Dana’s guest room had a quilt their grandmother had made, a window over the side yard, and a framed photograph of Sofia at four years old in a bee costume. Lea slept fourteen hours under the quilt, on her back, with her legs held open a hand’s width by the long bar, because she couldn’t sleep any other way. It didn’t occur to her until she woke that no one had told her to.

It was half past six in the evening. The light was going amber on the bee costume. Downstairs she could hear the television, and Sofia arguing with her father about a math worksheet, and a pan on the stove.

She lay still and took inventory. She’d been doing it every morning for a year, on the rug, aloud. She did it now in silence, to the ceiling.

The platform, at the top of her: seated, silent, listening. The rings at the base of her breasts: two. Pauline’s two. The bands on her thighs. The bar between them. The tongue bar, the nipple bars with their black stones, the rings in her labia, the triangle under her clit. No collar. She put her hand to her throat and found skin, and kept her hand there.

No phone. She had no phone. She lay under her grandmother’s quilt and understood, slowly, that no one on earth knew where she was except the three people downstairs. No line. No app. No Request release. No one would read her report tonight, because there was no one to send it to.

She waited to feel free.

She felt like a file that had been taken out of a cabinet and set down on a desk in the wrong building.

Rob cut the bar on the second morning.

Dana asked him to. Lea heard them in the kitchen, low, before he came up: Don’t ask her anything. Just do what she says. And Rob, who sold municipal bonds and coached under-tens soccer and had never in his life, Lea was fairly sure, seen anything like what he was about to see, came up the stairs with an angle grinder, a pair of safety glasses and a folded moving blanket, and knocked on the open door.

“Dana says there’s a bar,” he said, looking at the bee costume.

“There is.”

“Okay.” He nodded at the bee. “Okay. Where do you want to do it?”

They did it in the garage, because of the sparks. Lea sat on an upturned crate in a pair of Dana’s sweatpants that she’d cut up the inside seams the night before with kitchen scissors so they’d go on at all, with the moving blanket folded over each thigh and only the bar exposed between them, and Rob knelt on the concrete in his safety glasses and looked at the swivel where the bar met the left band and said, “Huh,” in the voice of a man looking at a very well-made thing.

“It’s titanium,” Lea said. “The bands are titanium. The bar’s steel. Cut the bar, not the swivel. Not the band.”

“Got it.”

“Not the band, Rob.”

“Got it,” he said again, very gently, and she realized she’d raised her voice.

He cut the bar an inch from the left swivel. It took four minutes. The sound filled the garage and her whole skeleton, and the bar got warm against her through the blanket, and then hot, and Rob stopped twice to let it cool and poured water from a bottle over it and didn’t look at her face. Then the right side. Three minutes.

The bar came away. Rob caught it before it hit the concrete, and held it a moment, the long steel rod with its two cut ends shining, and set it down on the workbench very carefully, next to a box of Sofia’s old cleats, as if it might go off.

The stubs stayed in the swivels. The bands stayed on. Those were hardware.

Lea sat on the crate.

Then she closed her legs.

She didn’t decide to. They closed on their own, the way a door swings shut when no one’s holding it — her knees coming together, her thighs meeting, the bands clicking softly against each other through the sweatpants, the stubs touching. Her thighs met for the first time since — she didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. Since the short bar in March, the long bar since June. Since the morning she’d stopped counting.

It felt obscene. It felt like the most intimate thing she had ever done in front of another person, and the other person was her brother-in-law, in safety glasses, in his garage, holding a bottle of water.

She opened them again. She couldn’t help it. She sat on the crate with her knees a hand’s width apart, exactly the width of the bar that wasn’t there, and stared at the gap.

Rob looked at her knees. He looked at the bar on the workbench. He took off his safety glasses.

“I’ll put it in the attic,” he said. “In case you want it. For — evidence. Or whatever.”

“Thank you.”

He went inside. He never asked her a single thing about it, then or ever. He told Dana later — Dana told Lea, a long time afterward — that he’d sat in the car outside Sofia’s school that afternoon for twenty minutes before he could go in.

She bought a phone on the third day, at a pharmacy, with cash Dana gave her. It was the cheapest one on the rack, prepaid, in a plastic clamshell she had to cut open with the same kitchen scissors. She set it up at the kitchen table while Sofia ate cereal across from her and watched with frank interest.

“Why don’t you have a phone, Aunt Lea?”

“I broke it.”

“How?”

“With bolt cutters.”

Sofia considered this. “Did you mean to?”

“Yes.”

“Cool,” said Sofia, and went back to her cereal.

Lea didn’t download anything. She didn’t sign into anything. She typed in four numbers from memory — Dana, Marcus Bell, the switchboard of a firm she had once worked at, and one more she didn’t let herself look at as she typed it — and put the phone in the pocket of the sweatpants, and felt its small, stupid weight against her thigh all day, and it never once warmed.

On the fourth day she took over Sofia’s desk.

It was in the corner of the guest room, a white desk from a flat-pack store with a pink lamp and a jar of gel pens and a sticker on the drawer that said SOFIA’S DESK — KNOCK FIRST. Lea knocked on it, gravely, the first morning. Then she cleared the gel pens into a shoebox and laid out the folder.

She did it the way she’d done it for twelve years. Not the way Pauline had ordered it, which was the order of a story. The way a lawyer orders a file: by what it proves.

She bought a ream of paper and a box of binder clips and a pack of yellow legal pads at the same pharmacy. She numbered every page Pauline had given her, by hand, in the bottom right corner: LC-0001 to LC-0412. She made an index. Four columns. Date. Speaker. Recorded parties. Proves. She went through the transcripts one at a time and logged every voice on them that wasn’t hers or Abby’s.

D. Ruiz — 23 instances.

M. Bell — 4.

Mother (R. Calloway) — 6.

C. Whitford — 1 (café, Aug 10).

H. Grant — 2.

P. Ward — 3.

She stopped at that one.

P. Ward — 3. Pauline at Lea’s office door in April. Pauline in the glass room on the morning of the collar. Pauline at the house, the night of the fish.

Pauline had handed over a folder that proved Pauline had been recorded without her consent, by the company she was trying to buy. Three times. She’d have read it. She read everything. She’d handed it over anyway.

Lea sat with the pink lamp on and looked at that line for a long time.

She doesn’t care, she thought. Not about that. She knows exactly what it’s worth, and she doesn’t care, because it isn’t what she wanted.

She wrote in the margin of the index, very small: What she wanted was me out of the house. She has it.

And then, underneath, smaller: What does she want next?

She didn’t eat much. Dana didn’t remark on it. Dana didn’t remark on anything. Dana brought her coffee in the mornings and set it on the corner of Sofia’s desk without looking at the pages, and at night she stood in the doorway of the guest room for a few seconds before she went to bed, the way she’d stood in the doorway of Sofia’s room when Sofia had a fever, and didn’t come in.

On the fifth night, she did come in.

She sat on the end of the bed, on the quilt. Lea was at the desk. She didn’t turn around.

“I’m not going to ask you anything,” Dana said.

“I know.”

“I want you to know I’m not asking. I’m just going to say one thing.”

Lea put her pen down.

“You can say a word,” Dana said, “to a doctor. Can’t you? And all of it comes out. Whatever it is.”

Lea sat very still.

She had never told Dana about Brennan. She’d never told Dana anything. But Dana had been married fourteen years and had a daughter and had once, in college, dated a man who’d turned out to keep handcuffs in his sock drawer, and Dana was not stupid, and Dana had sat at the bottom of a drive in a grey car for forty minutes looking up at a dark window.

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody. I guessed.” Dana’s voice was very level. “There’s always a word. In the books. Isn’t there?”

Lea turned around.

Her sister was sitting on their grandmother’s quilt in a T-shirt that said MERRIWEATHER U10 GIRLS — STATE SEMIFINALS, with her hands in her lap. She was looking at the floor.

“Yes,” said Lea. “There’s a word.”

“Then why haven’t you said it?”

It wasn’t a question about the word. Lea heard that. It was a question about the drive and the window and the bolt cutters, and all the questions Dana hadn’t asked, rolled up into the one she’d promised not to.

Lea opened her mouth.

She could tell her. Because if I say it, it all comes out, and I lose the only thing anyone in that deal wants. That was true. She could feel it being true, the way she could feel a clause hold. Because I’m the asset. Because I’m worth nine hundred million dollars to a woman who’s never touched me, and the minute I say a word to a doctor I’m worth nothing. It was all true. It was the kind of truth she’d have built a brief out of.

It was sixty percent of the truth.

“I’m fine,” Lea said.

Dana looked up.

And Lea heard it. She heard it in her own voice, in her sister’s guest room, at the end of a year. Fine. The word Craig had said every night for eight months at a kitchen counter. The word Abby had written on the first page of the first note: She is afraid of being fine. The word she’d said to her mother on the phone and to Dana at Luca’s and to the bathroom door on four, and every time she said it, someone had been listening.

Dana didn’t say anything. She just looked at her.

“No,” said Lea. “That’s not — I’m not. I’m not fine. I’m sorry.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know why I said it.”

“I do,” said Dana, and got up off the quilt, and kissed the top of Lea’s head, once, quickly, the way their mother used to, and went to bed.

She didn’t sleep.

At one in the morning she was still lying on her back under the quilt, with her knees a hand’s width apart, staring at the bee costume in the dark.

She hadn’t touched herself since the night on Abby’s side of the bed. Eleven times. Please, out loud, to nobody. She’d told herself, in the car down the bluff, in the garage, at Sofia’s desk, that she’d never try again. That she knew how it went. That the platform didn’t need anyone.

She pushed the sweatpants down.

She didn’t know why. She told herself she was testing something. That was the lawyer: establish the facts. She knew perfectly well she wasn’t testing anything. Her cunt had been wet since Dana said there’s always a word. Her clit had been swollen against the triangle bar since the garage, since her thighs had closed for the first time in months and she’d felt it, the obscene, enormous pleasure of her own legs touching. Five days without a hand on her. Five days without a pulse from the ring, without a report, without anyone. Her body had no idea what to do with that. It had decided to want.

She went slowly.

Two fingers, flat, over the triangle, the way she’d learned at seventeen and forgotten at thirty-seven. Small circles. The rings in her labia shifted under her palm, cool. Her other hand went to her breast without asking her, found the base of it, the ring there — two, steady, warm — and the nipple bar, and the black stone, and she rolled the nipple between her fingers and her back came up off the mattress and she bit her own lip so the sound wouldn’t go through the wall to Sofia.

She climbed.

It was fast. It was so fast it frightened her. She was at the edge in under two minutes, her hips moving against her own hand, her breath coming through her nose in short hard pulls, and she thought, very clearly, the way she’d once thought in courtrooms, it’s not connected. Nobody’s watching. It can’t—

The twinge.

Cold, bright, deep, from the ring at the top of her, out through the rings in her lips and into the triangle. Her pelvic floor slammed out of rhythm. The white flash at her clit. The climb, gone.

She lay there gasping under the quilt.

Passive. She knew that. She’d known it on Abby’s bed. It didn’t need anyone. It ran on its last state, on what it had last been told, and what it had last been told was no.

She started again.

She tried for an hour. She tried with the quilt over her face so she could make noise into it. She tried on her stomach, grinding against the heel of her hand, the stubs of the bar knocking against the mattress. She tried thinking of Abby — Abby’s fingers inside her on the table, Was it true? — and that got her there in ninety seconds, and the twinge took it in one. She tried thinking of nothing. She tried thinking of the glass and the man on the table, and hated herself, and got there, and lost it.

Nineteen times. She counted. She’d always count. That would never come out of her, whatever Anand’s tool did.

And somewhere around the fifteenth, lying on her back with her fingers slick and her clit throbbing and the twinge still ringing in her like a struck bell, she understood the other thing. The thing she hadn’t let herself understand on Abby’s bed, because on Abby’s bed there had still been a line, and an app, and a woman downtown who could, if she chose, at any second, reach into Lea’s body from forty kilometers away and let her.

There was no one now.

Induction requires administrator. She’d read that on her phone in March, in the suite, in the minutes after the stage. Interruption ran locally. It needed nothing. But the other thing — the release, the full, rolling, unbearable release that Abby had let her have only a handful of times in a year, and never once when she asked — that needed someone at the other end of a line. That needed a key. An uplink. A hand.

She had cut the collar off. She had crushed the phone. She had walked out of the house.

She’d left every orgasm she would ever have on the kitchen counter.

Not just for tonight. For as long as she was gone. For as long as no one, anywhere, held the other end. The system had failed closed, the way good medical systems did, and she was locked inside it: able to want, able to climb, able to get to the very edge as many times as she liked, alone, in her sister’s guest room, forever — and never once allowed over.

She lay under her grandmother’s quilt and cried, silently, with her fingers still between her legs, because the wall was thin and Sofia was ten.

She didn’t say the word. She didn’t even think it. She lay there and let the platform listen to her cry, and at some point near four she noticed that she’d put her knees exactly a hand’s width apart again, and left them there.

In the morning she sat down at Sofia’s desk and wrote on a fresh yellow page, at the top, in capitals:

WHO WANTS TO BUY ME?

Under it she wrote: Verity. $900M. Pauline.

Then she sat for a long time with the pen against her lip.

Then she wrote one more name, and underlined it twice, and took the cheap phone out of her pocket and looked at the four numbers in it, and the one she hadn’t let herself look at when she typed it.

It wasn’t Abby’s. She didn’t know Abby’s number by heart. She’d never once needed to call her.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L-01.
Day: 179–183.

No uplink. Last fix 03:52, front door. Five days.

Priti asked on Tuesday whether she should be worried. Clinically: no. The perfusion floor is enforced on the rings themselves; it doesn’t need us. The rings hold at 2. The platform runs passive on its last state. Bands closed. I’ve checked the failure modes 41 times. She’s safe. I built her to be safe without me.

That’s the part I keep reading.

Induction requires an administrator. Interruption doesn’t. She can climb as often as she likes. She can’t come. Not without someone at the other end, and there’s no other end.

I don’t know if she’s worked that out yet. She will. She’s a careful reader now. I made her one.

Board: Verity wants the extension “regularized” in light of “the participant’s status.” Hollis’s word. Daniel hasn’t returned two calls.

Still haven’t touched the counter. The glass has a ring in it where the wine’s dried.

She still hasn’t said it.

I keep thinking she’ll ring Priti and say it, and Priti will ring me, and it’ll be over, and I’ll unlock everything, the way I promised. I’ve rehearsed it. I’d do it well.

I’ve never rehearsed this. Five days of nothing.