At 17.00 she climbed the ladder to the wardroom and found Halvorsen at the end of the long table with a slate in one hand and a mug in the other, her boots up on the bench across from her, her coat unbuttoned. The captain didn't look up. She said, "You're up early," to the slate.

"I've got the Singh appointment," Jay said. "17.30, civilian concourse, bay four. I don't want to be late."

Halvorsen looked up then. She had a face that had spent forty years in the black and had stopped apologizing for it — flat grey eyes, a nose that had been broken and set crooked, a mouth that rested at a line. She looked at Jay the way she looked at a manifest: item, weight, destination.

"You'll need the docking pass," she said. "And you'll need to be back by 19.00. We're casting off at 19.15, and I don't hold a berth for a hand who's late."

"I'll be back by then."

"See that you are." Halvorsen set the slate down and picked up her mug and drank, and then she said, without any change in her voice, "The doctor's going to want to know what you are. You going to tell her?"

Jay had thought about that on the berth deck, lying on her back with the coolant loop rumbling under her and the case with the red panties zipped in her duffel an arm's length away. She'd thought about it the way she'd thought about the tattoo Halvorsen hadn't decided on yet, and about the difference between saying yes in a warm room and saying yes in a cold one, and about how much of that difference mattered. She'd come to a conclusion somewhere around 16.00, and the conclusion was that she was tired of being a liar.

"Yes," she said. "All of it. She'll need it if she's going to sign me fit."

Halvorsen nodded, once, the way she nodded at a manifest that balanced. "Then go," she said. "Bay four. And Miller—"

"Yeah?"

"The station's full of men who've been in the black too long. You walk the concourse looking the way you look, you're going to get looked at. That's not a problem. You get touched, that's a problem. You tell me who."

Jay felt something turn over in her chest, something that wasn't arousal and wasn't fear, something closer to the feeling she'd had the first time she'd watched a star-drive come apart and put it back together and had it hold. She said, "Understood, Captain," and Halvorsen went back to her slate, and that was the end of it.

The airlock cycled her onto the station at 16.45, and the concourse hit her the way it always did — noise and light and the smell of frying oil and coolant and a hundred bodies in a hurry. Starbase Twelve was a wheel of commerce and transit, and the civilian level was a cross-section of everything the black had ever spat out: dockworkers in stained coveralls, brokers in cheap suits, a family of four with matching duffels, a knot of off-duty Star Service ratings in pressed greys, a pair of Zarlok in shimmering robes who smelled of something sweet and rotten. Jay kept her head up and her stride even and her hands at her sides, and she watched the way people looked at her.

They looked. A dockworker in a welding apron turned his head as she passed and looked her up and down without any attempt at subtlety, and Jay felt the warmth pool low in her belly, the familiar catch, the primer's quiet work. A woman in a broker's coat looked at her longer, looked at her mouth, looked away. A young rating in Star Service greys looked at her and then looked harder, and Jay knew what he was seeing — the narrow waist, the small breasts under the borrowed shirt, the face that had been reshaped into something that belonged on a woman and had been left on a man, the whole of her a question that the eye couldn't answer and couldn't stop asking. She kept walking. The warmth in her belly kept its own pace.

Bay four was a surgical suite wedged between a ship's chandler and a noodle stand, and the sign over the door said SINGH, M.D. — GENERAL PRACTICE, XENO-COMPATIBLE, WALK-INS WELCOME. Jay stood outside it for a moment with her hand on the door and her heart going harder than it had any right to, and she thought about the Warspite's sickbay and Pell's steady hands and the way Pell had told her the body she had now was the body she kept. Then she pushed the door open.

The waiting room was three chairs and a desk and a wall of outdated medical posters, and the woman behind the desk was small and brown-skinned and somewhere in her sixties, with grey-streaked hair cut short and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses pushed up on her forehead. She looked up from a slate and said, "You're Miller?"

"Jay. Yes."

"Amara Singh." She stood and offered a hand, and Jay shook it, and Singh's grip was dry and firm and brief. "You're the referral from the Warspite. Pell's note said you'd had extensive modification and that the details were yours to share. She also said you'd been through something that would make a standard exam difficult, and that I should go at your pace and not mine." She sat back down and looked at Jay with an expression that was neither warm nor cold, only attentive. "So. Where do you want to start?"

Jay sat down in the chair across from the desk and put her hands on her knees and looked at the poster behind Singh's head, which showed a human digestive tract in cross-section with the caption KNOW YOUR ENGINE. She said, "I'd rather start with the paperwork and get it over with."

"The paperwork's the easy part," Singh said. "It's the exam that's going to be hard. You want to tell me why?"

"Because you're going to see things and you're going to ask me how they got there and I'm going to have to tell you."

"Yes." Singh didn't soften it. "That's the shape of it. I can do the exam under sedation if you'd prefer, but I'd rather you be awake, because I need to know what hurts and what doesn't, and you can't tell me that if you're doped."

Jay thought about it. She thought about Cassiday's frame and the primer and the way her nerves had been rewired so that pain and pleasure came out of the same pipe, and she thought about how much she trusted herself not to lie to a stranger about what she felt. She said, "I'll tell you the truth. I've gotten pretty good at telling the truth."

Singh nodded and stood and led her through a door into the exam room, which was small and clean and smelled of alcohol and something faintly floral, and on the counter there was a tray of instruments and a chair with stirrups and a scanner on a jointed arm and a bottle of lubricant and a stack of folded paper sheets. Singh said, "There's a gown on the chair. I'll step out. You can keep your underwear on if it makes it easier, but I'll need them off before the scan."

"I’m not wearing underwear," Jay said, and heard the flatness in her own voice, and Singh didn't blink.

"Then just the gown," she said, and stepped out.

Jay undressed with her back to the door, folding her shirt and her trousers onto the chair, and the gown was thin and blue and tied at the back and came down to her knees, and she sat on the edge of the exam table with her hands in her lap and her feet dangling and the paper crinkling under her, and she looked at the wall and breathed the way Okafor had taught her, four in and six out, and waited.

Singh came back in with a slate and pulled a stool up to the table and sat down at Jay's knee, and she said, "Start at the beginning. Not the Warspite. The beginning."

So Jay told her. She told her about Emma Vance and the Venture's Star and the maid uniform, and about Graadar and the surgical bay, and about Madam Michelle and the Vixen and the branding and the breeding, and she told her about the Dracon clients and the pregnancies and the births on stage, and she told her about Captain Jones and Doctor Cassiday, and she told her about the injections and the frame and the primer.

She didn't tell it the way she'd told it to Halvorsen, which had been a flat recitation, a manifest read aloud. She told it slowly, because Singh kept stopping her to ask questions. "The first injection — do you remember the site?" "The primer — did it change your sense of smell, your sense of taste?" "The Dracon gestation — how many cycles, and how far apart?" "When they cut you, did they leave the scrotum or remove it?" Jay answered all of it. She answered the questions about the births and the questions about the clients and the questions about what she'd been made to do to Birdie, and by the time she got to the end her voice was steady and her hands were steady and the room had stopped feeling like a room and had started feeling like a ledger, and she was the one keeping it.

Singh set the slate down and said, "Thank you. That's the hardest part. Now I need to look at you."

"The tattoos," Jay said.

"The tattoos. And the rest. Lie back and put your feet in the stirrups, and tell me if anything I do hurts, and tell me if anything I do feels good, because I need to know that too."

Jay lay back. The paper crinkled. The light over the table was bright and white and Singh's shadow moved across it as she pulled on gloves, and then her hands were on Jay's knees, easing them apart, and Jay felt the warmth start up again, the primer's quiet answer to being handled, and she hated it and she let it happen and she kept her eyes on the ceiling.

Singh worked in silence for a while. She looked at the horseshoe tattoo on Jay's left cheek, and at the block capitals below it, and she said, "Who did the horseshoe?"

"Cassiday. The geneticist. He'd made himself a horse cock and he used it on me and then he marked me with it."

"And the words?"

"That was Emma Vance. The first captain. She had them put on before she sold me."

Singh's hands didn't pause. "And the one on your back?"

"Cumdump. Also Vance."

"Any others I haven't seen?"

"Not that I know of. They might have put something somewhere I couldn't see. I was out for a lot of it."

Singh moved the scanner down over Jay's abdomen, and the screen on the jointed arm filled with the grey-green ghost of her insides, and Singh looked at it for a long time and then said, "Your breasts are fully functional, they would lactate if you became pregnant again. But you obviously have no womb not that that matters with certain species… as you have already discovered."

"Pell told me."

" Your penis and testies are fully functional, and the prostate, which is intact." She turned the scanner off and sat back. "How much do you know about how you were made pregnant with the Dracon larvae?"

"They put them in me. Through my arsehole."

"Through the rectum, into the descending colon, where the larvae attached to the mucosa and gestated. That's why you could carry them without a womb. The colon's a cavity like any other, and a lot of species will use it if there's nowhere better." Singh looked at her. "Which means you can still be bred. Several species can gestate inside the male anatomy — the Dracon, the Vess, the K'tari, a few others. If you're going to work as a free-use whore on a freighter that docks where the Kestrel docks, you're going to be exposed to them, and to everything else."

Jay lay there with her feet in the stirrups and the bright light on her face and felt the old cold thing settle into her chest. "So I can still be a brood mare."

"You can still be bred," Singh said. "That's not the same thing. But yes — biologically, the capacity is there."

"Can you stop it?"

Singh stood and went to the counter and opened a drawer and took out a small sealed tray. She set it on the table beside Jay's hip and opened it, and inside was a metal injector and a vial and a flat disc the size of a coin. She said, "This is a long-acting contraceptive implant. Subcutaneous, in the hip, lasts five years. It releases a hormone analogue that makes the mucosal lining of the colon and the rectum inhospitable to implantation — no larvae attach, no gestation, nothing takes. It works on every species I know of that can use a male host, including the Dracon, including the Vess, including the K'tari. It won't stop you getting fucked. But it'll stop you getting bred."

Jay looked at the disc. "And if I want it out?"

"Come back and I'll take it out. It's your body. I'm not going to put anything in you that you can't have removed." Singh picked up the injector. "But I'd recommend you keep it. You've been bred twice by something that wasn't your choice. This is a choice."

Jay lay there for a moment with the light on her face and the cold thing in her chest and the warmth in her belly, and she thought about the two infants on the stage and the containment crib and the fact that she had never learned what had happened to them, and she thought about how much of her life had been decided by people who had never asked her, and she said, "Put it in."

Singh swabbed her hip and pressed the injector down, and there was a small cold sting and a pressure and then nothing, and Singh pressed a pad over the site and held it for a count of thirty and said, "Done. It'll be tender for a day. No heavy lifting."

"I'm crew on a freighter. Heavy lifting's the job."

"Then lift with your arms and not your hip." Singh peeled the pad away and looked at the site and nodded, and then she went back to the counter and picked up a small case and a spray injector. "This is the other thing. You've been exposed to everything the black has to offer — Dracon mucosal pathogens, Vess gut flora, whatever was on the Vixen's clients, whatever was on Jones's crew. Pell started you on a broad-spectrum course on the Warspite, but it was a short course and it won't cover the xenotics. This is a long-acting antiviral and antibiotic, one injection, works for a year. It'll make you feel washed out tomorrow but you’ll only feel rough for a day or so and it'll make you piss a lot for two, and then you'll be clean."

She pressed the spray injector to Jay's shoulder and there was a hiss and a cold spread down Jay's arm, and Singh set the injector down and said, "Sit up. Slowly."

Jay sat up. The room tilted a little and then steadied, and she looked down at the small pad on her hip and the small red mark on her shoulder and felt, for the first time in a long time, like something had been done to her that she had asked for.

Singh pulled off her gloves and sat back down on the stool and picked up the slate. "I'm going to sign you fit for duty. I'm going to note the implant and the injection and the modification, and I'm going to note that you're cleared for sexual contact with all species on the standard registry, with the usual caveats — no permanent damage, no body modification without your consent, and you set your own limits. That's the medical opinion. The rest is yours."

"The rest is mine," Jay said, and heard how flat it came out, and Singh looked at her over the top of the slate.

"You don't believe that yet," she said. "That's fine. Belief takes longer than paperwork." She stood and handed Jay a folded printout and a small data chip. "The printout's for your captain. The chip's for you — your records, your implant serial, the referral numbers. Keep it somewhere you'll remember."

Jay took them. She dressed with her back to the room and tucked the printout into her jacket and the chip into the case in her duffel, and when she turned around Singh was at the door with her hand on the frame, and she said, "One more thing. You said you'd gotten good at telling the truth. Keep doing it. The primer makes you want to be used, and it doesn't make you want to be lied to, and the men who'll use you will lie to you about what they're doing if you let them. Don't let them."

"I won't," Jay said, and this time it didn't come out flat.

She paid at the desk — Singh charged her the walk-in rate and didn't charge her for the implant, and when Jay started to say something about it Singh said, "It's a public health measure, Miller. I'd do it for anyone. Go catch your ship." — and then she was back out on the concourse with the printout in her jacket and the injection cold in her shoulder and the implant tender in her hip, and the station was louder than it had been.

She walked back the way she'd come, and she noticed it this time. The dockworker in the welding apron was still there and he looked at her again and this time he whistled, low and long and appreciative, and Jay felt the warmth flare up her spine and into her face and she kept her eyes forward and her stride even and her hands at her sides, and she did not stop. A pair of off-duty ratings by the noodle stand watched her pass and one of them said something to the other and the other laughed, and Jay felt the laugh land on her skin like a hand. A woman in a broker's coat who had looked at her before looked at her again and this time held her gaze, and Jay held it back for a count of two and then looked away, and her heart was going hard and her cock was half-hard under her trousers and the whole of her was a live wire strung between shame and something that wasn't shame at all.

She thought, as she walked, about the fact that she had not worn underwear on purpose. She thought about the fact that she had walked the concourse slowly on purpose, and that she had kept her head up on purpose, and that she had known exactly what the dockworkers would do when they saw her and had come this way anyway. She thought about Okafor and the word addiction and the word want and the difference between them, and she thought about the fact that she had spent her whole life fixing machines because machines did exactly what they were built to do and never asked her to be anything else, and that she had been built into something that did exactly what it was built to do, and that she was, at this moment, doing it.

The airlock cycled her back onto the Kestrel's Weight at 17.30, and Djuna was in the corridor with a coil of cable over her shoulder and she looked at Jay and said, "You're back."

"I'm back."

"Captain's in the wardroom. She'll want the paper."

Jay went up. Halvorsen was at the long table with a cup of coffee and a spread of charts on the slate in front of her, and she looked up and saw the printout in Jay's hand and said, "Sit."

Jay sat. She put the printout on the table and slid it across, and Halvorsen picked it up and read it slowly, the way she read everything, her eyes moving down the page and her mouth a flat line. She read the whole thing. She read the note about the implant and the note about the injection and the note about the modification and the note about the clearance, and then she set it down and looked at Jay across the table.

"She's signed you fit," she said.

"She has."

"She's also noted that you're cleared for sexual contact with all species on the standard registry, with the caveat that you set your own limits." Halvorsen tapped the paper with one finger. "That's the medical opinion. Here's mine. The Kestrel's Weight is a freighter, not a brothel, and I run it like a freighter. You're crew. You're also the ship's whore, because that's the berth you asked for and that's the berth I hired you for, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. From the moment we cast off, any hand on this ship who wants you can have you, and any hand on this ship who doesn't want you doesn't have to look at you, and both of those are fine. What's not fine is anyone putting a hand on you without your yes. I told you that when I hired you and I'm telling you again, because the paper doesn't say it and I want it said."

"Understood."

"Good." Halvorsen picked up her coffee and drank and set it down. "There's one more thing on the paper. She's noted that you've got a contraceptive implant and that you're clear of everything the black's given you, which means you're fit to start work whenever you see fit." She looked at Jay steadily. "So. When do you see fit?"

Jay sat with the question. The wardroom was warm and the coolant loop was rumbling under the deck and somewhere above them the hull was ticking as the station's heat bled into it, and she could hear Imani's voice in the galley and Okonkwo's laugh and the clatter of a pan, and she could feel the implant tender in her hip and the injection cold in her shoulder and the printout on the table between her and the captain like a signed contract.

She thought about the dockworker's whistle. She thought about the broker's eyes. She thought about the fact that she had walked the concourse slowly on purpose and that her body had answered every look with heat, and that the heat was hers now, the way Okafor had said it was hers, and that she was sitting on a freighter that was casting off in three and a half hours with a captain who had just asked her, out loud, when she wanted to start being used.

She said, "Tonight. After dinner."

Halvorsen nodded, once, the way she nodded at a manifest that balanced. "Then tonight it is," she said. "You'll eat in your berth at 18.00, at 18.30 I will take you to the crew and introduce you. You'll be available after. I will not introduce you as Jay or Miller. From this moment on, while aboard this ship, you’ll be referred to as Whore. That will be your name and that is what I'll tell them." Jay nodded that she understood even as she felt the shame in her cheeks and the stirring in her cock. Halvorsen picked up her slate and looked back down at her charts signalling the meeting was over. "Welcome aboard, Whore."

Jay stood. She folded the printout and tucked it back into her jacket, and she walked out of the wardroom and down the ladder to the berth deck, and she went into her small end berth and sat down on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees. The coolant loop rumbled under the deck plates. Somewhere above her the hull ticked as it cooled. Her hip ached where the implant sat and her shoulder ached where the injection had gone in and her cock was hard against her thigh and she was, at this moment, exactly what she had asked to be.

She unzipped her duffel and took out the leather case and opened it and looked at the red silk panties folded inside, the ones Reyes had cleaned and folded and given back to her because she had wanted Jay to have something nice to remember her by and had not wanted to say so. She looked at them for a long time. Then she closed the case and put it back and zipped the duffel and set it on the deck under the rack, and she lay back on the bed and put her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling and waited for nineteen hundred.

She lay there with her hands behind her head for a while, and the ceiling of the end berth was a flat grey plate with a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the corner, and she traced the crack the way she used to trace a wiring diagram, following it from origin to terminus, checking it for load.

The coolant loop rumbled. Somewhere forward, someone dropped a pan and swore in a language she didn't know, and Imani laughed, and the sound came down the corridor and into the open mouth of her berth and sat there with her. She had no door. She'd known that when Halvorsen walked her down and pointed at the end berth and said that one's yours, the seal's bad on the aft end, you'll hear the loop, and she'd said fine, and she'd meant it. A whore doesn't get a door. A whore gets a berth with a bad seal and a view of whoever walks past, and that was the point, and she'd taken the berth anyway.

She sat up. Her hip pulled where the implant sat, a small dull ache that had settled into a rhythm with her pulse, and her shoulder still ran cold where the injection had gone in. She swung her legs off the rack and put her feet flat on the deck plates — cold, ribbed, the paint worn to bare metal in a stripe where boots had walked the same line for years — and she sat there with her elbows on her knees and looked at the open hatch and the corridor beyond it.

Nobody out there. Just the loop and the ticking hull and the smell of whatever Okonkwo was burning in the galley, something with onions in it. She had eighteen minutes.

She said it under her breath. "Whore."

The word came out flat and small and it landed on the deck plates and lay there like a dropped bolt. She made a face at herself. She'd said it the way she'd read a part number off a manifest — whore, one each — and that wasn't it. That wasn't the shape of it. Halvorsen hadn't said it like that. Halvorsen had said it the way she said manifest and cast off and understood, like it was a fact with weight behind it, and Jay had felt the weight land in her chest and then run down her spine and settle somewhere low and hot, and that was the thing she was trying to get into her mouth before she walked out there and had it said to her by eleven strangers.

She tried again. "Whore."

Louder this time. Not loud — the hatch was open, the corridor was right there, and she wasn't going to yell it into the passage like a lunatic — but loud enough that it came off the bulkhead and came back at her. And this time she heard it. She heard the vowel go soft at the end, the way her voice did when she was telling the truth and didn't like the truth, and she heard the whole word sit in the room like it had been nailed there. Her face went hot. The heat started in her cheeks and ran down her neck and into her chest and kept going, down past her ribs, into her belly, and her cock stirred against her thigh where it lay under the borrowed trousers, and she felt it happen and did not stop it.

That was the primer, or it was her, or it was both, and she'd stopped trying to separate the two somewhere around Starbase Twelve. Okafor had said the want was hers. Reyes had said the want was hers. Pell had said the body was hers and the body was the body she kept, and none of them had said the heat was hers, exactly, but Jay had been sitting with the question long enough to have an answer, and the answer was that it didn't matter whose it was. It was in her. It answered when she called it. She could call it or not call it, and tonight she'd already decided to call it, and there was a difference between being used and asking to be used, and she'd spent forty-one days on a Star Service ship learning the shape of that difference.

She said it one more time, and this time she said it the way Halvorsen had said it — flat, final, a fact with weight behind it, the way you'd say the seal's bad or we cast off at nineteen fifteen.

"Whore."

It came out right. It came out of her the way a torque wrench comes off a bolt when you've got the setting right — clean, no slip, no give. And her body answered, and the answer was the same as the first two times and stronger than either, a pulse that started at the base of her cock and went up through her gut and into her throat, and she sat on the edge of the rack with her hands on her knees and her jaw tight and let it move through her and out, and when it was done she was still sitting there and the berth was still the berth and the loop was still rumbling and nobody had heard her.

She looked at the hatch. She looked at the corridor beyond it, empty, lit by a strip light with one tube flickering at the far end. She looked at the leather case under the rack where the red silk was folded, and she thought about the fact that Jay hadn’t worn underwear for Halvorsen's interview and hadn't told her, and about the fact that she wasn't wearing them now, and about the fact that she hadn't worn underwear at all today, and every one of those facts was a decision she'd made on purpose.

She stood up. The implant pulled and she ignored it. The injection in her shoulder was still cold and she rolled it once, forward and back, and felt the muscle move under the skin, and she pulled the hem of her shirt straight and checked her trousers and put her hand on the frame of the hatch and looked down the corridor toward the galley where the onions were burning and the crew was talking and where, in a few minutes, Halvorsen was going to walk her in and say the word out loud to all of them and make it her name.

She stepped out of the berth and into the passage, and the deck plates were cold under her boots, and she was still hard, and she didn't do anything about that either.