will remove every component that’s been fitted. You’ll be cleaned, dressed and walked to the lobby. You’ll leave the trial. You won’t be paid — not for today, not pro rata, nothing. Your data will be deleted. You’ll never hear from me or from this company again.” She paused. “That’s all it costs. Nothing else. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” said Craig. “Withdraw. Got it.”

“Say it back.”

He laughed. “Withdraw.”

“Good. That’s the only time you’ll say it today, I expect.” Pauline smiled. “Anything else you say — stop, wait, please, that hurts — I’ll hear, and I’ll consider, and I’ll most likely ignore. That word I won’t ignore. Not for a second. You have my word.”

You have my word. In the dark, Lea’s hands had closed on the edge of the shelf. If you want out — really out — you say Brennan. That’s the only word that works. Anything else I’ll ignore. Stop I’ll ignore. Please I’ll definitely ignore. Abby on the bedroom floor in October, with the bell in Lea’s fist. The same speech. Nearly word for word.

She looked at Abby. Abby was looking at the glass.

“She taught it to you,” Lea said. Very quietly.

Abby didn’t answer.

LC.

3. Examination and measurement.

“Gown off,” said Dr. Anand.

He took it off. He did it with a kind of shrugging bravado, a what the hell — stood up and pulled it off over his head and dropped it on the floor and stood there naked in the white light with his hands on his hips, because Craig had always handled embarrassment by pretending to be the first to laugh at it. Lea had seen him do it at the doctor’s, at the beach, at the hospital after his knee surgery, on their wedding night. She had loved him for it, once.

She looked at him now through the glass and felt nothing she had a name for.

He was heavier than he’d been in the marriage. Softer at the waist. The same chest hair, the same scar on his left shin from the bicycle. He’d been shaved — trimmed close and then shaved completely, everything, so his cock and balls hung bare and pale and oddly young-looking under the hard light. And through the head of his cock, Lea saw, there was already a ring. Small, steel, plain — a 2.4-millimeter healing ring through the underside of the glans and out through the tip. They’d pierced him at intake, three weeks ago. She’d initialed that form too.

Dr. Anand examined him the way she’d examined Lea in January: thoroughly, neutrally, without comment. Gloved hands. A soft paper tape. Steel calipers. She laid the tape along the top of his soft cock, pressing its end into the pad of fat at the base, and read it out the way she’d read out Lea’s cervix in January, to Priya, who typed.

“Flaccid length, eight point four centimeters.”

The tape went round the base of him. “Circumference at base, ten point two. Mid-shaft, nine point six.” The calipers, across the head. “Glans diameter, twenty-nine millimeters.”

She weighed his balls in her palm and held each one, in turn, against a string of graduated wooden beads — an orchidometer, Lea knew, from the spec; she’d had to look it up — rolling it between gloved fingers until she found the bead that matched. “Left testis, eighteen milliliters. Right, seventeen.” The tape again, under them. “Scrotal hang, at rest, seven centimeters.”

She drew the foreskin — there wasn’t one; he was cut — she checked the piercing, turning the ring gently, looking at the healing. Craig stood with his hands on his hips through all of it, looking at the ceiling, cracking a joke about cold hands that nobody laughed at.

And from the chair, Pauline commented.

Not much. A word here and there. Pleasantly. As if she were reading a wine list. At the base circumference: “Average.” At the glans: “Mm. Smaller than he’d like you to think.” At the eighteen milliliters: “Heavy. Good. There’ll be plenty to drain.” And at the very first number, when Dr. Anand had read the flaccid length aloud, before any of the others: “Eight point four.” A pause. “That’s about three and a quarter inches, Craig. Is that all?”

Craig’s ears went red. He laughed. “It’s cold in here.”

“So you said.” Pauline didn’t laugh. “Erect, please, Doctor. I’d like the full range.”

Dr. Anand glanced at her. “That’s not required for—”

“It’s required for my calibration. I’d like to see what I’m working with.” Pauline turned her head. “Ms. Ostrova.”

The young woman in the black gloves stepped forward. She didn’t look at Craig’s face. She took his cock in her gloved hand — not gently, not roughly, simply took it, the way you’d pick up an instrument — and began to stroke him. Even. Firm. Exactly the same speed every time, like a metronome. Her face had no expression on it at all.

Craig’s breath went out of him in a short, surprised laugh. “Whoa. Okay. Hi.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t look up. She stroked him.

It took about thirty seconds. Lea watched it — watched his cock thicken and lift and harden in the stranger’s black glove, under the white light, in front of the velvet chair and the mirror, the ring through the head of it tilting up as he rose — and watched his face, which had started out grinning and was, by the end of the thirty seconds, not grinning anymore. Flushed. Uncertain. A man who’d just realized that his body would do this for anyone, in front of anyone, and that everyone in the room now knew it.

You were wet, said the deposition voice, from very far back. In the hotel suite. In front of Priya. With the white pen.

Dr. Anand laid the tape along the top of him again, pressed into the base, and read it out flatly. “Erect length, fourteen point six centimeters.” The tape round the middle. “Erect circumference, twelve point one. Angle approximately thirty degrees above horizontal.”

“Five and three-quarter inches,” said Pauline. “Mm.” And nothing else.

But she made a note on the slim tablet in her lap, and Lea, who had read the HCM-2 sizing tables in March, did the arithmetic without wanting to. A man who measured eight point four soft and fourteen point six hard grew by nearly three-quarters. A grower. The tables had a column for that. It changed which enclosure the keyholder would order.

Ms. Ostrova let go. Stepped back. Clasped her gloved hands. Craig stood there with his cock standing out stiff in front of him, bobbing, wet at the tip, slowly realizing that nobody was going to touch it again, and the color climbed from his ears down his neck.

LC.

Lea’s initials had grown slightly larger.

4. Restraint applied.

“On the table,” said Pauline. “On your back.”

“Do I need the—” Craig looked at the straps. Laughed. “Are those really necessary? I’m not going anywhere.”

“They’re in the protocol.” Pauline’s voice didn’t change. “Lie down, Craig.”

He lay down. He was still half-hard. Dr. Anand and Ms. Ostrova strapped him, together, efficiently, in silence — forehead, chest, upper arms, wrists, waist — and then lifted his legs into the stirrup sections, one each, and strapped his thighs, his knees, his ankles, and then swung the stirrups wide on their hinges, and wider, until he was spread open on the table like a frog, his knees up and out, his balls hanging, his asshole exposed to the room and the light and the mirror. Then the hip strap, tight, low across the front of his hips, with the gap at the center that his cock and balls lay through.

He couldn’t move. Lea could see it — could see him test it, the way she’d tested the back room’s table the first time, a small flex of each limb against each strap, and then a bigger one, and the strap not giving at all. She saw the exact moment he understood. Saw his face go still.

“Bit much,” he said to the ceiling. His voice was half an octave higher. “Bit much, guys.”

“You’re doing very well,” said Pauline.

Lea’s hands were flat on the shelf. Her face was hot. Her pulse — she could hear it, in her ears, the way she’d heard it under the hood on the stage — was up. And under the navy skirt, with her thighs held open by the bar, she was —

She didn’t let herself finish the thought.

Beside her, on Abby’s tablet, the line had jumped. Abby looked at it. Abby didn’t say anything.

LC. The C trailed off the edge of the box.

5. Anchor piercing exchanged.

That one was short. Dr. Anand swapped the healing ring for the anchor — a thicker, heavier steel ring, four millimeters, fourteen in diameter, with a flat, machined bar across the inside of it, a slot — tapering the healed channel up from two point four to four with a steel insertion taper first, and Craig hissed through his teeth while she worked it through the healed channel in the head of his cock, and Pauline said, “Breathe,” exactly the way Dr. Anand had said it to Lea, and Lea, in the dark, flinched.

6. Urethral element placed.

Dr. Anand uncovered the tray.

It was laid out the way the back room’s tray had been laid out in January. Things in a row on blue cloth. Most of them Lea knew from the spec sheet: a slim steel rod, hollow, eight centimeters long and seven millimeters across, with a bore down its center no wider than a pencil lead, rounded at one end and flared at the other, with a fine machined eyelet at the flared end; a heavy steel ring, hinged, lined in black, forty-five millimeters inside; a lube syringe; a probe-shaped silicone module, dark grey, with a flared base and a short cable stub; small tools; gauze.

And at the far end of the tray, under a second, smaller fold of blue cloth, something else. A shape. Something about the size of a closed fist, under the cloth. Lea couldn’t see what it was.

She knew what it was.

Dr. Anand picked up the rod.

“Craig,” she said, “this is the urethral element. It goes into your urethra, through the tip. Eight centimeters. Seven millimeters across. It’s lubricated and sterile and smaller than your urethra; it will feel strange, and full, and you may feel an urge to urinate. That’s normal. It isn’t damaging. Breathe out slowly as it goes in.”

Craig had lifted his head as far as the forehead strap allowed — about an inch — to look. “In—? In in? Through the—”

“You read the consent,” said Pauline.

“I—” He stopped. “Yeah. I mean. Yeah.”

He hadn’t. Lea knew he hadn’t. She’d watched him sign it in four seconds.

Dr. Anand lubricated the rod. She took his cock in her gloved hand — he’d softened, now, almost completely, from fear — and held it upright by the head, and set the rounded tip of the rod into the slit beside the steel ring, and began, very slowly, to feed it in.

Craig made a sound Lea had never heard him make in nine years of marriage. Not pain, exactly. Something higher and thinner than pain. A long, appalled, involuntary oh, through his teeth, as the steel slid into the head of his cock and kept going, down, inside, a centimeter at a time. His hips jerked against the hip strap. His hands, strapped at the wrists, opened and closed. “Oh — oh fuck — oh God, that’s — that’s—”

“Breathe out,” said Dr. Anand.

“What is that—”

“Breathe out, Craig,” said Pauline, from the chair, quite gently. “You’ll feel it in your bladder in a moment. That’s just where it is.”

He breathed out, shuddering. The rod went in. All of it, until only the flared end showed, resting in the slit at the tip of his cock — and then Dr. Anand took a tiny driver and threaded the eyelet at the flared end onto the bar across the inside of the anchor ring, and turned something, and there was a small, precise click.

The rod was locked into him. Through the ring. There was no way for it to come out now without the tool.

“Element seated,” said Dr. Anand.

On the monitor on its arm, a small new readout appeared. Lea couldn’t read it from here. Priya, at the side bench, said, “Element one, online,” without looking up, in exactly the voice the hood had used, in the hotel suite, in March. Element zero-one. Left nipple. Online.

Lea’s breasts tightened in their rings. Not the rings — her. Her own body, flinching around the steel, the way it had learned to flinch.

LC. The L had gone wobbly.

7. Base ring fitted and locked.

The hinged ring went behind his balls. Dr. Anand opened it on its hinge and fitted it around the base of his cock and under his balls, gathering them through, and closed it, flush against his body, and the seam clicked — the same small, final sound as Lea’s breast rings, as her labia rings, as every lock that had ever closed on her. Then she connected it — a short, rigid steel link from the ring to the flared end of the rod, so the ring and the rod and the piercing were all one piece. One unit. Locked to him at the root and the tip and through the middle.

Craig lay on the table breathing hard through his nose, staring at the ceiling, with his cock lying soft and bound and threaded on steel between his spread thighs, the ring at the base, the rod inside him, the anchor through the head. It looked, Lea thought, like a piece of jewelry. Like something precious, mounted. Like hers.

He thought that was it. She could see it in his face — the relief. He thought that was the device. Ring, piercing, rod. Wearable thing. He thought he’d gotten through it. He even laughed, shakily. “Okay. Okay, that’s — wow. That’s intense. Okay. Is that—? Are we—?”

“Not quite,” said Pauline. “Priya. Function test, please.”

8. Element function test (haptic / electrical).

“Haptic,” said Priya, and pressed a key.

Inside the base ring, something started to hum. Lea could hear it through the speaker — a low, buzzing, insect drone — and Craig’s whole body jerked against the straps. “Ah — ah — what — what is that—”

“Base ring vibration, thirty percent,” said Priya. “Fifty.”

The hum rose. Craig’s hips strained up against the hip strap. Lea watched his cock — soft a moment ago — begin, helplessly, to thicken, the vibration buzzing into the root of it and up through his balls. “Oh, fuck, okay, okay—”

“Constriction,” said Priya. “Two.”

The ring tightened. Lea saw it — saw the hinged steel draw in, at the base of him, the way her own breast rings drew in, a millimeter, two. And his cock, already swelling from the vibration, now couldn’t empty. It thickened faster. Darkened. Stood up off his belly, rising on the rod, the anchor ring at the tip catching the light, the whole thing swelling up hard and tight and flushed around the steel inside it.

“Four,” said Pauline, from the chair.

“Four,” said Priya.

Craig groaned. Long, low, astonished. His cock was fully hard now and the ring was squeezing at the base of it and it was going purple, dusky, thick, the veins standing out, so hard it trembled with his pulse. “Oh God, oh God, that’s — that’s — fuck, that’s—”

“Good?” said Pauline.

“I—” He was panting. “I don’t — yeah, fuck, yeah, it’s—”

“Electrical,” said Pauline. “Level one.”

Priya pressed a key.

Craig screamed.

It was short. A second — less. A single, sharp, bright crack of current through the rod, through the inside of his cock, down the length of it from the tip to the root — and Craig’s whole body slammed against the straps so hard the table shook, every muscle locked, his back arching off the vinyl as far as the chest strap allowed, his head snapping against the forehead band, his mouth wide. Then it stopped, and he dropped back onto the table, gasping, and his cock — which had been rock-hard a second before — sagged. Not all the way. Half. Shocked out of itself.

“Level one,” said Priya, neutrally. “Pass.”

In the dark, Lea had both hands over her mouth.

Corrective. She knew it. Not the same — not in her, not her nipple or her tongue — but she knew it. The jolt on the stage, through the left bar, that had made her scream into the ring gag in front of two hundred people. She’d felt exactly that. That clean, white, total crack. The way your whole body becomes nothing but the place where it hits.

She felt it again now, watching him — not in her body, in her memory of her body — and between her spread thighs, under the navy skirt, her cunt clenched hard on nothing.

“Well,” said Pauline, pleasantly, as Craig lay gasping. “That all works.”

LC. Barely. A scrawl.

9. Rear module placed.

“No,” said Craig, when he saw it. “No — wait, hang on, that’s not—”

Dr. Anand had picked up the grey silicone probe. It was not small. Tapered, curved upward at the end, with a broad, flared base and the short cable stub.

“Hang on — nobody said anything about — I’m not— that’s not—”

“Section four,” said Pauline. “Optional rear module.”

“Optional! It said optional—”

“Optional for the keyholder,” said Pauline. “I’ve opted.” She tilted her head. “You can always say the word, Craig. You know which one.”

Silence. Craig lay on the table, spread and strapped and threaded, breathing very hard, staring at the ceiling.

He didn’t say it.

Lea watched him not say it. Watched his mouth open — and close. Watched him decide. Something in his face, the old jaw-set, the I can handle it — she knew that face. He’d worn it the morning after she’d found out about the affair, the Thursday night, standing in their kitchen saying it’s not what you think, I can explain, I can handle this. She’d left on the Friday.

He didn’t say withdraw.

“Good,” said Pauline. “Doctor.”

Dr. Anand lubricated the probe and lubricated him — two gloved fingers, quick, clinical, pressing in, and he made a small, choked, humiliated sound and his whole face went red — and then set the tip of the probe against his asshole and pushed it in. Steady. Slow. Inexorable. He gasped, and swore, and his hips jerked against the strap, and it kept going, the widest part stretching him, his face contorted, until it was past and his body closed on the narrow neck of it and the flared base settled snug against him.

Craig lay panting. Then he made a different sound — lower, startled, almost a whimper — and his half-hard cock jerked on its rod.

“That’s the prostate,” said Dr. Anand. “It sits against it. You’ll feel it there.”

“I — fuck — I can feel — it’s—”

“You’ll feel it a great deal,” said Pauline. “Module online, Priya.”

“Rear module, online.”

“Seat it,” said Pauline.

Dr. Anand took a short steel piece from the tray — a rigid link, a few inches long, curved to follow the line of his body, with a socket at one end and a small machined stud at the other. She fitted the socket over a lug on the flared base of the probe, where it sat against him, and turned it a quarter-turn until it caught. Then she bent the link forward, along the shaved skin behind his balls, up the seam of his perineum, and pressed its other end against the underside of the base ring, where — Lea saw it now — there had been a matching stud all along.

Click.

Craig felt it. Lea watched him feel it — the probe drawn up and in, held, pinned against him from outside by steel that ran forward to the ring around his cock and balls. He tried to clench. Nothing moved.

“Neck expansion,” said Dr. Anand, to Priya. “Plus four millimeters.”

Something hummed, very faintly, inside him. The narrow neck of the probe — the part his body had closed around — began to thicken. Slowly. Stretching him open again from the inside, where he’d just tightened. Craig’s mouth opened. A long, thin breath came out of it.

“Plus four,” said Priya. “Holding.”

“Bulb,” said Dr. Anand. “Plus six.”

And the wide, buried head of the probe — the part already past his sphincter, the part pressed on his prostate — swelled. Lea could see nothing of it; it was inside him. She could see it in his face. His eyes flew wide. His belly tensed. A low, appalled groan dragged out of him, rising, as the thing in him grew fatter, and fatter, pressing outward, filling him, pushing harder against the gland it sat on, until it was far too wide to pass back the way it had come. His hips tried to lift. They couldn’t. “Oh God — oh God, it’s — it’s getting — it’s bigger —”

“Plus six,” said Priya. “Holding.”

“It’s seated,” said Dr. Anand. “It can’t be expelled. It can’t come out without the link released from the ring and the expansion reversed.” She glanced at Pauline. “Both are keyholder functions.”

“So they are,” said Pauline.

Craig lay there breathing hard, filled and pinned and stretched, the steel link running up between his thighs from the plug to the ring, and Lea watched him understand that it was all one thing now. Ring, rod, piercing, plug. One piece. Locked to him at the root and the tip and through the middle and from behind.

It wasn’t coming out today. Maybe not for a long time.

Lea’s own plug. Part One. The disabled stall on twenty-nine. Request release. Pending. Denied. Approved on the third polite ask. The way her body had stopped belonging to her one sphincter at a time.

She initialed the box. She couldn’t feel the pen.

10. Keyholder calibration session.

Pauline uncrossed her legs, recrossed them the other way, and settled back in the velvet chair.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s find out who you are.”

She didn’t touch him. She never moved from the chair. She did all of it with her voice — single words, quiet, unhurried, to Priya or to Ms. Ostrova or to no one — and with a small slim tablet that had appeared in her lap, which she tapped occasionally without looking down. And the room did what she said.

“Ring. Vibration, forty. Constriction, three.”

The ring hummed and squeezed and Craig’s cock rose on its rod again, swelling, darkening, standing up off his belly. He groaned. His hips tried to lift against the strap.

“Ms. Ostrova.”

The black glove closed round him.

And the edging began.

Lea would never be able to say afterward how long it lasted. The clock on the wall of the procedure room said 9:52 when it started. She stopped looking at it.

It went like this. The glove stroked him — even, firm, unvarying, the metronome stroke, from the base ring to just below the anchor at the head and back down, the rod inside him rigid under the glove, so that every stroke must have pressed it against him from the inside — and the ring hummed and squeezed at his root, and the probe sat on his prostate, and Craig climbed. Fast. Faster than Lea had ever seen him climb, in nine years, in their bed. Within a minute he was panting. Within two he was groaning on every stroke. His hips pushed up into the glove as far as the strap allowed, which was nowhere; his thighs shook in the stirrups; his cock was so swollen and dark that Lea could see it throbbing in the glove from eight feet away and a pane of glass.

“Oh God — oh God — I’m — I’m gonna — I’m gonna—”

“Stop,” said Pauline.

The glove let go. Instantly. Ms. Ostrova stepped back and clasped her hands.

And at the same instant, Priya pressed a key, and the ring went silent, and loosened — opened to zero — so that the blood that had been held in him drained out in a rush, and the probe went still, and there was nothing.

Nothing at all. No touch. No hum. No squeeze. Just air, and the white light, and the room watching him.

Craig howled. His cock jerked on its rod in the empty air, once, twice, swollen and slick and twitching, reaching for the glove that wasn’t there, and nothing came, and nothing touched it, and it throbbed and throbbed on nothing and then — slowly, as the blood drained — began to sink.

“No — no no no — fuck — please, I was right there, I was right there—”

“I know,” said Pauline. “That’s why I stopped.”

She let him lie there. Thirty seconds. A minute. Craig sobbing for breath, spread on the table, his cock half-down, wet, red, still twitching.

Then: “Again.”

The ring hummed. The glove closed. He rose.

It went on. That was all it did. It went on. Pauline never varied her voice and never raised it and never moved from the chair, and she brought him up, and stopped him, and brought him up, and stopped him. Sometimes she stopped him by taking everything away — the glove gone, the ring open, the probe silent, nothing but empty air — and he’d buck and howl at the nothing. And sometimes — without pattern, with no warning, so that he could never know which it would be — she stopped him with a word to Priya. “Corrective.” And the current cracked through the rod inside his cock, through the inside of it, at the very edge, at the instant before, and he’d scream and slam against the straps and his cock would sag in the glove as if it had been punched.

“Corrective” was one word. He learned to dread it in less than ten minutes. Lea watched him learn it. Watched him reach the edge, gasping, begging, and then — in the last second before Pauline spoke — flinch. His whole body bracing, his eyes squeezing shut, waiting to find out if it would be nothing or the shock. Waiting for her to choose.

Your body learned to flinch before the squeeze, said the deposition voice. Ten days. It took you ten days. It’s taken him ten minutes.

The probe joined in at the fourth edge. “Rear module. Twenty.” And it began to pulse inside him — a slow, deep, thrumming beat against his prostate — and Craig made a sound Lea had never heard a man make, high and broken and wordless, and his cock jerked in the glove and leaked, a long clear string from the tip around the rod, onto his belly.

At the seventh edge, Pauline did it with the probe alone.

“Ms. Ostrova. Hands away.”

The glove left him. The ring went silent. And only the probe stayed on — pulsing, deep, against his prostate — with nothing touching his cock at all. And Craig lay there with his cock standing up untouched on its rod in the white air, throbbing, leaking, swelling, and climbed. Slower. Agonizingly slower. From the inside. Lea watched him climb with nothing on him, nothing to push against, nothing he could do — watched him start to beg for the glove, beg for the ring, beg for anything on his cock, anything at all — while the probe thrummed inside him and walked him, inch by inch, toward the edge from a direction he’d never come from before.

“Please — please touch it — please, please, someone, please touch it—”

“No,” said Pauline.

He got there. Untouched. Right to the top of it, his whole body shaking in the straps, his cock jerking alone in the air.

“Corrective.”

He screamed.

Lea didn’t know when she’d started crying. She noticed only that her face was wet, and that her hands were pressed flat on the black shelf on either side of the clipboard, and that she was leaning forward, toward the glass, as close as the bar between her thighs would let her, and that she couldn’t stop looking.

That’s my face, she thought.

It was. That was what she couldn’t get past. Not that it was Craig — she had stopped, somewhere around the fourth edge, being able to hold onto the fact that it was Craig. It wasn’t Craig on the table. It was her. It was her face, in the back room, in October, in the hood, on the table with the machine. It was her face in the hotel ballroom with two hundred people watching. The begging, the flinching, the way the eyes squeezed shut before the stop. The way the whole body learned, in minutes, to reach for the thing that hurt it. She’d never seen it from the outside. She’d never known what it looked like.

It looked like this. It looked like an animal in a trap that kept putting its leg back in.

And her body — her body was answering.

She was soaked. She could feel it — the navy skirt, the bar holding her thighs apart, the cool air of the dark room on her open, swollen, dripping cunt. Her clit was throbbing against the triangle bar. Her nipples were standing hard around the tourmaline under her blouse and her breasts were aching in their rings, at one, at nothing, and she wanted — God help her — she wanted. Watching him. Watching the glove. Watching Pauline say stop. She was wetter than she’d been since the stage, and she hated it, and she hated herself, and none of the hating made the slightest difference to how wet she was.

She looked down. At the clipboard. At her own initials — LC, LC, LC — going down the page. The first one, at identity confirmed, small and neat and perfectly formed: the initials of a lawyer. Then larger. Then wobbly. Then a scrawl. The C at calibration — she’d made it without looking — was a single jagged hook that went right through the edge of the box.

She was signing her own record. She could see it degrading down the page, one box at a time, in her own hand.

Beside her, Abby hadn’t moved.

Abby was holding the tablet on her knee. She was watching Lea’s line — Lea could see it, from the corner of her eye, climbing and climbing, heart rate, conductance, the pelvic-floor wave that had started, somewhere around the probe, to pulse. Clenching. In rhythm. In rhythm with the glove.

Abby didn’t say anything. She didn’t touch the screen. She didn’t ruin her, or squeeze the rings, or tap the ring at the top of her.

She reached over in the dark, without looking, and put her hand flat on top of Lea’s hand on the shelf.

That was all. Her palm on the back of Lea’s hand. Not a caress. Not a grip. Just — there. Pressing down. Holding Lea’s hand on the shelf.

Lea turned her head and stared at her.

Abby was looking at the glass. Her face, in the dark, lit faintly white from the procedure room, was perfectly composed. Perfectly cold. Her jaw was tight.

Her hand was shaking.

Only slightly. Only enough for Lea to feel it, through the back of her own hand. A fine, steady tremor. And Lea understood — in the dark, with her ex-husband screaming through the ceiling speaker and her cunt dripping onto the seat of the black chair — that Abby wasn’t holding her hand to comfort her.

Abby was holding on.

“Stop,” said Pauline.

It was the eleventh edge, or the twelfth. The glove let go. The ring opened. The probe went still.

And Pauline, for the first time since she’d sat down, stood up.

She walked across the procedure room, unhurried, the green pumps soundless on the vinyl, and stopped beside the table, by Craig’s head. Not touching him. She never touched. She stood looking down at him — at his red, wet, wrecked face; at his eyes, rolling, unfocused; at his chest heaving under the strap; at his cock, swollen and purple and leaking on its steel rod, throbbing in the empty air, so close, so close, the last edge still guttering in it.

Craig looked up at her. His lips moved. “Please.” Barely a sound. “Please. Please. Please. Let me. Please. Anything. I’ll do anything. Please.”

“Anything,” Pauline repeated, thoughtfully.

She glanced up — once — at the mirror. At the black glass. At Lea.

Then she bent down, close to his ear, the reading glasses swinging on their cord, and said, in a voice so soft that only the ceiling speaker caught it — that only Lea and Abby, in the dark, could hear it:

“Craig. I’d like to ask you something.”

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Day: 90. 10:41.

Typing this on the tablet in the dark. She doesn’t know.

P. added a line to L.'s template. Item 11. Keyholder interview. Same font. L. found it in nine seconds.

P. used my words. The withdrawal speech. Nearly verbatim. I learned it from her. I’d forgotten I learned it from her.

L.: HR 141. Conductance off scale. PF pulsing in time with Ostrova’s hand — 0.9 s interval, locked. She’s crying. She’s soaked through the skirt.

I haven’t touched the platform. I’m not going to. Not today.

I put my hand on hers.

I don’t know what P. is going to ask him. I know what I’d ask.

I’d ask the thing she’s never told me.