Cassiday's hand moved to the second cuff. The first had already come off, and Jay's wrist dropped to her side, blood rushing back into her fingers with a hot prickle. She did not try to run. There was nowhere to run to. The cargo bay was a bowl of light, and the crew stood along its rim like men watching a dog get put down.

"Please," she said again. Her voice had gone thin, worn through from the inside. "I'll be good. I'll do whatever. Just—not the box."

Verhoeven was already turning away, her heels ticking across the deck plate. "Everyone says that," she said, without looking back. "Then they go in the box, and they come out the other side of the galaxy, and they're still exactly the same product. The box doesn't change anything. It just holds."

Cassiday worked the third cuff. Jay's other wrist fell free, and her arms hung at her sides, loose and useless. She was still spread at the ankles, still pinned to the frame, and the shape of her body against the steel felt obscene even to her — the small breasts Cassiday had grown, the cinched waist, the cock that hung between her thighs, half-hard from nothing, from the room, from the fact of being looked at. That was the worst part. Her body had learned to want the looking.

"Ankles," Cassiday said, and knelt to work the last two cuffs himself, one hand braced on her calf. His fingers were warm and dry. He did not hurry. When the last cuff came free, Jay's knees buckled, and she caught herself on the edge of the platform with both hands, head down, breathing the smell of hot metal and her own sweat.

"Stand up," Cassiday said. "You don't get to look broken. You're inventory."

Jay stood up.

The case was already in the bay. She had not seen it arrive — it must have been brought in while she was being inspected, while Verhoeven's gloved fingers were pressing her open, while she was being told to say thank you. It sat on a pallet in the center of the yellow square, matte black, chest-high, with recessed latches and a small readout panel on the lid. There was a stenciled serial number on the side and nothing else. No padding visible. No air holes that she could see. It looked like what it was: a box for shipping meat.

"Walk," Cassiday said.

She walked. Her feet were bare on the cold deck, and every step made a small sound she could hear too clearly. The crew watched. She knew most of their faces now — had learned them the way you learn the faces of weather. The big one with the burn scar across his jaw. The two brothers who did everything together. The one with the tattooed neck who had cried while he used her, which had frightened her more than the ones who laughed.

The lid of the case was open. Inside was a molded cradle, shaped roughly like a person, lined in gray foam. There was a strap at the top end, and another at the bottom, and a small mesh grille near where the head would lie. That was the air. That was all the air there was.

"In," Cassiday said.

Jay looked at the foam. She thought about Birdie, which was a habit she had not been able to break — Birdie on the shuttle with her mouth full and her eyes bright, Birdie on Sarif IV walking up the path toward her mother's door, Birdie's back getting smaller. She had told Birdie that if anyone came looking, she would say Birdie was dead. She had meant it as a kindness. Standing over the case, she understood it had also been a lie she could live inside, and now she was being asked to climb into a smaller one.

"I said in."

She climbed in. The foam was cold and gave slightly under her weight, and it was shaped wrong — too narrow at the shoulders, too shallow through the chest — so that she had to lie on her side with her knees drawn up a little, one arm folded under her. The cradle cupped her like a hand that had been measured for someone else. Cassiday reached down and pulled the strap across her shoulders, cinched it, then did the one at her ankles. The strap bit into the soft place above her heel.

"Breathe out," he said.

"What?"

"Breathe out and hold it. The lid won't close if your chest is full."

She breathed out. The lid came down. The latch clicked. Then the second latch. Then a third, near her feet, that she felt more than heard — a small hard knock transmitted through the foam into her hip.

Dark. Total. Not the dark of a room at night, which has shapes in it, but the dark of the inside of a thing, which has nothing. She could hear her own breath against the mesh grille, close and wet. She could hear her heart, which was not a metaphor now, was a fist knocking on the inside of her ribs, and she could hear it in her ears and in her throat and in the soles of her feet where the strap held her.

She tried to count. She got to eleven and lost it. She tried to think about the case as a machine, the way she used to think about a star-drive that was giving her trouble — what are its parts, what does it want, where is it leaking — and found she could not hold the thought. The case was not a machine. The case was a box, and she was in it, and there was no part of the box she could reach.

The case moved.

It was a lurch at first, then a long slide, then a bump that knocked her cheek against the foam. She heard voices outside, muffled, and the clatter of the pallet being dragged across the deck plate. Then the sound changed — opened up, echoed — and she understood they were in a corridor. The case turned a corner. Her body shifted inside it, foam pressing into her hip and shoulder, and she had to brace her feet against the end of the cradle to keep from sliding.

She thought: this is what cargo feels like.

The corridor sounds went on for a long time. Voices passed and faded. A door opened and closed somewhere. The case was set down once, hard enough to jar her teeth, and she heard Verhoeven's voice above her, saying something about a manifest, and another voice answering, and then the case was lifted again and the motion resumed.

Jay closed her eyes, which made no difference, and tried to be small. It was not a strategy. It was the only thing her body knew how to do anymore. On the Vixen she had learned to be small. On Jones's ship she had learned to be small and grateful. Now she was in a box, and being small was the same as being the right shape for the box, and she found, to her shame, that she was good at it.

Then the case dropped.

It was not a set-down. It was a fall — a half-meter of free movement and then a slam that drove the air out of her and slammed her knee against the side of the cradle. She heard something break outside, metal on metal, and then a sound she had heard before, on the Venture's Star, through a bulkhead, when a hull plate had come loose in a debris field: a flat, hard crack that traveled through the deck and into her bones.

Then shouting.

Not the shouting of a crew moving cargo. The other kind. The kind with names in it, and orders, and the high tight note of men who have just discovered they are in a fight. She heard Verhoeven's voice cut through it once — sharp, cold, the same voice that had told her the box didn't change anything — and then she heard a sound she could not place, a long tearing sound, and then the shouting got farther away.

The case was moving again. Fast this time. Not a drag but a run — she could feel the rhythm of running feet through the pallet, two sets of them, and the case swung and tilted and her body rolled against the straps. She heard a voice right above her, breathless: "Go, go, go—" and then a different sound, a deep hollow boom, and then the quality of the air changed.

An airlock. She knew the sound. She had spent twenty years around airlocks. The boom was the outer door. The change in the air was pressure. The case was being carried through a docking collar, and on the other side of the collar there was a ship.

The fighting sounds receded. They did not stop — she could still hear, very faint, the flat crack of something hitting a hull — but they got smaller and farther, the way a storm gets smaller when you close a door on it. The case was set down. Not dropped. Set down, carefully, the way you set down something you have been paid to deliver.

Then nothing.

She lay in the dark and listened to her own breathing and the hum of a ship she did not know. It was a different hum. The Venture's Star had hummed like a refrigerator. The Vixen had hummed like a brothel — low and dirty, with music in it somewhere. Jones's ship had hummed like a wound. This one hummed like a machine that had been built to a specification. Clean. Even. Almost quiet.

She waited. She counted. She got to sixty and started again and got to sixty again. She thought about the word manifest and the word inventory and the word product, and she thought about how she had stopped being a person somewhere back on the Venture's Star and had not noticed the exact moment, the way you don't notice the moment a room gets dark.

Boots.

Two sets, maybe three, walking on a hard deck toward the case. They stopped beside her. She heard a voice, close, low: "This it?" And another: "That's the tag." And then the first voice again, with something in it she did not recognize at first because she had not heard it in a long time: "All right. Let's get it open."

The latches popped, one, two, three. The lid lifted, and light came in — white, flat, brighter than anything she had seen in weeks — and she squeezed her eyes shut against it, and her body, without being told, curled tighter into the cradle.

"Easy," the voice said. "Easy. You're all right."

She opened her eyes. It took a moment. The light was the light of a sickbay — she knew that light, she had seen it on a dozen ships — and when the shapes resolved she saw three people standing over her, and all three of them were in uniform. Not pirate leather. Not the Vixen's silk. Uniforms, blue-gray, with a small round patch on the shoulder she could not read yet. The one nearest her was a woman with gray at her temples and a face that had been kind for a long time and had stopped expecting to be thanked for it.

"Can you sit up?" the woman said. "Slow. Take it slow."

Jay sat up. The straps were already off — someone had cut them, or unfastened them while she was looking at the light — and she swung her legs over the side of the case and put her feet on the deck. The deck was warm. That was the thing that undid her, for a second. The deck was warm.

"Where—" she said, and her voice came out as a rasp. She swallowed. "Where am I?"

"You're aboard the UNSS Warspite," the woman said. "United Nations Star Service. Battlecruiser. We've been hunting the Jones crew for four months." She paused, and her eyes moved over Jay — the small breasts, the cinched waist, the cock, the whole impossible shape of her — and she did not flinch, which Jay noticed, and did not look away, which Jay noticed more. "You're safe. You're on a Federation ship. Nobody here is going to touch you."

Jay started to laugh. It came out wrong — a dry, cracked sound, more like a cough. She put her hand over her mouth to stop it. When she took the hand away, her face was wet, and she did not know when that had happened.

"The broker," she said. "Verhoeven. She—"

"Was ours," the woman said. "Deep cover. Seven years. Her job was to find hostages inside the pirate networks and get them out without blowing her cover." She glanced at the case. "You were the last one on that ship. The rest were already clear."

Jay looked at the case. The lid was open, and the foam inside was dented where her body had been, and there was a dark smear on the gray where her hip had pressed. She thought about Verhoeven's gloved fingers. She thought about the word sweet spot. She thought about being told to say thank you.

"She bought me," Jay said. "She paid sixty-eight units for me. I heard her say it."

"She paid sixty-eight units of Star Service operational funds for you," the woman said. "It's in a ledger. It'll be audited. You don't owe anyone anything."

The words landed somewhere in Jay's chest and did not stick. She heard them. She understood them. But there was a part of her that had been inventory for so long that being told she was not inventory anymore felt like being told the sky was green. She nodded anyway. It was what you did.

"I'm Commander Ruth Okafor," the woman said. "Ship's counselor. This is Doctor Pell, and this is Nurse Adeyemi. We're going to take you to a private room and get you cleaned up, and then the doctor is going to examine you. Nothing that happens in this room goes anywhere without your say-so. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Jay said.

"Do you believe me?"

Jay looked at her. It was a real question, and she could see that Okafor knew it was a real question, and that she was not going to pretend otherwise. That was the first thing in a long time that had felt like it was being said to her and not at her.

"No," Jay said. "But I'd like to."

Okafor nodded, once, as if that were the correct answer. "Good," she said. "That's honest. Come on."

They gave her a gown. It was the wrong kind of gown — a real patient's gown, thin blue cotton, open at the back — and when Nurse Adeyemi helped her into it, Jay felt the old reflex fire, the one that said this is a costume, this is the start of something, and she had to stand very still for a moment with her hands at her sides until it passed. Nobody touched her except to tie the strings. Nobody commented on her body. That was somehow worse than being commented on. Silence left room for her to hear herself think, and she had been avoiding that for a long time.

The examination room was small and white and smelled like antiseptic and clean linen. Doctor Pell was a compact man in his fifties with a soft voice and steady hands, and he worked without narrating, which Jay appreciated. He took her blood pressure. He listened to her heart. He looked in her eyes and her throat and asked her to open her mouth and say ah. He asked permission before every step, and every time she said yes, and every time she said yes she felt something in her chest loosen by a degree.

Then he got to the rest of it.

"I'm going to need to examine the surgical sites," he said. "The chest, the genital area, and the rectum. I'll tell you what I'm doing before I do it. If you want to stop at any point, say stop, and we stop. All right?"

"All right," Jay said.

He examined the chest first. The breasts were small and high and tender, and when he pressed the tissue gently with two fingers, Jay's breath caught — not from pain, exactly, but from the way Cassiday's primer had rewired her, the way any touch on that part of her body arrived as a kind of question her nerves had been trained to answer with yes. She kept her face still. She had gotten good at keeping her face still.

"These are about eight weeks along, by the tissue," Pell said, to Okafor, not to Jay. "Second-generation endocrine induction. The glandular structure is stable. He did clean work." He paused, and his mouth tightened. "Clean work on a filthy job."

"Can they be reversed?" Okafor asked.

Pell was quiet for a moment. He looked at Jay, and Jay looked back at him, and she understood from the look that the answer was already known and that he was deciding how to say it.

"The breasts could be surgically reduced," he said. "The waist reshaping is skeletal and soft-tissue. That could be partially corrected with a long course of reconstruction. But the neural work — the synaptic primer — that's not something we can undo. It's not a scar. It's a rewiring. His nerves have been taught to route certain signals through the pleasure centers. We can teach him to manage it. We can't unteach it."

"So he lives with it," Okafor said.

"He lives with it," Pell said. "As a sissy. That's the word Cassiday would have used, and I'm not going to pretend there's a kinder one that means the same thing. The body he has now is the body he keeps."

Jay sat on the edge of the examination table with the paper crinkling under her thighs and listened to two strangers decide the rest of her life in a calm, professional voice, and the strange thing was that she was not surprised. She had known. Somewhere in the frame room, somewhere in the cargo bay, somewhere in the case, she had already understood that there was no version of this where she got her old body back. The old body had been a mechanic's body. The old body had been a man's body. The old body had been a thing she had never particularly liked, but it had been hers, and it was gone, and what was left was this: a body that had been built to be used, and did not know how to be anything else.

"I know," Jay said.

Both of them looked at her.

"I know," she said again. "I've known since the frame. You don't have to be gentle about it. I'd rather you weren't."

Pell set down his instrument. "All right," he said. "Then I'll tell you straight. You’ll never be a man again. You have a working penis and testicles, but the rest of your body will remain that of a woman."

"I figured that out," Jay said.

"You still get hard," Pell said. "The primer rerouted that too. It just doesn't work the way it did."

"I know," Jay said. "It works when someone's looking, when I am ashamed or humiliated."

The room was quiet. Okafor wrote something on her pad and did not look up. Pell picked up his instrument again and asked, in the same steady voice, whether Jay was ready for the rest of the examination, and Jay said yes, and lay back on the table, and stared at the ceiling while he worked. There was a water stain on one of the tiles, shaped like a boot. She counted the perforations in the acoustic panel above the light. She did not feel much of anything, which she understood was not the same as being all right, but was, for now, a place to stand.

Afterward, Okafor took her to a small room off the sickbay with a cot and a chair and a window — an actual window, with a real view of stars going by slow, and Jay sat on the cot and looked at the stars for a long time and did not say anything.

Okafor sat in the chair. She did not fill the silence. She let it sit there between them, and after a while Jay understood that she was being offered something, and that the something was time.

"I'm supposed to debrief you," Okafor said, eventually. "For the record. So that what happened to you is documented, and so that the people who did it can be charged. That's the official reason." She paused. "The unofficial reason is that I've been doing this for twenty-two years, and I've never met anyone who came out of a place like the Vixen and the Jones ship and got better by not talking about it."

"You want me to tell you what they did to me."

"I want you to tell me whatever you can stand to tell me," Okafor said. "And when you can't stand it anymore, you stop, and we sit here and look at the stars. That's the whole deal."

Jay looked at the stars. They were moving slowly, the way stars move when a ship is under way at cruising speed, and she thought about the shuttle and the dark and the nav console with no destination on it, and about how she had pointed the nose at nothing and been caught, and about how that had turned out to be the best thing that had happened to her in a year.

"I was a mechanic," she said. "Before. I worked on drives. I was good at it."

"I believe you," Okafor said.

"I lost my job. I was in a bar near the docks, and a captain came in, and she offered me a berth. Captain Emma Vance. She said she needed a mechanic." Jay's mouth twisted. "She needed a maid. A French maid uniform. That was the first thing they gave me."

"That was the Venture's Star?"

"Yes." Jay's hands were in her lap, and she was looking at them, and they were not a mechanic's hands anymore. The calluses were gone. The grease was gone. They were soft and small and the nails were clean. "She traded me to a Zarlok slaver to save her crew. Graadar. He did a function test on me. Then he sold me to the Vixen."

"Madam Michelle's ship."

"Yes." Jay closed her eyes. "I don't want to talk about the Vixen in detail. Not yet. I'll tell you the shape of it. I was branded. I was bred. There was another worker, Birdie, and we were both made pregnant with Dracon larvae, and we both gave birth on stage, and then we escaped. She's safe. She's with her mother. That's all I'll say about her, and if you write it down, write it down that she's dead. That's what I told her I'd say."

Okafor wrote nothing. "All right," she said. "Birdie is dead. On the record."

"Thank you."

"And then?"

"And then I was in a shuttle with nowhere to go, and Jones caught me. He knew what I was. He'd seen the bulletins. He gave me to Cassiday, and Cassiday—" Jay stopped. She opened her eyes and looked at the stars and made herself keep talking, because the alternative was to sit in the silence and hear the frame room humming behind her eyes. "Cassiday put me in a frame and injected me and made me come while he did it. He told me I was fuckmeat. He put a horseshoe on my ass with a needle. He made me count the men who used me. Twelve. I got to twelve, all mutants, and then the captain came in, and that was thirteen, and then the broker came."

"You counted them out loud."

"He made me. He said it was for the buyer. He said it proved I was trained." Jay's voice was flat. "It did. I was."

Okafor was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "The counting. Did you ever try to stop?"

"I didn't want to stop," Jay said. "That's the part I can't—" She stopped again. She pressed her palms against her thighs, hard, feeling the softness there, the absence of the calluses, the new shape of her own legs. "That's the part I can't get past. I didn't want to stop. When he told me to say thank you, I said thank you. When he told me to beg, I begged. Not because I was afraid. Because some part of me meant it. Because he'd rewired me so that meaning it was the only thing that felt like anything."

"That's what the primer does," Okafor said. "It's not consent. It's chemistry. You didn't choose it. He chose it for you."

"I know," Jay said. "I know all of that. I've been telling myself all of that. It doesn't change how it feels."

"No," Okafor said. "It doesn't. Not yet. But it will, if you let it. That's not a promise. It's just what I've seen."

Jay was quiet for a long time after that. The stars slid past the window. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed, and someone laughed, a real laugh, the kind people laugh when nothing is wrong. It was such a strange sound that Jay turned her head toward it, and then she had to look away, because her eyes were stinging again and she was tired of them doing that.

"What happens to me now?" she said. "Officially. What's the procedure for a person who comes out of a box."

Okafor set her pad down. "Officially, you're a rescued civilian. You get medical care, you get transport to wherever you want to go, and you get a debrief that goes into a file that helps us prosecute the people who did this. Unofficially—" She looked at Jay for a moment. "Unofficially, you can stay on the Warspite as long as you need to. We're on patrol for another six months. There's no rush. You don't have to know where you're going."

"I don't know where I'm going," Jay said.

"Good," Okafor said. "That's the right answer. The people who come out of these things and say they know exactly where they're going are the ones I worry about."

Jay almost smiled. It didn't get all the way there, but it got partway, which was more than she had managed in weeks. "Can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"The crew on this ship. The ones who took me out of the case. Do they know what I am?"

Okafor considered the question. "They know you were a hostage. They know you were abused, and they know… they know what has been done to your body. But they don't know the details. They don't need to."

"They'll find out," Jay said. "This ship's going to be on patrol for six months. They'll see me. They'll figure it out. Word gets around on a ship." She said it without heat, without fear, the way she might have said the portside thruster's running hot. It was a fact about ships. She knew ships.

"Some of them will," Okafor said. "And some of them will be kind about it, and some of them won't, and you'll learn which is which, the same way you learned everything else on the ships you've been on. I can't protect you from that. I can tell you that on this ship, the crew takes its orders from Captain Reyes, and Captain Reyes takes this kind of thing very seriously. Anyone who gives you trouble answers to her."

Jay nodded. She was thinking about something else now — something that had been forming in her chest since the moment the lid came off the case, and that she had not been able to name until now. It was not hope. Hope was too big a word, too clean. It was smaller and dirtier than hope. It was the feeling she used to get in a docking bay when she saw a ship that was broken and knew she could fix it. It was the feeling of a tool that has been put down on a bench and is waiting to find out what it's for.

"Commander," Jay said. "Can I ask you something else?"

"Of course."

"Does this ship have a crew that—" She stopped. She turned the sentence over in her mouth and could not find a version of it that did not sound insane. So she said the insane version. "Does this ship have a crew that would use someone like me? If someone like me wanted to be used. In that way."

Okafor did not flinch. She had been a counselor for a long time, and Jay understood, watching her face, that she had heard worse and stranger things from people in worse and stranger states. But she was also, Jay could see, taking the question seriously, which was the thing Jay had been afraid she wouldn't do.

"That's not a question I can answer for you," Okafor said. "Not because I don't want to. Because it's not mine to answer. This is a Star Service ship. There are rules about fraternization, and there are rules about what crew can and can't ask of each other, and those rules exist for a reason. What I can tell you is that you don't have to decide that today. You don't have to decide it this month. You're not on the Vixen anymore. Nobody here is going to put you on a stage."

"I know," Jay said. "That's not what I'm asking." She looked at the stars. "I'm asking whether there's a place for me. On a ship. Doing what I'm good at now." She heard her own voice and did not recognize the steadiness in it. "Because I've been a lot of things, Commander. I've been a mechanic. I've been a whore. I've been a breeder. I've been sold and put in a box. And the only one of those I was ever good at was the second one, and I'd like to be good at something again."

Okafor was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "Let's get you through the next few weeks first. Then we'll talk about what you're good at."

"All right," Jay said.

She lay back on the cot after Okafor left, and she looked at the stars going by, and she put her hand on her own chest — the small breasts, the soft skin, the body that was not the body she had been born in and would never be the body she had been born in again — and she did not cry. She had done enough of that. Instead she did what she had always done when a machine was broken beyond repair and the only question left was what to build out of the parts: she took inventory.

Two hands. Steady. Good with tools, even if the calluses were gone.

A body that Cassiday had made, that Verhoeven had bought, that Okafor had said she could keep. A body that was good at one thing and did not know how to want anything else.

A ship around her, humming clean, full of people who had not yet decided what she was.

She closed her eyes. Somewhere down the corridor, someone was still laughing. The sound was small and ordinary and it did not belong to her, and for the first time in a long time, Jay found that it did not have to. She was on a ship. The ship was going somewhere. She did not have to know where. She just had to be useful when it got there.

The stars went by. She slept.

A week later, Jay stood outside the captain's office with her hand raised to knock and her heart going like a trapped bird against her ribs.

The corridor was quiet. Ship-quiet. The Warspite hummed around her the way a good drive hums when it's been tuned right — no rattle, no whine, just that low even note that says everything's where it's supposed to be. She'd been listening to it for seven days. Seven days of clean sheets and three meals and nobody putting a hand on her unless she asked. Seven days of walking the observation deck at night because she couldn't sleep and the stars were the only thing on this ship that didn't look at her like they were deciding something.

She'd asked Okafor for the appointment. Okafor had looked at her for a long moment, the way she did, and then she'd written something on her pad and said, "She'll see you at fourteen hundred. I'll walk you down."

Jay hadn't let her. She'd wanted to do this part alone.

She knocked.

"Come."

The door slid open. Captain Reyes's office was small and severe — a desk bolted to the deck, two chairs, a wall of screens showing ship's status in quiet green readouts. No decoration except a single framed photograph on the desk, turned away from the door. Reyes was standing at the viewport with her hands clasped behind her back, looking at the stars going by. She was a compact woman in her late forties with short gray-streaked hair and a face that had been weathered by command the way rock gets weathered by wind — worn smooth in some places, sharp in others. She turned when Jay came in.

"Miller," she said. "Sit down."

Jay sat. The chair was hard and she was grateful for it. She needed something hard under her right now.

"You wanted to see me," Reyes said. She didn't sit. She leaned against the edge of her desk with her arms crossed and looked down at Jay with an expression Jay couldn't read — not hostile, not warm. Waiting.

"Yes, ma'am."

"What can I do for you?"

Jay had rehearsed this. She'd rehearsed it in the dark of her cot for three nights running, turning the words over until they were smooth, and now that she was here the words had gone and left her with nothing but the truth, which was uglier and simpler than anything she'd rehearsed.

"I want to ask about the ship's policy," she said. "On free use."

The silence that followed was long enough that Jay heard the environmental system cycle, a soft intake of air from the vent over the desk. Reyes's face didn't change. That was worse than if it had.

"Say that again," Reyes said.

"Free use," Jay said. "When a ship designates someone aboard as available. For the crew. To use. However they want, whenever they want. I've been on ships that ran it. I know it's not standard on a Star Service vessel, but I wanted to ask whether—"

"Stop." Reyes held up one hand. Jay stopped. "Miller. What do you think you're asking me?"

"I'm asking whether the Warspite has a policy. Or whether it could." Jay met her eyes. It took everything she had. "I'd like to thank the crew. For my rescue. All of them. And I'd like to do it in the way I'm good at."

Reyes looked at her for a long time. Then she pushed off the desk and walked around it and sat down in her own chair, across from Jay, at eye level. She folded her hands on the desk. When she spoke, her voice had changed — quieter, and underneath the quiet, something Jay recognized because she'd heard it in Okafor's voice too. Care. The kind that costs something.

"Miller," she said. "I'm going to tell you something and I need you to hear it. The United Nations Star Service does not have a free-use policy. No Star Service vessel has one. No Star Service vessel will ever have one. What you're describing is not something we do, and it is not something I would ever authorize, and if any officer under my command attempted to institute it, I would have them in irons before their next watch."

Jay opened her mouth. Reyes kept going.

"I know what you've been through. I've read Okafor's notes. I know what was done to you on the Venture's Star, on the Vixen, on Jones's ship. And I want you to understand that the thing you just asked me for — the thing you called a policy — is the thing that was done to you. It has a name and the name is rape, and it doesn't become something else because the person being used asks for it first. On a Star Service ship, every person aboard has the right to say no. That right doesn't get signed away. Not by a civilian, not by a crew member, not by anyone. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you believe me?"

Jay looked at her hands in her lap. Soft hands. Clean nails. "I believe you mean it," she said. "I don't know if I believe it makes a difference to me."

Reyes was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That's honest. I'll take it." She leaned back. "Here's what I can tell you, and I want you to listen carefully, because I'm only going to say it once. You're a civilian aboard my ship. You're not crew. You're not subject to my orders and you're not subject to my protection in the way my crew is. What that means in practice is this: if you want to have sex with someone aboard this ship, that's your business. Yours and theirs. I can't stop you. I wouldn't try. Adults on a long patrol make their own arrangements, and as long as it's consensual and it doesn't compromise the mission, it's not my concern."

"But there's no policy."

"There's no policy," Reyes said. "There's no roster and there's no standing order and there's no one aboard this ship whose job is to be available to anyone else. If you want to go to a crew member and ask them for something, you can do that. If they say yes, that's between you and them. If they say no, that's the end of it. And if anyone aboard this ship ever puts a hand on you without your yes — you come to me. Not Okafor. Me. Directly. And they will be damn lucky if I don’t flush their arses out of the nearest airlock. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Reyes studied her. "You're disappointed."

Jay flinched. She hadn't meant to. "I'm not—"

"You are. I've been reading people a long time, Miller. You came in here hoping I'd tell you there was a place for you. A slot. A function. Something with a name on it." She paused. "There isn't. Not the kind you're looking for. I'm sorry."

Jay sat with that. The ship hummed. The green readouts flickered. She thought about the word function and how it had been the only thing holding her up for a long time, and how Reyes had just pulled it out from under her and somehow she was still sitting.

"There is one thing," Reyes said.

Jay looked up.

"You said you wanted to thank me. Personally." Reyes's voice was even. She didn't look away. "If you meant that, I'll take it. I'm not going to pretend I don't know what you're offering and I'm not going to pretend I'm not interested. But I want to be clear about what it is. It's not a policy. It's not a duty. It's me, asking you, right now, in this room, whether you want to put your mouth on me. And if you say yes, that's a yes to a specific thing, and it doesn't obligate you to anything else, with me or with anyone. If you say no, we shake hands and you walk out of here and we never speak of it again. Those are the terms. Take them or leave them."

Jay's mouth had gone dry. Her heart was doing something complicated — not fear, exactly. Something older than fear. Something that had been trained into her on the frame and in the cargo bay and in the case, and that woke up now the way a dog wakes up when it hears its name.

"What specifically," she said. Her voice came out low. "Ma'am."

Reyes held her gaze. "I want your tongue in my cunt," she said. "And I want it in my ass. In that order. I want to come on your face twice and then I want to send you back to your quarters with my taste still in your mouth. That's what I want. Is that what you're offering? and you are absolutely free to say no."

"Yes," Jay said. The word came out before she'd decided to say it, which was how she knew it was true. "Yes, ma'am."

"Get on your knees."

Jay slid off the chair and onto the deck. The deck plate was cold through the thin fabric of her trousers, and the position was so familiar that her body settled into it without being told — knees apart, back straight, hands loose at her sides, chin up. Waiting. Reyes looked down at her for a moment, and something crossed her face that Jay couldn't read — not quite pity, not quite hunger. Assessment. The same look a chief gives a new hand before deciding whether to trust them with the good tools.

"Stand up and take your clothes off," Reyes said. "I want to see what I'm getting."

Jay stood. She undressed without ceremony — trousers, then the soft tunic they'd given her, then the undershorts, folding each piece and setting it on the chair because that was what her hands wanted to do. The office air was cool on her skin. She stood straight with her arms at her sides and let Reyes look. The small breasts. The cinched waist. The cock between her thighs, already half-hard, already answering the looking the way Cassiday had taught it to.

"Turn around," Reyes said. "Slow."

Jay turned. She felt Reyes's eyes on her back, on the horseshoe tattoo on her left cheek, on the soft curve of her ass that Cassiday's injections had rounded. When she came back around, Reyes's face had changed — the assessment was gone, replaced by something hotter and more honest.

"Come here," Reyes said. She stood up and unbuckled her belt. Her uniform trousers came down and she stepped out of them and sat back down on the edge of the desk, leaning back on her hands, her thighs spread. She was not wearing anything under the trousers. Her cunt was dark and wet and framed by a thatch of gray-streaked hair, and the smell of her reached Jay from across the room — sharp and warm and human. "Knees. Between my legs."

Jay knelt. The deck was cold under her knees and Reyes's thighs were warm on either side of her head, and for a moment Jay just breathed, her face an inch from Reyes's cunt, feeling the heat of it against her lips. She'd done this a hundred times on the Vixen. She knew the geometry of it — the angle, the pressure, the rhythm that got a woman off fastest. But Reyes wasn't a client. Reyes hadn't bought her. Reyes had said take it or leave it, and Jay had taken it, and that made it different in a way she didn't have words for.

"Lick," Reyes said. "Slow."

Jay licked. One long stroke from the base of Reyes's cunt up to her clit, flat tongue, slow. Reyes's hips shifted. Her hand came down and rested on the back of Jay's head — not pushing, just there, a weight. Jay licked again, and again, and on the fourth stroke she closed her lips around Reyes's clit and sucked, and Reyes made a sound low in her chest that Jay felt through her own ribcage.

"Good," Reyes said. "That's good. Keep that."

Jay kept it. She worked Reyes's clit with her lips and her tongue, steady and unhurried, the way she'd learned to work a bolt that was torqued just past spec — patience, pressure, no sudden moves. Reyes's breathing changed above her. The hand on the back of her head curled into her hair. Jay slid her tongue lower, into the wet heat of Reyes's cunt, and fucked her with it — in and out, slow and deep, tasting her, feeling her clench around the muscle of Jay's tongue. Reyes's thighs tightened against Jay's ears.

"That's it," Reyes said. Her voice had gone rough. "Don't stop. Don't you dare stop."

Jay didn't stop. She moved her mouth back up to Reyes's clit and sucked harder, and slid two fingers of her right hand up into Reyes's cunt, curling them the way she'd been taught, and Reyes came with a sharp intake of breath and a long shudder that Jay felt run all the way down through her thighs. Her cunt clenched around Jay's fingers in tight waves. Jay kept her mouth on Reyes's clit, gentle now, riding her through it, until Reyes's hand in her hair pulled her back.

"Enough," Reyes said. "Give me a second."

Jay sat back on her heels. Her mouth was slick and her chin was wet and she could taste Reyes on her tongue, salt and musk and something faintly metallic. Reyes looked down at her with her chest still heaving.

"You're good at that," Reyes said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Stand up. Turn around. Bend over the desk."

Jay stood. Her legs were unsteady. She turned and bent over the desk with her forearms flat on the surface and her ass toward Reyes, and she heard Reyes come off the desk and stand behind her. A hand landed on her hip, warm and dry. Then Reyes's other hand was spreading her, and Jay felt the cool air on her asshole, and her whole body tightened in anticipation.

"I said ass next," Reyes said. "Hold still."

Jay held still. Reyes's tongue touched her asshole, and Jay's breath went out of her in a long shaking exhale. Reyes licked her there — slow circles, then a firmer stroke, then the tip of her tongue pressing in. Jay's hands curled against the desk. Her cock was hard now, fully hard, pressed between her belly and the edge of the desk, and she could feel it leaking against her own skin. Reyes's tongue worked into her, and Jay made a sound she hadn't authorized — a small high whine that came up out of her throat and hung in the air of the office.

"You like that," Reyes said against her. It wasn't a question.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Say it."

"I like it. I like your tongue in my ass."

Reyes hummed against her and went back in, deeper this time, and Jay pressed her forehead against the desk and let it happen. She was shaking. Not from cold. From the thing her body did now, the thing Cassiday had built into her, the way being used opened something in her chest and let the light in. She hated it and she needed it and there was no separating the two anymore.

"Turn around," Reyes said. "On your knees. I'm going to come on your face."

Jay turned and knelt. Reyes straddled her — one knee on the chair, one foot on the deck, her cunt an inch from Jay's mouth — and Jay opened her mouth and put her tongue back where it had been, on Reyes's clit, working it fast now, the way she'd learned got a woman over the edge quickest. Reyes's hand fisted in her hair and held her there. Reyes's hips rocked against Jay's face. The wet sounds were obscene in the small office, and the smell of her was everywhere, and Jay's cock was so hard it ached and she didn't touch it because she hadn't been told to.

"I'm close," Reyes said. "Don't pull back. Whatever happens, don't pull back."

Jay didn't pull back. Reyes came the second time with a sound that started low and ended high, and her whole body locked, and then — Jay felt it happen, felt the gush of it before she understood what it was — Reyes's cunt flooded against her mouth. Hot and wet and more than Jay had expected. It ran down Jay's chin and into the hollow of her throat and over her chest, and Reyes kept coming, and the second wave hit Jay across the face, in her eyes, in her hair, down her neck. Jay held her mouth where it was and kept licking until Reyes's hand pulled her back by the hair.

Jay knelt there with her eyes closed and Reyes's come dripping off her chin and down her tits, and she didn't wipe it off. She didn't dare. Her cock was still hard and untouched and it hurt, and she kept her hands at her sides.

Reyes looked down at her for a long moment. Then she reached for a towel off the back of her chair and tossed it into Jay's lap.

"Clean up," she said. "You can sit."

Jay wiped her face and her chest and her hair, and she stood up on legs that had gone watery and sat back down in the hard chair, naked, with the towel in her lap. Reyes pulled her trousers back on and sat on the edge of the desk, and for a moment neither of them said anything. The ship hummed. The green readouts flickered. Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed.

"You didn't touch yourself," Reyes said.

"No, ma'am. I wasn't told to."

"You're allowed to, you know. On this ship. If you're with someone and you want to come, you can."

Jay nodded. She didn't say what she was thinking, which was that she wasn't sure she knew how to want that anymore — that coming had been somebody else's decision for so long that taking it back felt like reaching for a tool that had been put in a different drawer.

Reyes watched her. Then she said, in a different voice — quieter, more careful — "Can I ask you something, Miller? Off the record."

"Yes, ma'am."

"The Vixen. And Cassiday. I've read the file, but the file is thin. It says you were used. It doesn't say what you were used as." She paused. "You don't have to answer. But I'd like to know. I'd like to know what was done to you, from you, not from a report."

Jay's throat closed. She looked at the towel in her lap. Then she looked at the stars going by in the viewport behind Reyes's shoulder, and she made herself talk, because Reyes had asked, and Reyes had earned the answer.

"On the Vixen I was a breeding bitch," she said. Her voice was flat. "That was the job. Michelle bred me with the Dracon clients — big things, scaled, two cocks each. She put me in the lounge in a breeding harness and the clients paid by the load. I carried the eggs. I gave birth on stage, in front of a paying crowd. Twice. The second one came out of my ass because the first one had stretched me so bad the doctors said the birth canal wouldn't close in time." She stopped. Breathed. "That's what I was on the Vixen. A brood mare. A vessel. I got pregnant and I got emptied and I got pregnant again, and that was the whole of my function, and I was good at it."

Reyes's face hadn't changed, but her hands had. They were folded tight on her thigh, knuckles pale.

"And Cassiday?" Reyes said. "The horse cock? I saw the tattoo and have heard the whispers across the galaxy."

Jay's face went hot. She could feel the blush climbing up her neck and she hated it — hated that her body still did that, hated that shame and arousal had been welded together so thoroughly that even talking about it made her cock stir under the towel.

"He had a custom phallus," Jay said. "Grown onto him. Equine. It was — long. Thick at the base, flared at the head. He used it on me in the frame room, the first day. He didn't ask. He just put it in me and told me to take it, and I took it, because that was what I was for." She swallowed. "It hurt. It hurt worse than the Dracons, because it was shaped wrong for me, and it kept going, and there was no end to it. And then it didn't hurt anymore. He'd injected me by then. The first primer. It made the hurting into wanting. I came on it. I came on it while he was telling me I was fuckmeat, and I said thank you, and I meant it, and that's the part I can't—" She stopped.

"That's the part you can't forgive," Reyes said.

"Yes, ma'am."

Reyes was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood up and walked around the desk and stood in front of Jay, and she put her hand on Jay's shoulder — just her hand, warm and dry, no pressure — and she said, "You were not the thing they made you do. You were the thing they did it to. Those are different. It'll take you a while to feel the difference. But you will. If you live long enough, you will."

Jay looked up at her. Her eyes were stinging again. She was tired of them doing that.

"Thank you, ma'am," she said.

"Get dressed," Reyes said. "And Miller — you can come to me again. If you want to. Not as a policy. Not as an order. As one person coming to another person."

Jay stood up and pulled her clothes back on. Her hands were steady, which surprised her. When she got to the door, she stopped with her hand on the frame and turned back.

"Captain," she said. "What you said. About being the thing they did it to, and not the thing they made me do." She paused. "I'd like to believe that. I don't know if I do. But I'd like to."

Reyes nodded, once. "That's a start," she said. "Go get some sleep."

Jay stepped out into the corridor and the door slid shut behind her, and she stood there for a moment in the clean even hum of the Warspite with Reyes's taste still on her tongue and the towel balled up in her fist, and she thought about the word person and how it was a smaller word than function and somehow heavier, and she started walking back toward her quarters, and after three steps she realized she was walking with her chin up.