The chair was the same hard chair it had been for five months. Gray composite, one armrest scuffed where her thumb always found the same spot, the cushion compressed to nothing by now. Jay sat with her boots flat on the deck and her hands loose in her lap, the way she'd taught herself, and looked at the two stars outside the viewport that the Warspite had been holding steady between for eleven days.

Commander Okafor's office was small and warm and smelled like the tea she kept in the bottom drawer of her desk. There was a plant in the corner that Jay had watched grow four new leaves since the rescue. There was a framed photo of a woman on the shelf behind the desk, and Jay had never asked who she was, and Okafor had never volunteered it, and that was the kind of thing that had made Jay trust her.

"You're quiet today," Okafor said.

"I'm always quiet."

"You're differently quiet." Okafor set her mug down and folded her hands on the desk. She had a counselor's stillness, the kind that didn't push. Her hair was cropped close to her skull, silver at the temples, and her eyes were the steady brown of a woman who had spent twenty-two years watching people arrive at the sentence they'd been circling for months. "When you're quiet like this, it usually means something's already been said inside your head, and you're deciding whether to say it out here."

Jay's jaw worked. She looked back at the stars. Two points of light that didn't care about anything, that would burn for a billion years whether she was in the chair or not.

The silence stretched. Okafor let it. She had a whole career of letting it. Jay had learned the shape of that patience over five months of these Thursdays, and she had learned that the patience was not a trap. It was just patience. It was a woman waiting without any interest in what she was waiting for.

"I think I miss it," Jay said.

The words came out low, flat, the way she said things when she was already braced for the recoil. She heard herself say it and her stomach dropped, the old drop, the drop she'd felt a thousand times in the days after the rescue when she'd opened her mouth and something had come out that she didn't want to claim.

Okafor didn't flinch. She leaned forward an inch, elbows on the desk, and asked the question the way she asked every question: like it was the only sentence in the room.

"Miss what, Jay?"

Jay's hands found the armrests. Her fingers curled around the scuffed composite and held, hard, the way they held when she was trying to stay inside her own body. She could feel the heat of her own palms against the plastic. She could feel the small ache in her shoulders from the way she'd started sleeping, curled, knees up, the way she'd slept on the Vixen when she'd had a corner to sleep in at all.

"I don't know how to say it," she said.

"Try the wrong version first."

Jay laughed, one breath, no humor in it. "That's what you always say."

"It's always the right advice."

Jay looked at the plant. Four new leaves. She had counted them every week. It was a stupid thing to count, but it was a thing that had grown on its own, in a room where nobody had been hurt, and she had needed that for a while.

"The frame," she said. "The one Cassiday strapped me into. The one on Jones's ship. I miss the frame."

Okafor's pen stayed on the desk. She hadn't picked it up. She never picked it up when Jay was saying something real.

"Tell me what you miss about it."

"It held me," Jay said. The words came slow, one at a time, like she was pulling them out of a deep pocket. "It held me so I didn't have to hold myself. I didn't have to decide anything. I didn't have to figure out what to do next. There was no next. There was just the straps and the cold of the steel and somebody else's voice telling me what I was."

She stopped. Her throat had gone tight.

"And what were you?" Okafor asked.

"Fuckmeat," Jay said. The word landed in the small warm room like a dropped tool. She heard it and her face went hot and her hands tightened on the armrests and she wanted to take it back, and she didn't. "That's what he called me. Cassiday. He'd say it while he was working on me. 'You're not a man anymore, you're a piece of fuckmeat, and you're a very good piece of fuckmeat.' And I'd come. Every time. Every single time he said it, my body would—"

She stopped again. Her breath was coming short. The stars outside the viewport were still there, indifferent, and she fixed on them.

"Your body would respond," Okafor said, gently, filling the sentence the way she did, without judgment, giving Jay the word she hadn't been able to say. "The primer did that. It rewired the pathways. It's not a moral failing, Jay. It's a scar."

"It doesn't feel like a scar."

"What does it feel like?"

Jay was quiet for a long time. The hum of the Warspite was under everything, the deep steady thrum of a ship that had been built to carry people safely through the dark. She had learned to sleep to that hum. She had learned that the hum meant nobody was going to come through the door in the night.

"It feels like a second pulse," she said finally. "Like there's a pulse under my pulse. And it doesn't care what I think. It doesn't care that I know better. It just wants. It wants somebody to tell me what to be. It wants to be told. It wants the weight. It wants somebody's hand on the back of my neck and somebody's voice in my ear telling me I'm good at this, telling me I'm a good—"

She stopped. She couldn't finish the sentence. The word was there, on the tip of her tongue, and she couldn't get it out, and the not-getting-it-out felt like the last wall she had.

Okafor didn't push. She sat back and picked up her tea and took a sip, and the small ordinary sound of the sip was a kindness, an anchor, a reminder that the room was still a room.

"You know what you're describing," Okafor said. "You've heard the word before."

"Submissive," Jay said. It came out flat and small.

"Among other things."

"Yeah."

"And you've been treating it like a diagnosis."

Jay looked at her. Okafor's face was calm and open, and there was nothing in it that looked like pity, and that was the thing Jay had come to need from these Thursdays more than anything else. Not pity. Not disgust. Just a woman looking at her like she was a person describing a weather system.

"What else would I treat it like?"

"A want," Okafor said. "A real want. Not a wound that happens to be shaped like a want."

Jay's mouth opened. Nothing came out. She closed it.

"Say the objection," Okafor said. "The one you just swallowed."

"They made me this way."

"They made you a body that responds to a certain kind of pressure. That's true. Cassiday's primer did that, and it can't be undone, and Doctor Pell was honest with you about that." Okafor set her mug down. "But the wanting isn't the primer. The wanting is what you do with the body afterwards. The primer made you come when you were called fuckmeat. It didn't make you come back to this office every Thursday. It didn't make you ask Captain Reyes for a free-use policy. It didn't make you take her up on it when she offered you herself instead."

Jay's face went hot again. "You know about that."

"I know you walked out of her office with your chin up. She told me. Not the details—she wouldn't. Just that you'd asked for something and she'd said yes, and that you'd handled it like an adult."

"I handled it like a whore."

"You handled it like a person who knows what she wants and asked for it clearly and accepted the answer." Okafor tilted her head. "Is there a version of that sentence where 'whore' is an insult?"

Jay stared at her.

"I'm not being clever," Okafor said. "I'm asking. Is 'whore' an insult when you say it about yourself? Or is it a job title you're using to punish yourself for taking the job?"

The room was very quiet. Jay could hear the tea cooling in Okafor's mug. She could hear her own heartbeat, which was fast, and she could hear the small creak of the chair as she shifted her weight and the composite gave under her.

"I don't know," she said.

"Good," Okafor said. "That's honest. That's the most honest thing you've said in three weeks."

Jay laughed again, and this time there was a little air in it. "You say that every week."

"Because every week you get a little more honest. That's the whole job." Okafor picked her pen up now, and Jay knew what that meant: the session was moving toward the part where Okafor would say something Jay would carry out of the room. "I want to give you a frame. Not the frame you miss—a different one. Can I?"

"Yeah."

"You're not broken. You're not a wound. You're a woman with a specific sexuality that was carved into you by force, and now you get to decide what to do with it. That's not weakness, Jay. Knowing what you want is strength. It's real, and it's yours to name."

Jay looked at the stars. The two points of light were still there, still indifferent, and she felt something shift in her chest, a small movement, like a bone settling into a socket it had been trying to find for months.

"I don't know what to name it," she said.

"You don't have to name it tonight. You just have to stop calling it a disease."

"And what do I call it?"

"You call it mine," Okafor said. "You call it the thing I want. You call it the thing I'm going to figure out how to live with, and then figure out how to live with well, and then figure out how to live with on purpose."

Jay sat with that. The hum of the Warspite was under everything. The plant had four new leaves. The chair was the same hard chair. And Jay was still in it, and she was still herself, and the thing under her skin was still there, and Okafor had just told her it was allowed.

"There's more," Jay said.

"There usually is."

Jay pulled one hand off the armrest and looked at it. Her hand. Smaller than it had been. Soft. No calluses. She had spent twenty years building calluses on this hand, wrenching drives, and now the palm was smooth as a girl's, and she had stopped being surprised by that, and that was its own kind of loss.

"It's not just the frame," she said. "It's the—" She stopped. Started again. "When I was on the Vixen. When I was a product. There was a stage. There was a lounge. And I would go out there and I would dance and I would strip and there would be a hundred people watching and I would know exactly what I was for. I would know exactly what every single one of them wanted from me. And there was a kind of—" She searched for the word. "Peace. There was a kind of peace in it. Because there was no question. There was no 'what should I do with my life.' There was just the next client and the next set of hands and the next thing I was supposed to be."

Okafor was quiet.

"And I know how that sounds."

"How does it sound?"

"Like I'm saying I liked being a whore."

"Did you?"

Jay's throat worked. "No. Yes. I don't know. It wasn't the being used. It was the—the being decided. The being the thing that somebody else had decided what to do with. I didn't have to be a person. Being a person is exhausting, Ruth. Being a person is a thousand small decisions a day and every one of them is a chance to get it wrong. When I was on that stage I couldn't get it wrong. I was the stage. I was the product. There was nothing to get wrong."

Okafor nodded slowly. "That's a real thing," she said. "That's not a sickness. That's a real thing a lot of people feel, and most of them don't have the vocabulary for it, and the ones who do are usually too ashamed to say it out loud. You just said it out loud in a chair in my office. That's the whole job, Jay."

"So what do I do with it?"

"You stop apologizing for it." Okafor leaned forward. "You stop telling yourself the story where the primer made you want this. The primer made you come. The wanting is yours. The wanting was probably yours before Cassiday ever put a needle in your arm—you just didn't have a name for it, and you were a mechanic in a bar who didn't know he was allowed to want anything at all."

Jay looked at her. The stars were still there. The plant was still there. The chair was still hard, and Jay was still in it, and something in her chest had gone loose, like a strap she'd been holding tight for years had finally been unbuckled.

"I don't know if I believe that," she said.

"You don't have to believe it tonight. You just have to stop arguing with it."

Jay sat with that for a while. The session wound down the way it always did, with Okafor asking a couple of small practical questions about sleep and appetite, and Jay giving small practical answers, and Okafor writing something in her notebook that Jay wouldn't see. And at the end, Jay stood up, and her legs were steady, and she looked at the two stars one more time and then she looked back at Okafor and said the thing she had come in to say and hadn't known it.

"I think I want to go back out there," she said.

Okafor's pen stopped. "Out where?"

"To the stars. On a ship. Not as a passenger. As—" Jay's mouth twisted. "As crew."

"Crew," Okafor repeated. Neutral. Giving her the room.

"I know how it sounds."

"It sounds like a woman who spent twenty years fixing drives and five months sitting in a chair in my office is thinking about going back to work." Okafor set the pen down. "That's not a scandal, Jay. That's a Tuesday."

Jay almost smiled. "It's Thursday."

"Even better." Okafor stood. She came around the desk and stopped a step away, close enough that Jay could smell the tea on her breath. "You're allowed to want a life, Jay. You're allowed to want a life that includes the thing you're ashamed of. You're allowed to want both."

Jay looked at her. The counselor was a head shorter than her and had the steady eyes of a woman who had said this exact sentence to a hundred people and meant it every time.

"I'll see you next Thursday," Jay said.

"You will."

Jay stepped out into the corridor. The door slid shut behind her, and the hum of the Warspite closed around her like a hand, and she stood there for a moment with her back to the door and her chin up and her hands loose at her sides, and she thought about the word want and how it was a smaller word than function and somehow heavier, and she started walking back toward her quarters.

Her quarters were two decks down and at the end of a corridor that had a window at the far end of it. The window was a luxury, one of the small ones the Warspite had been built with in the days when ships still had windows, and Jay had come to think of it as hers. She stopped at it on the way, the way she always did, and looked out at the dark and the two stars and the faint smudge of a nebula that was a thousand light years away and looked like a thumbprint on the glass.

She thought about Okafor's sentence. The wanting is yours. She thought about the frame and the straps and Cassiday's voice and the way her body had answered every time. She thought about the stage on the Vixen and the hundred faces and the peace of being a product. She thought about Reyes's taste on her tongue and the towel balled in her fist and the word person, which was smaller than function and heavier.

And she thought about the wanting that lived under her skin like a second pulse, the one that didn't care what she thought, the one that wanted to be told what to be. The one that made her skin crawl with a need to be used by somebody, anybody.

She walked the rest of the way to her quarters.

The door slid shut behind her and the lights came up low, the way she'd set them, and the room was the same small room it had been for five months: a bunk, a desk, a chair, a locker, a sink behind a curtain, and a small round mirror over the sink that she had spent five months learning not to look at. She had not looked at it since the rescue. Not once. Not really. She had looked at the sink. She had looked at her hands. She had looked at the wall behind her own shoulder in the mirror and pretended she was looking at the mirror.

Tonight she looked at the mirror.

The woman in it was not a stranger anymore. Jay had stopped being surprised by her around month three. Small breasts under the regulation undershirt. A soft jaw she had never had. Fine hair that had grown back after Cassiday's first injection had taken it all, and had grown back finer and lighter and had settled into a shape she had not chosen. Narrow waist. Hips that had widened on their own. And underneath, the thing Cassiday had left her, the shameful reminder, the cock that was still there, smaller than it had been, softer, but there, hanging between her thighs like an apology.

Jay looked at her for a long time. Then she reached down and pulled the undershirt over her head, and dropped it on the chair, and stood in front of the mirror in just the uniform trousers, and looked at her own breasts, small and pale, and the soft line of her ribs, and the narrow waist, and the hips.

She had not touched herself since the rescue. Not once. Doctor Pell had told her the rewiring was permanent, and Jay had taken that as a sentence, and she had gone five months without letting her hand go anywhere below her own waist except to wash and to piss. She had been afraid of what her body would do. She had been afraid of the second pulse.

She sat down on the edge of the bunk and unsealed the trousers and pulled them off, and she sat there in just a thong that barely covered her cock and very nearly covered her balls, with her hands on her thighs, and looked at the wall.

The wanting was already there. It had been there since Okafor's office, since she'd said the word fuckmeat out loud and heard it land in the room and not be struck down. It was a low warm ache under her navel and a tightness in her chest and a wetness she could feel between her legs that had nothing to do with any man in the room and everything to do with the voice in her own head.

She reached for the memory the way she reached for a tool she knew the weight of. Cassiday's voice. The clinical flatness of it. The way he had said 'you're a very good piece of fuckmeat' while he worked, and the way her body had answered, not because she wanted to answer, but because the primer had opened every nerve and left them that way.

Her hand moved to her breast. She cupped it, the way a lover would, and her thumb found the nipple and circled it, and the sensation went straight down through her, a bright wire from her chest to her cock, and she made a sound in the empty room that she had not made in five months.

"Fuck," she whispered.

She lay back on the bunk and pulled the thong off and kicked it onto the deck, and she was naked on the standard-issue sheets with the lights low and the hum of the Warspite all around her, and she put her hand between her legs and found her cock slick and hot and ready the way she had been trained to be ready, and she did not fight it.

She thought about the frame. The cold steel. The straps at her wrists and her ankles. The way Cassiday had strapped her in and left her there for the injection to work, and the way she had hung in the straps with her body changing around her and her cock half-hard and her mouth open and nobody in the room but the ventilation.

She wrapped her fingers around her cock and slowly draw her hand back along the shaft, with a small sound that was loud in the quiet room. She moaned softly enjoying the sensation, the way the primer had taught her, and she pressed ehr little finger into the space between the base of her cock and her testicles, and the pressure bloomed through her pelvis and up her spine.

"Good girl," she said, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice that was not her voice, in a voice she had stolen from a hundred men. "Good little fuckmeat."

Her hips lifted off the bunk. Her ass-cunt clenched around nothing. The words were doing it, the words were the whole thing, the words were the key the primer had cut into her and the lock was her own body and she was opening it herself for the first time since the rescue.

She lifted her fingers up to her mouth and tasted her precum, salt and sweet and musk, and the taste went through her the way the words had gone through her, and she sucked her own fingers clean and put her hand back down and slid three in this time.

The memory shifted. Jones's ship. The cargo bay. The cold deck under her knees and the crew standing in a rough half-circle and Cassiday's notebook open on a crate and the count. Twelve. Thirteen. The Captain's boots thudding toward her across the deck like a drumbeat of doom, and the way she had looked up at him, and the way he had unsealed his trousers without a word, and the way she had opened her mouth because there was nothing else to do with her mouth and nothing else she wanted to do with it.

She had been his urinal. He had made her drink his waste and she had done it, and her throat had worked and her eyes had watered and her body had answered the way it answered everything now, with heat, with a clench, with the small shameful yes that lived under her skin.

She remembered the taste. Warm and salt, acrid and bitter, and hers, because she had been told it was hers, because Cassiday had said 'drink it down, it's yours now,' and she had. Swallowing the foul fluid and feeling it pool, hot and heavy, deep in her stomach.

Her hand again wrapped around her cock, moved faster now. Her fingertip found her the pressure point between her cock and balls and pressed, and the pressure was almost too much, the primer had left her that way, every touch a little too bright, and she made a sound into the pillow and bit down on the fabric and kept going.

She thought about the Vixen. The lounge. The stage. The hundred faces and the cheerleader outfit and the way she had learned to dance for them, to move her hips, to bend, to show them what they had come to see. She thought about the old man in Suite 3 who had bought the group pass and made her fuck Kira and come inside her against orders, and the way Kira had berated her afterwards, and the way Chloe had fisted her, and the way her body had taken all of it and asked for more.

She thought about Cassiday's cock. The mutated thing, the equine thing, the long grey length of it and the way it had opened her and filled her and the way she had come on it and said thank you while he called her fuckmeat. She thought about the horseshoe tattoo on her left ass cheek and the way she had not looked at it in five months and knew exactly what it looked like.

She rolled onto her stomach. She put her hand behind her, awkwardly reaching, and found her own anus with wet fingers, and pressed, and her body opened for her the way it opened for everyone, because that was the training, because that was what the primer had made of her, and she slid two fingers in and gasped into the pillow.

"Fuckmeat," she whispered. "Pisswhore. Cum dump. Gangbang whore."

She said the words the way she had said them on the Vixen, the way Michelle had tattooed them into her, the way Cassiday had written them into the notebook as a selling point, and her body answered every one of them with a clench and a throb and a wetness that hung in a clear thread beneath her.

She thought about being told. That was the thing. That was the whole thing. Being told. Being told what she was and having it be true. Being told what to do and having it be the only thing in the world. The peace of it. The peace she had tried to describe to Okafor and hadn't quite gotten right.

She worked her fingers in deeper and pressed her palm against her own cock, small and hard and leaking, and the two sensations met in the middle of her and built into one, and she was shaking, her thighs were shaking, the sheets were wet under her, and she was saying the words over and over into the pillow, the words Cassiday had taught her, the words Michelle had branded into her, the words that were hers now, that Okafor had told her were hers.

"Fuckmeat. Fuckmeat. I'm a good piece of fuckmeat. I'm a good—"

She came. Hard. Her ass-cunt clenched around her fingers and her ass clenched around her fingers and her whole body pulled tight like a strap and then let go, as her balls pulled up towards her body and she made a sound into the pillow that was almost a sob She rode it out, her hips rolling against her own hand, her breath ragged, her eyes wet.

When it was over she lay there with her face in the pillow and her hand still between her legs, and she cried. Not the way she had cried in the days after the rescue, not the way she had cried in the sickbay, not the way she had cried on the stolen shuttle with Birdie's voice in her ear. This was a different crying. This was the crying of a woman who had just been handed back something she had thought was lost.

She lay there for a long time. The hum of the Warspite was all around her. The lights were low. The sheets were wet and she didn't care. Her body was warm and used and hers.

She got up eventually and washed her hands at the sink and drank a glass of water and looked at herself in the mirror one more time. The woman in the mirror had wet eyes and a flushed face and a small smile that Jay had not seen on her own face in five months.

"Okay," she said to the mirror. "Okay."

She pulled a clean undershirt out of the locker and a clean pair of undershorts and put them on, and she sat down at the desk and pulled up the ship's roster on the small screen, the way she had done a hundred times in the last five months without ever admitting to herself what she was looking at. The Warspite had a crew of two hundred and forty. She was not on the roster. She was a guest. She had been a guest for five months, and Okafor had told her tonight that she was allowed to want a life, and Jay was a mechanic, and a mechanic with twenty years on drives could find work on any ship in the service.

She scrolled to the bottom of the roster. There was a line at the bottom of the screen that said 'SHORE LEAVE — CARGO BAY 7 — 0600.' The Warspite was going to dock at Starbase 12 in two days for resupply. She would have three days of shore leave. She could walk the docks. She could talk to captains. She could find a ship that needed a woman who knew what she was for.

She closed the screen and sat back in the chair and looked at the two stars outside her window, still there, still indifferent, and she thought about the word want and the word person and the word whore, and she thought about Okafor's sentence, and she thought about the frame and the stage and Cassiday's voice and Jones's boots and the taste of Reyes on her tongue, and she thought about the second pulse under her pulse, and she let it be there.

She got into the bunk and pulled the blanket up to her chin and turned off the lights and lay in the dark with the hum of the Warspite all around her, and she slept without dreaming, and in the morning she woke up with her chin still up.

Shore leave began at 0600 and Jay was awake at 0430, which was not a thing she had planned. She lay in the dark for a while with her eyes open, listening to the hum, and then she got up and showered and stood in front of the mirror with the towel around her shoulders and looked at herself on purpose, the way she had been practicing, and she said, out loud, "Okay," and she got dressed.

She had one clean uniform, the one she'd been issued in the sickbay, and she put it on and looked at herself in the mirror again and then took it off, because the corridor outside Captain Reyes's office was not a corridor you walked down in a uniform you'd been given for free. She dug out the other set of clothes, the ones she'd bought with her own name on the requisition slip, the ones the quartermaster had handed over without a word because the quartermaster had been told not to make a thing of it. A white shear blouse. A short floaty skirt with a tartan patten that fit her hips because they had been tailored for her hips. A loose jacket that was ever so slightly too big in the shoulders. No underwear, her breats were small and firm enough to not need a bra, and for what she had planned, panties or a thong would just get in the way.

She looked at the woman in the mirror with the big jacket and the short skirt and the short fine hair, and she thought, you look like a cheerleader, no. You look like a you look like a young woman going on a third date. And she turned off the light and went out.

The Warspite at 0500 was the quietest ship Jay had ever walked. The corridors were lit to a low blue, the way ships were lit at night, and the only people she passed were the skeleton watch — a young ensign with a tablet, a rating with a toolkit, a pair of engineers who nodded at her the way they nodded at each other. Nobody stared. Nobody had stared at her in months. That had been the strangest thing about the Warspite, in the beginning: nobody stared, and Jay had spent the first three weeks of it convinced the not-staring was a policy, a thing the crew had been ordered to do, and she had hated them for it, and then she had realized somewhere around week five that the not-staring was just what it was. Two hundred and forty people who had seen worse things than her and had their own jobs to do.

She took the lift down two decks and walked the long corridor toward the captain's office, and the door at the end of it was the same door it had been the last time she had walked it, and the last time she had walked it she had been carrying a towel balled in her fist and Reyes's taste on her tongue and her chin up.

She stopped in front of the door. She did not knock. She stood there for a moment with her hands at her sides and she thought about what she was going to say, and the sentence she had rehearsed in the bunk at 0430 was not the sentence that wanted to come out, and she let that be true, and she pressed the panel.

"Come."

The door slid open and Reyes was at her desk, and she was not in uniform. She was in a soft gray shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and her hair down, and there was a mug of coffee at her elbow and a tablet in front of her and the desk light was on, and Jay had never seen her like this, had only ever seen her the captain, and the sight of her like this — a woman at her own desk in her own quarters at five in the morning, hair down, elbows on the desk — did something to Jay's chest that she did not have time to examine.

Reyes looked up. Her face did the thing it did, the small recalibration, the captain's assessment running behind the woman's eyes, and then it settled and she said, "Jay."

"Captain."

"It's five in the morning."

"I know."

"Sit down."

Jay sat. The chair across from the desk was soft, a real chair, not the hard composite of Okafor's office, and Jay sat in it with her back straight and her hands on her knees and looked at the captain, and the captain looked back at her with that flat, patient, unhurried face, and waited.

Reyes was good at waiting. That was the first thing Jay had learned about her, in the corridor, with the towel. The captain waited the way Okafor waited, which was to say she waited without any visible interest in what she was waiting for, and the waiting was the whole thing, the waiting was the door you had to walk through on your own.

Jay said, "I'm leaving in two days."

Reyes did not move. "Shore leave."

"Shore leave, and then I'm not coming back." Jay's hands tightened on her knees. "I've been a guest on your ship for five months. You've fed me and housed me and kept me safe and you've never once asked me for anything, and I've been trying to figure out how to say this for about three weeks, and I'm going to say it badly, so I'm sorry in advance."

"Say it badly."

"I'm a mechanic. Twenty years on drives. Before all of this, before the Venture's Star, I was a good mechanic. I had a reputation. I could walk onto any dock in the service and get a berth on a ship that needed a drive hand." Jay's mouth was dry. She kept going. "And I don't want a berth as a drive hand. I want a berth where I'm useful the way I'm useful. I want a ship that will take me on knowing what I am. I want to serve. The way I know how to serve."

The words sat in the room. Reyes picked up her coffee and took a sip and set it down, and the small ordinary sound of the mug against the desk was the same sound Okafor's mug had made, and Jay understood, in that moment, that she had been having the same conversation with two different women for five months and only one of them had known it.

"You want a berth as a ship's whore," Reyes said.

Jay's face went hot. She did not look away. "Yes."

"You know the service doesn't have that."

"I know the service doesn't have that. I've read the regs. I read them the first week." Jay's voice was steady, which surprised her. "I know what happens to a rating who gets caught doing what I'm asking to do on a service ship. I know there's a captain somewhere who'd let it happen and a captain somewhere who'd the first captain out an airlock, and I know the difference between those two captains is the captain, and I came to you because you're the captain who wouldn't let it happen."

Reyes leaned back in her chair. The desk light caught the line of her jaw and the gray at her temples and the small scar on her cheekbone that Jay had never asked about, and she studied Jay the way she had studied her in the corridor, the way she had studied her across the desk the first time, and Jay sat in the soft chair and let herself be studied, because being studied was a thing she had learned to be good at, and because she wanted Reyes to see exactly what she was looking at.

"You've thought about this," Reyes said.

"For five months."

"You've talked to Okafor about it."

"I talked to Okafor about it yesterday." Jay's hands loosened on her knees. "She told me the wanting was mine. She told me I was allowed to want a life that includes the thing I'm ashamed of. She told me to stop calling it a disease."

"Ruth's good at her job."

"She's the best thing that's happened to me since the rescue."

Reyes nodded slowly. She picked up the tablet and set it aside, facedown, which Jay understood was a thing the captain did when she was done with the ship for a moment and was just a woman at a desk. "You've got shore leave in two days. You'll walk the docks at Starbase 12. You'll talk to captains. Some of them will take you on and some of them won't and you'll figure out which is which, and I'm not going to tell you not to. You're a free woman, Jay. You've been a free woman since the day Verhoeven put you on my deck."

"I know."

"Do you?"

Jay looked at her. The captain's eyes were steady and dark and there was something in them that Jay had seen before, in the corridor, in the sickbay, in the first hour aboard the Warspite when Reyes had come down to look at her and had not asked her a single question and had simply stood at the foot of the bunk and said you're safe, you're on my ship, nobody on this ship will touch you unless you ask them to.

"I know I'm free," Jay said. "That's the problem. I don't know what to do with it. I've been free for five months and I've been sitting in a chair in Okafor's office once a week trying to figure out what free is for, and the only thing I've figured out is that I don't want to be free the way other people are free. I want to be free to be what I am. I want to choose it. That's the whole thing. I want to choose to be a free use whore."

Reyes was quiet for a moment. The ship hummed around them. Somewhere down the corridor a hatch opened and closed, and the sound was the sound of the Warspite being a ship, and Jay listened to it the way she listened to everything now, the way she had learned to listen in the holding cell and the frame room and the shipping crate, the way she had learned to listen for the difference between a friendly sound and a bad one.

"Why are you telling me this," Reyes said. Not a question. An invitation.

Jay took a breath. This was the part she had rehearsed and the part she had not rehearsed, and she said it the way she had learned to say true things, which was to say it flat and low and without any apology in it.

"Because I'm leaving in two days and I don't know if I'll ever see you again, and because you're the first person since the Venturer who looked at me like a person and then let me be something else when I asked. Because I respect you, and because I want to ask you for one more thing before I go and I want you to know that I know exactly what I'm asking."

Reyes set her coffee down. She folded her hands on the desk.

"Ask."

Jay's throat worked. She had said the word fuckmeat out loud in Okafor's office and it had not killed her. She had said I want to serve out loud in Reyes's office and it had not killed her either. There was one more sentence in her and she was going to say it, and she was going to say it in this room, to this woman, with the desk light on and the coffee cooling and the ship humming, and she was going to say it as a free woman asking another free woman for a thing, which was the only way it counted.

"Let me plesure you," Jay said. "One last time. Before I go."

The room was very quiet.

"Not as a captain using a guest," Jay said. "Not as a favor to a survivor. Not as the thing you did in the corridor because I asked and you said yes because it was the kindest way to say no to a free-use policy." She leaned forward an inch, and her hands were flat on her knees, and her voice was steady. "As a woman who's leaving. As a woman who's about to walk onto a dock and offer herself to a stranger and wants to walk onto that dock having given pleasure one last time to somebody who knows her name. I want to leave your ship with your taste on me. That's the favor. That's the whole favor."

Reyes did not answer for a long time. She sat with her hands folded on the desk and she looked at Jay the way she looked at a manifest that did not add up, and Jay sat in the soft chair and let her look, and the hum of the Warspite was all around them, and the coffee went cold in the mug.

"You're asking me to use you," Reyes said finally. "As a woman. Not as a captain."

"Yes."

"You understand what that means to me."

"I think I do."

"Tell me."

Jay's mouth was dry again. She said it anyway. "It means you're not hiding behind the rank. It means you're not doing it because I'm a survivor and you're being kind. It means you're doing it because you want to, and you're letting me see that you want to, and you're letting me have it knowing that I'm going to walk out of this room and off this ship and probably never see you again. It means you're giving me something you don't have to give me."

Reyes looked at her. And then something in her face changed, the way it had changed in the corridor, the small shift from the captain to the woman, and Jay saw it happen and felt her own breath catch.

"Stand up," Reyes said.

Jay stood.

Reyes stood too, and came around the desk, and stopped a step away, close enough that Jay could smell the coffee on her breath and the clean soap smell of her, and she was a head shorter than Jay and she looked up at her with those steady dark eyes and said, "This is the last thing I'll ever ask you, so I want you to hear it. If you want to stop at any point, you say stop, and we stop, and you walk out of here with your chin up and we never speak of it. That's not a trap. That's not a test. That's the deal."

"I hear it."

"Say it back."

"If I want to stop, I say stop, and we stop, and I walk out with my chin up."

"Good." Reyes reached up and put her hand on Jay's shoulder, and the weight of it went through the big jacket and the dark shirt and into the muscle, and Jay felt her whole body answer the weight the way it answered everything now, with a low warm bloom under her navel and a tightness in her chest and a readiness that was not a choice and was hers anyway.

"Take off the jacket," Reyes said.

Jay took off the jacket. She folded it, because folding it was a thing her hands knew how to do, and she laid it over the back of the soft chair, and when she turned back Reyes was watching her with her arms at her sides and her face open in a way Jay had never seen, and Jay felt the second pulse under her pulse, the one that wanted to be told, and she let it be there, and she stood in the dark shirt and the tailored trousers in front of the captain of the UNSS Warspite and waited to be told what to do next.

"Lay on the floor," Reyes said, and gestured with her hand toward a thick pile rug in the centre of the room.

Jay walked to the rug. The deck was cold under her bare feet — she had taken her boots off at the door without thinking, the way she had learned to take her boots off at the door of any room she was going to be used in — and she sat down in the centre of the bunk rug her hands on her thighs and looked up at Reyes, who was crossing the room toward her with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had made a decision and was not going to make it twice. Slowly Jay lowered herself until she was lying prone face up on the rug.

Reyes stopped in front of her. She looked down at Jay for a long moment, and then she stepped over Jay so she stood astride Jay’s head — and Jay understood, the way she understood everything now, in her body before her mind, and she lay back on the rug with her chin still up, for what came next. Looking up she could see all the way up Reyes’s long legs as see the flash of the red panties normally hidden from view beneath the Captains regulation knee length skirt.