He pressed his thumb to the glass and the screen woke under it, cold white in the dark room, the pairing list still open the way he had left it. remote_01. remote_02. He touched the second name and a small grey panel slid up from the bottom edge, and there it was, plain as a receipt: revoke device. No confirmation. No fraud watch. No lock on the door. He had built it that way himself, three years ago, because he had never once imagined needing to keep a man out.

His thumb hovered. The city stood in the window behind him, a thousand windows lit and none of them looking back, and the remote lay on the sill, patient, and Willow breathed behind him in the bed, slow and deep and gone.

He pressed it.

The click was almost nothing. A soft tick, the sound a pen makes when it sets down. The name Marcus thinned where it sat in its flat grey script, paled, and was gone, and the list closed up over the gap like water, leaving remote_01 alone on the screen the way it had been alone for forty-one days before tonight. David let the breath out through his nose and set the phone face-up on the sill beside the remote, and the two of them sat there together, phone and remote, and the room was quiet.

He turned.

She was on her side with the sheet pulled to her hip, one arm folded under the pillow, her face turned toward the window so the city laid its pale light across her cheek. The copper wig sat cocked on the nightstand where she had set it hours ago, and the collar showed at her throat, the small silver padlock riding the hollow above her collarbone, and her breath moved it, up and down, up and down, the metronome of a woman who had finally stopped holding anything back.

He crossed the boards without hurrying.

And the plug pulsed.

Deep and slow. One long draw of pressure that started low in her and climbed, and her back came off the mattress in a single unbroken arc, her heel sliding up the sheet, her breath catching in her throat and stopping there. David stopped where he stood. His hand was on the remote before he had decided to reach for it — the cold plastic already in his palm, his thumb already on the dial, and he had not touched anything.

He looked at the phone. remote_01. Only remote_01.

He pressed the dial down. The little haptic kicked under his thumb, the confirmation he had built in himself, and inside her the plug should have gone still. It did. Her back came down to the sheet, slow, vertebra by vertebra, and she made a small sound in her sleep, a sound with no words in it, and settled.

David stood over her with the remote in his hand and did not move.

The city hummed on the far side of the glass. Somewhere below, a siren unspooled down an avenue and thinned to nothing. He turned the remote over once, twice, the way he turned a problem over, and looked at the seam where the plastic met the seam, and the light on the dial, and the dial was at zero, and he knew the dial was at zero because he had set it at zero himself before he lay down, and he had not touched it since.

He set his thumb on it again and held it.

The plug pulsed.

The same deep draw. The same slow climb. And this time he watched her — watched the breath go out of her and her lips part and her hips tilt into the mattress, a small involuntary search, and the sheet pulled tight across her thigh, and the pulse ran its length and let her go, and she never woke.

He lifted his thumb. The dial had not moved.

He would have known. He had built this thing with his own hands, in a workshop above a garage in Jersey, the soldering iron warm between his fingers and the schematic taped to the wall, and he had built the dial to click, one stop per degree, so that a man could feel where he was without looking. He had not felt a click. He had not felt anything.

He set the remote down on the nightstand, deliberately, face-up, and stepped back from the bed.

For eleven minutes in the dark, that was what the log had said. Eleven minutes, while he slept. A peak, and no climax. He had read it four times on the phone and the number had not changed, and now he stood in his own bedroom with his arms crossed over his chest and looked at the woman in his bed and did the arithmetic he had been refusing to do since he found it. The plug had never needed him. It had been answering to somebody else for forty-one days. He had revoked the second remote and the second remote had not been the thing that was pulsing.

He uncrossed his arms.

He turned and walked to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the city, and the city did not care, and that was the useful thing about it. Behind him the sheets moved. He heard her turn onto her back, heard the small wet sound of her lips opening, and he did not turn around, because he wanted to hear it first, without his eyes on it, the way he listened to a deal in a room before he looked at the numbers.

The plug pulsed again.

Longer this time. He counted it against his own breath without meaning to — one, two, three, four — and it was timed to her, he could hear it, the pulse rising as her chest rose and falling as it fell, and it was not the rhythm of a machine. It was the rhythm of a body being read.

He turned around.

Her eyes were open.

They were dark in the low light, the pupils run wide, and they found him across the room without searching, and there was no sleep left in them at all. She lay on her back with the sheet across her hips and her arms loose at her sides, and the collar moved with her throat when she swallowed, and she watched him the way she had watched him in the lobby — as if she had known where he was standing before she opened her eyes.

He did not move toward her. He stood at the window with the city behind him and let her look.

"It's not you either," she said.

Her voice was low and rough with sleep and there was no fear in it, and no question, and she said it the way a person says a thing they have already worked out — flat, and certain, and offering it up like a coin she had found in her pocket.

David did not answer. He stood very still and looked at her, and the plug hummed on inside her, patient, unhurried, and her breath kept its rhythm, and her eyes stayed on him, and the room held the two of them the way a hall holds a sound after the door has shut.

"Say that again," he said.

"It's not you," Willow said. "It hasn't been you for a while." She turned her head on the pillow, just enough to find the remote where he had set it down, and then her eyes came back to him. "You can put that away."

He picked it up anyway. He turned it over in his hand and looked at the dial, and the dial sat at zero, and he set his thumb on it and pushed it all the way up.

Nothing.

The plug pulsed, deep and slow, and it was not the pulse he had asked for, and he felt that in his hand like a splinter of cold — the remote inert, the haptic dead, his own device sitting in his palm like a stone he had picked up off the beach.

Willow watched him do it. She watched his thumb go up the dial and she watched the nothing that came back, and something moved across her face that he had not seen there before — not surprise, and not triumph, something quieter, closer to recognition, the look of a woman being handed a thing she had privately suspected for weeks.

"How long," David said.

"I don't know." She shifted on the sheet, drew one knee up, and the sheet rode with it and settled in the crease of her hip. "It started after the lobby. Maybe before. It comes when I think about it." She held his eyes. "It comes when I don't."

He took a step toward the bed. Then another. He stopped at the foot of it with the remote still in his hand, and he looked down the length of her, the pale legs, the smooth chest, the collar at her throat with its small silver lock, and he understood that he was standing at the edge of something he had not built, and that the thing he had built was answering to it now.

"Then it's learned you," he said.

"Yes."

He set the remote down on the foot of the mattress, between her feet, where she could see it, and he did not pick it up again. The plug hummed on inside her, steady, unhurried, keeping its own time, and Willow lay back against the pillow and let it, her eyes half-lidded now, her lips parted, her breath moving in the long slow rhythm of a woman who had stopped waiting for permission.

"Show me," David said.

"Show you what."

"What it does when I'm not in the room."

She looked at him for a long moment, and then she closed her eyes, and she did nothing at all — no hand, no shift of her hips, no reach for the remote — and the plug pulsed, and pulsed again, and the rhythm of it climbed with her breath and did not let her go, and David stood at the foot of the bed in the dark and watched his own device read a woman he had thought he owned, and he did not decide anything yet.

He counted it. He stood at the foot of his own bed and counted, the way he counted everything, and the plug kept its own arithmetic against her breath — up on the inhale, down on the exhale, one long draw and one short release, and never once the interval he had programmed into it. He had written that interval himself. Four seconds on, six off, a metronome a man could set his watch by. This was not four and six. This was her.

Her hands lay open on the sheet, palms up, the fingers loose. Nothing clenched. Nothing reached. A woman being touched from the inside by something that knew where to touch, and she let it happen the way you let rain happen, and David watched her mouth and watched the tendon in her throat and understood that he was watching a door he had built open onto a room he had never seen.

The hum in the room changed.

He heard it before he placed it — a low note under the city noise, under the building's own breath, the deep electrical drone of the tower settling on its bones at two in the morning. He had slept in this room for nine years and never once noticed it. Now it sat under everything, steady, patient, and the plug pulsed inside her and the hum did not change, and he stood there with the hair rising on his forearms and could not have said which of them was making the sound.

He crossed to the window and put his palm flat against the glass.

Cold. The city laid out below in its grids and its rivers of light, the avenues running north, the late cabs threading between the lights, and none of it knew his name, and he had always liked that, had built his whole life on being a man the city could not see. He looked down at his own hand on the glass, the broad knuckles, the scar across the thumb from the soldering iron, and behind him the plug pulsed again, and Willow's breath caught, and he pressed his forehead to the cold pane and closed his eyes.

"David."

He did not turn.

"I can feel where you are." Her voice came from the bed, low, unhurried, the words spaced like she was reading them off the inside of her own eyelids. "Even with my eyes shut. Like a room with the light on behind the door."

He opened his eyes and looked at her reflection in the glass. She lay on her back with the sheet at her hips and her arms open, and in the black pane she floated over the city like something the city had dreamed, and the plug pulsed, and her back came off the sheet a half-inch and settled, and she never opened her eyes.

"What does it feel like," he said.

"Warm." She said it slowly, tasting the word. "It started cold. The first weeks it was cold, and I hated it, and I wanted it out of me. Now it's warm. It's been warm for a while." A small breath. "It's like being held somewhere I can't see."

He turned from the window.

"Open your eyes."

She did. Dark and steady, no sleep in them, and they found him across the room the way they always did now, before he moved, before he spoke, as if she had a map of him drawn somewhere behind her ribs. The collar rode her throat. The little silver padlock caught the city light and gave it back.

"You're not angry," she said.

"No."

"You should be." She turned her head on the pillow, watching him. "I've been lying in your bed for eleven nights with something inside me that answers to a man you threw out of your lobby, and you're standing there like a man reading a contract."

"I am reading a contract." He came back to the foot of the bed. He did not reach for the remote. He looked down at her, at the sheet across her hips, at the open hands, and he let the silence do its work, the way he had let it work in a hundred rooms with a hundred men who had something to sell. "The question is who signed it."

She held his eyes and did not answer, and the plug pulsed, and the pulse ran long, and her lips parted and her hips tilted and she let it take her the whole length of it without looking away from him. When it let her go she was breathing harder, and she was still looking at him, and there was something in her face now that he had not put there — a patience, a waiting, the look of a woman who had stopped needing to be told what she was.

"It doesn't answer to Marcus either," she said. "I don't think it ever did. I think he paired it and it hummed for him a while because I let it. Because I wanted somebody to be holding the other end." She drew one knee up under the sheet, slow. "And then it stopped needing him. The way a hand stops needing the glove."

David stood very still.

"So what is it answering to," he said.

She smiled — not the bimbo smile, not the glossy practiced thing she put on for cameras, something smaller and older and entirely her own — and she closed her eyes and laid her head back on the pillow and did not answer him, and the plug pulsed, and pulsed, and the rhythm of it was her breath and her breath was the rhythm of it, and David Cross stood naked at the foot of his own bed in the dark and felt the floor of his certainty go soft under his feet.