The corridor swallowed them whole. No viewports. No seams. Just ribbed metal that curved overhead like the inside of a throat, lit by strips that flickered at a frequency Jay's eyes couldn't quite hold. Jones walked him through it with one hand clamped on the back of his neck, thumb and forefinger digging into the meat either side of his spine. Every few meters the floor grates changed pitch underfoot — a hollow clang, then a softer one, then hollow again. Jay counted them without meaning to. Fourteen. Fifteen. Counting was something to do with his mind that wasn't screaming.

"You'll want to breathe through it," Jones said. Conversational. Almost kind. "The doctor's work is best appreciated with a clear head. He doesn't like it when they pass out before the interesting part."

"Where are you taking me." Jay's voice came out flat. He'd meant it as a question. It landed as a statement, which was fine. Statements were all he had left.

"I told you. The fitting." Jones steered him around a corner and the corridor opened into a chamber that smelled of hot metal and something sweeter underneath — a chemical sweetness, like burnt sugar, like the inside of a hospital that had stopped pretending. "The frame's been waiting. Doctor's been calibrating it since you came aboard."

The frame stood in the center of the room like a piece of industrial art. Jay had spent twenty years around machines, and he'd never seen anything shaped so deliberately for a human body. Two uprights, polished steel, bolted to a base plate that was bolted to the deck. Restraints at the shoulders, the wrists, the hips, the ankles — heavy buckled cuffs with padded interiors that had been worn smooth by other wrists, other hips. The padding was the worst part. Someone had thought about comfort. Someone had decided that the person in the frame should be able to stay in it a long time.

Behind it, on a rolling cart, lay an array of instruments Jay refused to catalog. Tubes. A pressure injector. Something with a needle as long as his hand. A rack of vials filled with fluid that moved too slowly to be water.

Cassiday was already there. He stood at a console with his back to the door, wire-rimmed spectacles catching the light, thin shoulders hunched over a readout. He didn't turn when they entered. He said, without looking up: "You're late."

"He was praying to the drain," Jones said. "Waste of a good coating."

"The coating was the point." Cassiday turned now, and his pale blue eyes found Jay and did not move. He looked at Jay the way a man looks at a machine he's about to disassemble — already seeing the parts, already mapping where the cuts would go. "Bring him here. The frame first. We'll do the injection on the frame. Less mess."

Jones walked him forward and Jay's legs kept working, because that was what legs did, and his mind retreated to a small cold room in the back of his skull and pulled the door shut behind it. He'd learned that trick on the Vixen. He'd learned it in the EVA pod. He'd learned it in the surgical bay with Graadar's gauntlets on his hips. The body could do what it had to do while the mind waited in the cold room for the noise to stop.

The cuffs closed around his wrists first. Cold steel, then the give of padding, then the sharp click of the locks engaging. Jones pulled each strap tight with a practiced yank, checking the tension, and Jay's arms stretched above his head and his shoulders took the weight and his feet lifted off the deck. Then the hip restraints. Then the ankles, spread wide, each foot locked to its own base plate. By the end he hung in the frame like a carcass on a hook, arms up, legs open, everything exposed.

"There," Jones said. The yellow eye swept over him. "Now you look like a canvas."

Cassiday approached with the pressure injector. He didn't hurry. He wiped the injection site — the inside of Jay's left thigh — with a swab that smelled of alcohol and rot, and he held the swab there a moment longer than necessary, watching Jay's face.

"The first injection was the primer," Cassiday said. "It told your cells what they were going to become. This is the rewrite. The primer was a whisper. This is the shout."

"What's in it."

"Everything you'll need to become useful." Cassiday pressed the injector against his thigh. "Hold still. If you move, you tear the tissue, and I'll have to start the site over. You don't want me to start over."

The needle went in. Jay felt it — a cold point, then a bloom of heat that spread up his leg and into his groin and then stopped, waiting. For a moment nothing happened. He was hanging in the frame, his thigh stinging, his shoulders burning, and he thought maybe Cassiday was bluffing. Maybe the injection was saline. Maybe the whole thing was theater.

Then the heat turned into fire.

It began in his thigh and raced up his spine and out into his fingertips and down into his toes and back up into his skull, and every cell it touched woke up screaming. Jay's back arched against the restraints before he knew it was happening. The cuffs bit into his wrists. His heels came off the base plates and his whole body bent like a bow under tension, and the sound that came out of his mouth was not a word. It was a long, ragged noise that started in his chest and tore its way out through his throat.

"There it is," Jones said. He sounded satisfied. He sounded like a man watching a fire he'd set.

Cassiday had stepped back to the console. He was making notes. "Good response. Faster than the last one. The primer took."

Jay couldn't hear him properly. The fire was everywhere now. It moved under his skin like something alive, and it wasn't just pain — it was pressure, deep in the muscle, like his body was being kneaded from the inside by hands he couldn't see. He felt his shoulders shift. He felt his ribs move. He looked down at his own chest and watched the hair on it fall away in patches, drifting down through the air like ash, and beneath it the skin was smooth and pale and wrong.

"Oh god," he said. "Oh god oh god oh—"

"Save it," Jones said. "You'll want the air."

The hair kept falling. His arms, his legs, his chest — everywhere the fire touched, the hair let go and drifted and settled on the deck in small soft drifts. Jay watched a clump of it land near his left foot and he thought, distantly, that it looked like the fur of an animal that had been dead a while. Then the fire reached his scalp and his head began to itch and burn at once, and he felt the hair on his head loosen in his own hands though his hands were cuffed and couldn't touch it, and he understood that he was being erased.

The pain crested and broke and crested again. It came in waves, each one a little different, each one reaching a part of him the last one hadn't found. His jaw ached. His cheekbones ached. Something behind his eyes was being pulled and pushed and he heard himself sob and didn't care. He was crying steadily now, tears running down his face and into his mouth, and every few seconds the crying broke into a scream when a new wave hit.

"The bone structure's the slow part," Cassiday said, as if discussing weather. "That won't finish today. But the transition should be complete by morning. You'll see the difference in the mirror."

"What mirror," Jay gasped. "You don't have mirrors. You have—" He lost the sentence. The fire took it.

"We have mirrors," Cassiday said. "You just haven't earned one yet."

The chest was the worst. Jay felt the tissue under his nipples begin to swell and shift, and he looked down and watched his own chest change shape while he hung there, helpless, cuffed, weeping. The skin stretched. The muscle underneath softened and reorganized. Two small mounds pushed up out of his ribcage, tentative at first, then fuller, then rounder, until he was looking at a pair of small breasts sitting on his own chest where his pectorals had been. A cups. Maybe not even that. But unmistakable. Breasts. On him. He watched them rise and fall with his breathing, and the worst part — the part that made him want to die — was that they were sensitive. The air moving over them made his nipples tighten. The tension in the frame made them ache in a way that was not entirely pain.

"Beautiful," Cassiday said. He had come closer. He reached out and ran the back of one liver-spotted finger across Jay's new left breast, and Jay's whole body jerked in the restraints and a sound came out of him that he had never made before. Not a scream. Something lower. Something that embarrassed him more than the scream had.

Cassiday smiled. It was the first time Jay had seen him smile, and it was worse than the pain. "There it is," he said. "The neural rewiring is holding. He feels it."

"Feels what," Jay said. His voice was wrecked. It came out higher than it should have, and he heard the change in it and wanted to claw his own throat out.

"Everything," Cassiday said. "That's the design. The body stops distinguishing between pain and pleasure at a certain threshold. The primer opened the door. The rewrite is teaching your nerves to walk through it." He traced his finger down Jay's sternum, between the new breasts, and Jay's hips bucked against the restraints and his cock — his cock, still there, still his — came up hard against his belly.

Jay looked down at it. He couldn't not look. It was the only part of him that hadn't changed, the only piece of the old body left, and it was standing up like a flag while he hung in a frame in a pirate ship with breasts on his chest and no hair left on his body and tears drying on his face. He was hard. He was so hard it hurt. And he had no idea when it had happened.

"Oh," Cassiday said. "Oh, that's good. Look at that, Captain."

Jones came around the frame. He looked down at Jay's erection and his jagged grin widened. "Well. The canvas likes it."

"He doesn't know why," Cassiday said. "That's the beauty of it. The rewrite is doing its work on the reward pathways. Every time the body's reshaped, the nerves fire pleasure. He's being trained to come from being changed. He'll feel it every time we touch him from now on. He'll feel it every time he looks in a mirror. He'll feel it every time he remembers this."

"That's not—" Jay's voice cracked. "That's not what's happening. That's just— my body's confused. That's just—"

"Is it?" Cassiday's hand closed around Jay's cock. Just like that. No warning. His grip was dry and cool and absolutely confident, and he stroked once from root to tip, and Jay's whole body convulsed in the frame and a moan came out of his mouth that he tried to swallow and couldn't. "Tell me that's confusion."

"Stop—"

"You're leaking already." Cassiday's thumb swept across the head and came away slick. He held it up where Jay could see it. "Confusion doesn't leak. Confusion doesn't stand up like this. This is your body telling the truth."

"It's not—"

"Say it." Cassiday's grip tightened. "Say what your body wants."

Jay shook his head. His hair — what was left of it — fell across his eyes and he saw it was pale now, lighter than it had been, and he felt another piece of himself go. "No."

Cassiday stroked him again. Slow. Deliberate. From root to tip, then back down, then up again. Jay's hips moved with the stroke before he could stop them. His mouth opened and closed around nothing. The fire in his body had settled into a low hum that seemed to sync with the rhythm of Cassiday's hand, and every stroke sent a pulse of heat up through his new breasts and down into his balls and back up through his cock, and he was so hard and so wet and so close and he hated himself with a purity he had not known he was capable of.

"Say it," Cassiday said again. "Or I stop. And I don't start again until tomorrow. And tomorrow I'll have the frame reconfigured. You won't like the new configuration."

"Please," Jay said. The word came out before he could catch it. It hung in the air between them, and Jay heard it, and his face burned with shame that had nothing to do with the heat in his blood. "Please don't stop."

"There," Cassiday said. He sounded pleased. He sounded like a teacher whose student had finally gotten the answer right. "That wasn't so hard, was it."

He kept stroking. Jay's head fell back against the frame and his eyes closed and he stopped trying to hold anything in. The tears kept coming, and the moans kept coming, and his hips kept moving, and somewhere in the middle of it all the shame stopped being a separate thing and became part of the pleasure, a flavor in it, a heat in it, and he understood with a clarity that broke his heart that he was never going to be able to separate the two again. This was what Cassiday was making him. This was what he was becoming. A body that came when it was hurt. A mouth that begged. A thing that hung in a frame and leaked and said please.

"Look at me," Cassiday said.

Jay opened his eyes.

"Look at what you are." Cassiday's free hand came up and cupped Jay's new left breast, thumb and forefinger catching the nipple, rolling it. Jay's whole body arched and a sob came out of him that was almost a laugh. "You came in here a man. You're leaving something else. And your body knows it. Your body's been waiting for it. Every stroke of this hand is telling you the truth you've been running from since the first time someone put their cock in your mouth."

"Please—"

"What do you want."

"I want—" Jay's voice broke. He didn't know what he wanted. He wanted to come. He wanted to die. He wanted the fire to stop and he wanted Cassiday's hand to never stop and he wanted to be back in the cold room in the back of his skull and he wanted to be anywhere but here, in this body, in this frame, with breasts on his chest and his name in pieces somewhere behind him. "I want to come."

"Say please."

"Please."

"Say please, Doctor."

"Please, Doctor."

"Say please, Doctor, I want to come for you."

"Please, Doctor, I want to come for you."

Cassiday's hand sped up. Short, hard strokes now, his grip tight and wet with Jay's own leaking, and the sound of it filled the room — a slick, rhythmic noise that Jay would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life. Jones stood to the side and watched. Jay could feel the yellow eye on him. He could feel the weight of being seen, and it made the pleasure worse, hotter, more shameful, and he was right at the edge and he couldn't stop and he couldn't hold it and—

"Come," Cassiday said.

Jay came. His whole body locked in the frame, every muscle pulling against the restraints, and his cock jerked in Cassiday's hand and spilled up his own belly and onto his new breasts, hot and white and dripping down the curve of them. The orgasm went on longer than it should have. It kept rolling through him in waves, each one pulling another sound out of his throat, and by the end he was shaking in the cuffs and his vision had gone grey at the edges and he could hear himself whimpering like an animal.

Cassiday let go of his cock and stepped back. He looked at the mess on Jay's chest with the satisfaction of a man who had just finished a difficult repair.

"Good," he said. "Very good. The pathways are holding beautifully. We'll do this again in six hours. The bone work starts tomorrow."

Jay hung in the frame and couldn't answer. His chest heaved. His come cooled on his skin. His cock was still half-hard, twitching with aftershocks, and he could feel the new weight of his breasts moving with every breath he took, and he could not look away from them. He could not look away from what he had become. He could not look away from the fact that his body had just come harder than it had in years, and that some part of him — some small, terrible part he was only now beginning to see — had liked it.

"Clean him up," Jones said. "He's got a visitor coming."

Jay's head came up. "What visitor."

Jones's grin widened. "A broker. Interested in the finished product. He wants to see the work in progress." He turned toward the door. "Don't worry. You'll make an impression."

The door closed behind him. Cassiday was already at the console, making notes, humming to himself. Jay hung in the frame with his come drying on his new breasts and his heart pounding and the cold room in the back of his skull no longer cold — warmer now, warmer than it had any right to be, and getting warmer every time Cassiday's hand had touched him.

He looked down at the small round mounds on his chest. He looked at the smooth pale skin where his hair had been. He looked at his own cock, still there, still his, still standing up like it belonged to someone else.

"What am I," he said. Not to Cassiday. Not to anyone. To the frame. To the deck. To the small cold room in the back of his skull that wasn't cold anymore.

Cassiday didn't look up from his notes. "You're a work in progress," he said. "The Captain will want to see the final version. As will the crew and everyone who comes aboard this ship from now on." He made a small mark on his readout. "You're not a man anymore, Jay. You're a piece of fuckmeat. And fuckmeat doesn't ask what it is. fuckmeat waits to be used and sold."

The words settled into Jay's chest like stones. He hung in the frame and felt them, one by one, and felt his body respond to them — the heat rising in his face, the clench low in his gut, the twitch of his cock against his belly. Even this. Even being told he was fuckmeat. His body was learning to like that too.

Cassiday came back with a cloth. Not a warm one — a cold one, wrung out over a steel basin, water dripping off the corner of it and spattering the deck in small dark coins. He didn't announce himself. He didn't ask. He just laid the cloth flat across Jay's belly and dragged it upward, slow, collecting the cooling come in a long wet smear up over the new curve of his left breast, over the nipple, and Jay's whole torso flinched away from the cold before it could stop itself.

"Hold still," Cassiday said. "You'll make me do it twice."

The cloth went back down. The second pass was worse. The cold had eaten into the fabric now, and every inch of skin it crossed pulled tight and pebbled, and Jay could feel his nipples harden under the drag of it — both of them, the old flat man's nipples he'd had for forty-two years and the new ones sitting on the new shape, all of it responding the same way, all of it betraying him the same way. Cassiday noticed. Of course he noticed. He turned the cloth and pressed it flat over the right breast, palm behind it, and held it there until Jay's breath came out in a thin shake.

"There's no rush," Cassiday said. "The chemicals aren't going anywhere. They'll keep working while I clean you."

Jay stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was ribbed metal, same as the corridor. A seam ran down the center of it, and the seam had a bead of rust along one edge, and he fixed his eyes on that bead of rust and did not move them. He'd learned on the Vixen that if you gave your eyes one small true thing to hold, the rest of you could go somewhere else. The rust was orange-brown. The rust was probably older than he was. The rust had been there when whoever built this ship bolted the plates together, and it would be there when whoever came after him cut the plates apart for scrap, and it did not care that he was hanging in a frame with breasts on his chest and a doctor's cold hand on his tit.

Cassiday wiped under the left breast, then the right. He lifted each one with the flat of his hand to get the crease, and the lift was gentle, almost clinical, which was somehow worse than roughness would have been — the gentleness said he'd done this before, many times, to many bodies, and he'd worked out the best way to get underneath. Jay's hips shifted in the restraints. His cock, which had finally begun to soften, twitched back up against his belly at the touch, and he felt the heat of his own blush spread from his throat to his ears.

"Good," Cassiday said. He wasn't talking about the cleanliness. "Keep responding like that. It makes the readings easier."

"Readings."

"Everything you do is a reading." Cassiday dropped the cloth into the basin. The water in it had gone cloudy, faintly opalescent, and Jay could not look at it. "Heart rate. Skin response. Pupil dilation. Erection latency. I've been tracking you since the primer went in. You're a very legible subject, Jay. Most of them fight so hard the data's useless for the first week."

He picked up a second cloth from the cart. This one was dry. He ran it over Jay's chest, over his belly, dabbing at the thin residue the wet cloth had left behind, and the dry drag of it made Jay's skin crawl in a way that was almost unbearable. He could feel every thread of the cloth. He could feel the individual fibers catching on the fine new hairs that hadn't fallen out yet, the last stubborn ones, and he could feel the places where Cassiday pressed a little harder than he needed to, testing, waiting for the flinch.

Jay didn't flinch. He held the rust.

"You're learning," Cassiday said. "That's interesting. Most of them don't learn this fast." He set the dry cloth down and stood back, and for a moment he just looked, head tilted, wire-rimmed glasses catching the overhead strip. "You've been through this before. Not this exactly. But something like it. Someone's already trained the flinch out of you."

Jay said nothing.

"Michelle's work, I'd guess. The broker listings mentioned her. She's thorough." Cassiday picked up his readout and made a note. "It's a shame she lost you. You were clearly one of her better pieces. But I'll build on the foundation. That's all any of us can do."

He walked to the console and began shutting it down — the display panels flickering to black one by one, the soft hum of the equipment winding down to nothing. Jay watched the room go dark in stages. The instruments on the cart stayed where they were. The frame stayed where it was. Cassiday shrugged into a long grey coat that hung on a hook by the door, and the coat was stained at the cuffs and along the hem, and Jay thought about all the bodies that had stained it and made himself stop thinking about it.

"Six hours," Cassiday said, hand on the door. "Don't try to sleep. The second stage metabolizes faster if you stay conscious. You'll feel it working in your bones by the time I get back. That's normal."

"Wait."

Cassiday paused. He didn't turn around.

"The broker. Jones said there's a broker coming."

"There is."

"What does he want."

"To see you." Cassiday's shoulders moved under the coat — a shrug, or something close to it. "Buyers don't trust photographs anymore. Too many fakes on the market. He'll want to look at the seams, check the tissue response, fuck the merchandise and make sure it is to the required specification. Standard." He opened the door. The corridor light cut across the deck in a long yellow wedge. "You'll want to be responsive. A good showing gets you sold faster, and sold faster means you leave this frame sooner. That's the only incentive I can offer you. Take it or don't."

The door closed behind him. The lock engaged with a sound like a knuckle cracking.

Jay hung in the frame and the room got quiet. Not the kind of quiet he'd known in the holding cell, with the drain gurgling and Jones's boots in the corridor. This was a sealed-room quiet, a dead-air quiet, the kind that only existed on ships where the ventilation had been shut down for the night cycle and the only sound was your own body doing its involuntary work. His breath. His heartbeat, which he could hear in his ears now that there was nothing else to hear. The faint wet click in his throat every time he swallowed.

And underneath all of it, the chemicals.

He could feel them. He hadn't been able to, before — the first injection had been fire, and fire was too loud to feel anything under. But the fire had burned down now, and what was left was a slow deep ache that moved through him like water finding its level. It was in his thighs. It was in his hips, in the joint sockets, a dull grinding pressure as if something were being reshaped from the inside and the bone was having to make room. It was in his jaw, in his cheekbones, in the small bones around his eyes. When he closed his eyes he could feel his own skull being quietly reorganized, and when he opened them again the room looked very slightly different, the proportions of it subtly wrong, as if his face had moved and taken the world with it.

He looked down at his chest.

The breasts were still there. They were real. He'd half-hoped that without Cassiday's hand on them, without the frame's tension pulling at his skin, they might flatten back out — that the whole thing had been some kind of stress response, a swelling that would go down. They hadn't. They sat on his ribcage, small and round and pale, and the air moving over them made his nipples tighten in a way he could not control and could not ignore. Every breath he took lifted them and set them down again. Every slight shift of his weight in the cuffs made them move. He was aware of them the way he was aware of a broken finger — constantly, intrusively, in a way that made it impossible to think about anything else for more than a few seconds at a time.

He tried to look away. His eyes went back.

He tried to think about something else. The shuttle. Birdie on her mother's porch. The look on her mother's face when she'd opened the door and seen what her daughter had become. He held the image for maybe ten seconds before it dissolved, and what replaced it was Cassiday's hand, and what replaced that was his own cock, half-hard, still slick at the tip, still standing up against his belly like it hadn't gotten the message that the rest of him had been taken apart.

"You're a work in progress," he said. Quietly. To the breasts. To the frame. To the rust on the ceiling seam. "That's all. That's all this is. You're a work in progress."

The words didn't help. They sat in the dead air and went stale, and he could hear how thin they were, how much they were trying to cover. He wasn't a work in progress. He was a ruin. He was a building that had been gutted and was being rebuilt into a shape the architect liked better, and the architect was a liver-spotted old man with a horse's cock and a rack of vials, and the building didn't get a vote.

The ache shifted. It moved down out of his hips and into his groin, and for a moment Jay thought it was just the same heat he'd been feeling all night, the low background hum of whatever Cassiday had put into him. Then it deepened. It became a pressure, a fullness, like the feeling of being hard for too long without relief, except it wasn't in his cock. It was behind his cock. It was in the place where his balls had been, and it was in the place behind that, deeper, in the root of him, in the tissue that ran up into his belly and down into his thighs.

He knew what was happening. He didn't want to know. He knew anyway.

The chemicals were working on the soft tissue now. The bone would come later — Cassiday had said so — but the soft tissue was first, the fat and the fascia and the little structural things that gave a body its shape, and Jay could feel them being slowly rearranged the way you could feel a ship's hull creaking in a gravity well. His hips were spreading. Not much. Not yet. But the angle of his thighs against the ankle cuffs had changed, and his waist — he couldn't see his waist, he was hanging with his arms up and his belly stretched — but he could feel it, the way the muscle had begun to pull in and soften, the way his ribs sat differently on top of it.

And the fullness behind his cock kept building.

It wasn't arousal. It was too deep for arousal. It was the ache of a body being asked to do something it had never done, and doing it anyway, and the doing was slow and constant and there was no position he could shift into that would relieve it. He tried to move his hips. The restraints held. He tried to clench the muscles there, the way you'd clench to push something out, and the clench made it worse — sent a pulse of heat up through his groin and into his cock and made it jump against his belly and leak another bead of clear fluid down the shaft.

"Stop," he told it. "Stop it. Stop."

The door cracked open again before the lock had finished settling. Jay heard the tumblers reverse, felt the pressure change in the dead air, and then Cassiday was back in the doorway with the cold basin still balanced on one hip and a fresh folded cloth in his other hand. He hadn't brought the cart. He hadn't brought the readout. He'd come back for one thing and he crossed the deck in four unhurried strides to get it.

"You came on yourself," Cassiday said.

It wasn't a question and it wasn't an accusation. It was the tone of a man noting that a drain had backed up. He set the basin on the deck, unfolded the new cloth, and held it up so Jay could see it — grey, thin, the same kind he'd used before.

"I didn't—" Jay started, and stopped, because he had. The proof was cooling on his belly in a tacky stripe and the cloth was coming for it either way.

"You did. Twice since I left. The second one was smaller." Cassiday crouched in front of him, and up close the man's knee popped audibly as it bent, which was the only sound in the room that belonged to anyone but Jay. "That's the myorelaxant. It opens the pelvic floor and the smooth muscle in the vas deferens. You'll leak like this for about a day. It's not a problem. It's the process."

The cloth touched Jay's belly and the cold hit him like a hand. He sucked air through his teeth and his whole abdomen flinched away, which only pressed his cock forward into the cloth, and Cassiday used that — laid the fabric flat over the head of it and pressed, gentle, until Jay's hips jumped and a sound came up out of him that he tried to swallow and couldn't.

"Hold still."

He dragged the cloth down the shaft, slow, and the friction was wrong in every way — too cold, too dry at the edge where the fabric had already wicked up what it caught — and Jay's cock stayed hard through all of it, harder if anything, standing up off his belly and twitching under the drag like it was being stroked instead of scrubbed. Cassiday wiped the base of it, then the crease along the inside of his thigh where a bead had run down and gone tacky in the fine new hair there, and he did that part with two fingers wrapped in the cloth, working the seam of Jay's leg like he was cleaning a tool.

"You're not ashamed of this," Cassiday said. "That's the interesting part."

"I am."

"No." He folded the cloth to a clean side and went back up the shaft. "Shame has a signature. Elevated cortisol, suppressed skin conductance, the eyes go to the floor and stay there. You've been looking at me the whole time. You watched my hand. You're aroused and you're watching, and what you're feeling isn't shame, it's something you've been taught to call shame because you don't have a better word for it."

Jay's jaw worked. "You don't know what I feel."

"I know what you do." Cassiday's thumb slid up over the head of Jay's cock, gathering the last of the wet, and the touch was light enough to be accidental and deliberate enough that it wasn't. Jay's thighs locked. The sound he made was small and wet and he hated it more than he'd hated anything all night. "You've been hard since the primer. Through the tattoo. Through the frame. Through every reading I took. That's not a body being tortured. That's a body that's found its function."

He stood up, and his knee popped again, and he dropped the soiled cloth into the basin where it sank and turned the water cloudy. Then he picked the basin up by the rim and carried it to the drain in the corner of the room — a square grate set into the deck plates, the same kind that had been in Jay's holding cell — and poured the water out in a long grey rope. It hissed going down. The smell that came up off the grate was cold metal and something faintly animal, and Jay knew what it was, and he made himself breathe through it and not think about the fact that the drain had smelled like that before he'd come into the room.

"Six hours," Cassiday said, setting the empty basin down by the door. "I told you not to sleep. I'll amend that. You can sleep. It won't slow the process much, and you'll want the rest before the broker gets here."

"When."

"Evening cycle. Maybe earlier if Jones decides to move the schedule." He pulled the grey coat off the hook and shrugged into it, and the stained hem swung against his shins. "He'll bring the broker in himself. Jones likes to watch the first inspection — he's proud of his canvases. Don't embarrass him. The crew will warm you up during the day so you’ll be well fucked out when the Broker arrives."

Jay watched him cross to the door. His mouth was dry and his cock was still up against his belly and there was nothing he could do about either one, and the words came out anyway, thin and scraped. "Why are you telling me this."

Cassiday stopped with his hand on the frame. The overhead strip caught his lenses and turned them into two flat white coins, and behind them his eyes were unreadable.

"Because I want the sale to go through," he said. "You're the most responsive subject I've had in eleven years, and if the broker walks you're going to a mining crew as a fuck doll and my data ends. So I'm telling you how to behave." He opened the door. The corridor light cut in, yellow and long. "That's the whole of it. There's no kindness in this room, Jay. You'll do better if you stop looking for it."

The door closed. The lock engaged. His footsteps went down the corridor and faded, and the ventilation was still off, and the room went back to the dead-air quiet with Jay alone in it.

He hung there and listened to himself. His heart was still fast — faster than it had been before Cassiday came back, which he noted and did not examine — and the cold from the cloth had faded out of his belly and left a faint tightness behind, the skin drawn where the water had dried. The come was gone. The evidence was gone. The room was exactly as it had been, and the only thing that had changed was the thing he couldn't see, the slow work going on under his skin, and he couldn't tell whether it had sped up while Cassiday was in the room or whether he'd just been too busy being looked at to feel it.

He felt it now.

The ache had moved out of his groin and into his hips again, but it was different this time — not the dull grinding of bone making room but a pull, a drawing-in, as if something under the muscle were being cinched tighter by degrees. His waist. He could feel his waist. He'd never felt his waist in his life. It was the part of a body you didn't notice, the part between the ribs and the hip, and now it was the loudest thing in him, a band of pressure running from his spine around to his navel, and when he breathed in he could feel the band resist and when he breathed out he could feel it settle a fraction tighter than it had been.

He looked down. The breasts moved with the breath and the nipples had gone hard again in the cold room, and past them, past the low swell of his belly, he could see the line of his own flank where it curved in toward the hip cuff. The curve was wrong. It had a waist in it now — not much, a suggestion, the way a waist looked on someone who'd been wearing a belt too long — but it was there, and it hadn't been there when Cassiday had hung him up, and the sight of it did something to his chest that he didn't have a word for.

Not shame. He tried the word on and it didn't fit, and he remembered Cassiday's voice saying you don't have a better word for it, and he hated that the man had been right about that too.

He closed his eyes. The ache was in his cheekbones now, a fine pressure under the skin, and when he pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth he could feel the shape of his own jaw differently — narrower at the hinge, the corner of it softened, as if the bone were being sanded down from the inside. His face. He was going to have to look at his face. The room had no mirror and no reflection in it anywhere, which he understood now was not an oversight, and he was grateful for it in a way that made his stomach turn.

Time went. He couldn't measure it — no clock, no light change, no traffic in the corridor — and he tried counting his breaths and lost the count somewhere past two hundred, and when he started again he lost it faster. The ache cycled. It would build in one place until it was nearly unbearable and then fade to a background hum, and while it faded it would open somewhere new, and he learned to track it the way he'd once tracked a bad bearing in an engine: by sound, by feel, by the small wrongness that told you which part was giving out.

Except his body wasn't giving out. It was taking on. That was the thing he couldn't get his head around. Every other time a body had been worked on in his life it had been repair — something broken, something mended, the same shape at the end. This was the opposite. This was a shape being replaced by another shape, one cell at a time, and the cells weren't asking him.

His cock had finally gone down. He noticed it the way you notice a sound stopping. The leak had dried on his belly and left a thin crust he could feel when he breathed, and the head of it had shrunk back against the shaft and the whole thing lay against his thigh, soft, and it looked smaller than he remembered it. Not much. A little. The myorelaxant, or the chemicals, or the fact that it had spent the last six hours standing up in a cold room and was simply tired.

He didn't know which, and he didn't want to know, and he looked at it anyway for a long time because it was the last thing on his body that was still his, and he wanted to memorize it before it stopped being true.

The ventilation kicked on sometime after that. He heard it first as a change in the air — a faint moving cold against his left side — and then the low hum of the fans came up under the room and the dead-air quiet was gone and he could hear the ship again. The deep structural groan of it. A pump cycling somewhere below decks. Footsteps in a corridor he couldn't see, two sets, unhurried, going away from him.

He hung in the frame and listened to the ship and felt his waist cinch another fraction tighter, and he thought about the broker coming in the morning, and about the look on a stranger's face when he ran a hand over the merchandise, and about whether the body he'd have by then would still be something he recognized, and the answer was probably not, and there was nothing he could do about it, and he was still hard again before he'd finished the thought.

"You're a work in progress," he said to the ceiling. The rust bead was still there. It hadn't moved. "That's all."

It sounded just as thin the second time. He closed his eyes and let the ship's noise fill the room and waited for the morning, and the chemicals kept working, and under the low fan hum he could hear his own breath coming a little shorter than it had been, a little higher in his chest, like a body that was learning to breathe in a shape it hadn't been issued yet.