1.

It was the first thing she saw, the morning after. White on black, centered, enormous, the same font as always. Lea lay with her wrists still tethered to the ring under the mattress and looked at the phone where Abby had propped it against the lamp so that she would, and understood that sometime in the night the number had stopped being a count of days and become a count of something else. It didn’t measure how long she had been locked. It measured how far she was from the last time she’d been let go. Those had always been the same thing. They weren’t anymore.

Her body knew. That was the worst of it. Twelve hours ago she had come four times, screaming through a ring gag, and this morning, behind the plate, the pilot light was already lit. Not a flicker — a flame. She had thought, if she’d thought anything, that coming would put it out for a while. Reset her. Bring her baseline down to something she recognized. Instead it had done the opposite. Her body had learned, last night, exactly what it had been missing for eighty days, in vivid and specific detail, and now it wanted that, specifically, again, now, and the shield lay against her clit with its familiar faint indifference and the ridge nestled between her lips and nothing, nothing, nothing happened.

Abby came in at seven with coffee, already dressed for work, and unclipped the tether, and looked at the phone and then at Lea’s face.

“Eighty-three,” she said.

“What?”

“Resting. Eighty-three this morning. Up two from yesterday.” She set the coffee on the nightstand. “You thought it would go down.”

“I thought—” Lea sat up. Her wrists were still cuffed together. “I thought that was the point. Of letting me.”

“The point of letting you,” Abby said, “was to show you what you don’t get.” She held out her hand for Lea’s wrists, and unlocked them, and dropped the cuffs on the bed. “Shower. Car’s at eight. You have the Verity term sheet on your desk and Priya needs you on the data-retention language by noon.”

She was good at the job. That was a thing nobody had warned her about, and that she had not expected to matter as much as it did. Halo’s problems were interesting — FDA classification, data privacy across forty countries, patent claims on hardware nobody had built before — and she was the only person in the building who could solve them, and she solved them. People came to her door with questions and left with answers. Priya, who had seen her strapped open in the lab chair with a hood laced over her face, sat across from her at a conference table and argued about indemnification caps with absolute professional seriousness, and never once let anything show, and Lea was so grateful for that she could have wept.

She sat at her corner desk in the north light with her legs crossed under the table and the fine gunmetal chain against her throat, and worked, and for whole minutes at a time she forgot.

Then she would shift in her chair and the ridge would slide, and she would remember. Or she would glance up at the small black dome in the corner of the ceiling. Or she would think, unbidden, in the middle of a sentence about Article 9 of the GDPR: It doesn’t come off.

She did not ask about it for four days. She was proud of that. On the fifth, at home — she had started thinking of it as home, and had stopped noticing that she had — she asked.

They were in the kitchen. Abby was cooking; Schedule A, paragraph three. Lea was at the island with a glass of the wine Abby had poured and permitted.

“The second product,” Lea said. “What is it?”

Abby didn’t turn around. “You don’t ask about that.”

“I’m not asking for — I’m asking what it is. I’m your general counsel. If it’s going to market I’ll be the one filing—”

“When it’s time for you to file, you’ll get a brief.” Abby lifted the lid on a pan and looked at whatever was in it. “Until then, you don’t ask about it. That’s a rule. As of now.”

“You can’t just make a rule because I asked a question you don’t—”

“I can, actually.” Abby set the lid down. “I’ve been doing it since September.”

Lea put her glass down too hard. Wine slopped over the rim onto the stone.

“You told me it doesn’t come off,” she said. Her voice wasn’t steady. “You told me that and then you went to sleep. Do you have any idea what that’s — I’ve been lying awake every night, I can’t — Abby, I’m asking you as a person. Not as the—” she made a gesture at herself, at the chain at her throat, at all of it — “as a person. What are you going to put in me?”

Abby turned around then. She wiped her hands on a dish towel, slowly, and looked at Lea for a long moment with an expression that was almost curious.

“That’s twice,” she said. “In one minute. After I told you it was a rule.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yes, you do.” Abby took her phone out of the back pocket of her trousers. She didn’t unlock it to look at Lea’s telemetry. She opened something else — a file, an audio file, Lea saw the waveform — and set the phone on the island between them, and pressed play.

It was Lea’s voice.

It was small and wet and broken and it came out of the phone’s speaker into the bright kitchen like something that had crawled out of a drain, and Lea knew it before the second word, knew the room it had been recorded in, knew the strap across her waist and the light in her eyes and the laptop tilted down toward her face.

“Because I did them for you. All of them. Every one. They’re yours.”

Abby let it play out. The tiny hiss after. Then she stopped it.

“Day forty-four,” she said. “You were begging me not to take your days away. Because they were mine. You said so. I didn’t put the words in your mouth, Lea. I didn’t even ask the question. You volunteered.” She put the phone back in her pocket. “So I’d like to know, now, which version of you I’m supposed to be listening to. The one on the table who knew exactly what she was for — or the one at my kitchen island asking me what I’m going to put in her as if it’s any of her business.”

Lea stood very still.

That’s not fair. The deposition voice, level, reasonable. That was a different context. You were strapped down. You’d been edged for — you were in no condition to — statements made under duress are —

But she had meant it. That was the thing. She had heard it come out of the speaker and she had recognized not just the voice but the meaning, the exact feeling of it, the total sincerity — she had meant every word, she remembered meaning it, she could feel the shape of meaning it in her chest right now. And the woman at the island who was asking questions — she meant that too. Both of them did. And Abby had played one against the other so neatly that Lea could no longer tell which was the real one, or whether the one asking questions had ever been real at all, or had only been a habit, a reflex, a lawyer’s tic left over from the person she’d been before September.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I do,” said Abby. “Go to the back room. Strip. Wait for me on your knees by the cabinet.”

She knelt on the warm rug by the glass-fronted cabinet for twenty-five minutes, naked except for the shield and the chain at her throat, and listened to Abby finish cooking dinner. She could hear the extractor fan. A pan. Abby humming. The smell came under the door — garlic, something with thyme — and Lea’s stomach turned over with hunger and she knelt there and smelled it and didn’t move. The fern in its frame. The table under its hard white light, straps laid open. The amber lamp.

A guest room in a good hotel, she thought, nonsensically, and didn’t know why the phrase had come to her, or from where.

When Abby came in she had changed into the black robe. She went to the cabinet without looking at Lea and opened it and took out a case — another matte-black case, slim, the length of a forearm — and knelt on the rug in front of her and opened it on the floor between them.

Inside, on grey foam, lay two bands of brushed steel, each one curved into an open C, each one lined on its inner face with black leather. Each had a hinge on one side and, on the other, a small flush lock. Between them, in its own slot in the foam, a short steel bar, a hand’s width long, with a small swivel joint at each end.

“Thigh bands,” Abby said. “Stand up.”

Lea stood. Abby fitted the first band around her right thigh, high, just below the crease where her leg met her body, and closed it. It was cool and heavy and fitted her exactly — too exactly; of course it had been made for her — and when it closed it made the same small final sound as the shield. Then the left. Then Abby fitted the bar between them — one end to a socket on the inside of each band — and Lea heard each joint lock home. Abby stood back.

“Walk to the door.”

Lea walked. Or tried to. On the first step her leg swung forward and the bar swung with it on its joints and then stopped, because the bar was rigid, and it would not let her legs get any farther apart than it was long, or any closer together. She stumbled, and caught herself on the table’s edge. She tried again, smaller. The joints allowed her legs to swing past each other a little, forward and back, a short, careful, wide-legged step — the step of a woman in leg irons, or a woman who’d been riding for a week — and no more.

“Now stand with your feet together.”

She tried. Her feet moved; her ankles came together. Her thighs didn’t. And she understood.

The bands were mounted high, on the soft insides of her thighs, just below where her legs met her body, and the bar between them was rigid steel. Her knees could come together. Her feet could. But up there — where it mattered, where her thighs had always closed around the shield — the bar held them a hand’s width apart, exactly, and would not give a millimetre. She pushed. The bar pushed back. Her thighs could not touch.

She had not realized, until that second, how much she needed them to touch. How constantly. Every day since September — at her desk, on the train, in meetings, in bed — she had crossed her legs or pressed her knees together or squeezed her thighs around the shield, rhythmically, unconsciously, a hundred times a day, a thousand, and it had never once been enough, and it had always been something. A pressure. The ghost of a pressure. She had not known she was doing it until it was gone.

Now it was gone. She stood with her feet together and her thighs held open and the shield hanging in the space between them, touching nothing, pressed by nothing, and the want in her rose up with nowhere at all to go.

“Oh, God,” she said.

“A week,” said Abby. “For asking twice. You’ll wear them to work. Skirts — full ones, to the knee; trousers won’t go on over the bar. You have two. I’ve ordered more. You’ll sit with your feet flat on the floor. You will not be able to cross your legs, and if you try, the bar will remind you, and the bands will log it, and I’ll know.” She tilted her head. “Count how many times you try. Put it in your report. I want to see how much of you was just — squeezing. All this time.”

Lea looked down at herself. Steel bands. The chain. The bright small gap between her thighs where there had never been a gap before.

“And if I ask a third time,” she said. It came out a whisper.

“Then you’ll find out what a third time costs.” Abby picked up the empty case and closed it. “Dinner’s ready. Walk carefully. The stairs are going to be interesting.”

She tried to cross her legs forty-one times the first day.

She knew because she counted, as instructed, and because Abby’s tally at ten o’clock that night, sent back in reply to her report as a single number, matched hers exactly. Forty-one times her body reached for the old relief — in the car, at her desk, on a call with Okafor’s general counsel in Lyon — and forty-one times the bar caught and held and her thighs stopped a hand’s width short of each other and hung there, open, aching, and she had to sit with it.

On the second day it was thirty-six. On the third, twenty-nine. On the fourth she caught herself sitting at her desk with her knees apart and her feet flat on the floor, unthinkingly, like a woman who had always sat that way, and understood that she had stopped trying. Her body had learned. It had taken four days.

She put that in her report too.

Lea I don’t reach for it anymore. I sat like this all afternoon and didn’t notice until five. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

Abby’s reply: Worse. For you.

On the seventh night she knelt on the rug in the back room and Abby crouched in front of her with a small steel key from her chain and unlocked the bar. One joint, then the other. It came away in Abby’s hand, and Lea’s thighs, released, fell together so fast and so hard that she gasped at the contact. Skin on skin. The shield pressed between them. Something.

She waited for Abby to unlock the bands.

Abby didn’t. She ran a fingertip around the inside of the right band, where the steel met the leather met Lea’s skin, checking the fit, and stood up.

“The bands stay,” she said.

Lea looked down at them. Two curves of brushed steel, high on her thighs, hinged and locked, with the small empty sockets on their inner faces where the bar had been.

“For how long?”

“They’re not a punishment anymore. They’re hardware.” Abby dropped the bar into its slot in the grey foam. “The bar is the punishment. Or a chain, when I want you walking small. Or a long bar, when I want you open.” She closed the case. “The bands are just where I attach things. You’ll stop noticing them.”

She didn’t stop noticing them. But by Christmas she had stopped trying to.

And then, a minute later, the first thing she’d said about it all week:

Abby Christmas is in twelve days. I’ve decided you’re going to your mother’s.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 8 (cycle 2).
Entry by: A.M.

Post-release baseline: 83 and rising. As predicted — release raised the floor, not lowered it. She expected relief. She got specificity. She now knows exactly what she’s missing, and in what order.

First direct challenge re: second product, day 5. Played the day-44 recording. Effective beyond expectation. She didn’t argue with it; she argued with herself. Note: the recording doesn’t win the argument. It splits her into two people and lets them fight. I only need to wait.

Thigh bands, 7 days with the short bar. Crossing attempts: 41, 36, 29, 11, 3, 0, 0. Habit extinguished in 5 days. She was squeezing roughly 40 times a day and had no idea. She does now.

Bar off day 12. Bands stay — permanently. Attachment points now: short bar, long bar, hobble chain, bed rings. She asked how long. I said they’re hardware. She heard forever and didn’t ask again.

Christmas: will send her. Plug ordered on the morning. Every release request through dinner to be denied. I want her family to see her and not be able to name what they’re seeing.

Anand confirmed for Jan 9. Fitting window Jan 12–16.

She doesn’t know there’s a window.