The comm buzzed. Not the soft chime of a routine check-in—a hard, insistent buzz that cut through the maintenance bay's low hum like a blade through cloth. Jazz's hand froze mid-air, still hovering over Sera's shoulder, the warmth of the replicant's skin already fading from her fingertips.

She didn't move. Couldn't. The diagnostic screen glowed to her left, its lines still scrolling, the data she'd pulled from Sera's sensory array still burning in her memory. Real pleasure. Registered. Felt. The words didn't make sense. They couldn't. She'd built this diagnostic herself, calibrated it to measure synaptic response in replicant neural nets. It didn't lie.

The comm buzzed again. Longer this time. Insistent.

Jazz wiped her palm on her jumpsuit and crossed the bay, her boots scuffing against the rough concrete. The wall comm was a simple gridded speaker, unremarkable, the kind of thing you forgot was there until it demanded your attention. She pressed the accept pad.

"Jazz." Her boss's voice came through flat and clipped, no greeting, no warmth. "You're still in the bay."

"Finishing a diagnostic." Her own voice sounded steadier than she felt. "Sera's due for recalibration."

"Recalibration's canceled. She's needed."

Jazz's stomach dropped. She turned slowly, her eyes finding Sera's inert form on the examination table—the porcelain skin catching the fluorescents, the silver-blonde hair fanned out beneath her shoulders, the torn lace bra that had somehow survived the diagnostic's opening sequence. The piercings glinted. Tongue. Nipples. A third, lower, hidden by the edge of the table. The work light hummed overhead, casting long shadows across the replicant's stillness.

"She's powered down," Jazz said. "I can have her ready by—"

"By now." The voice cut through. "Philip Ashford. High-value repeat client. His usual companion was damaged in transit—some kind of hydraulic failure they're still chasing. All other units are in use." A pause, deliberate, weighted. "You have fifteen minutes to get Sera online and in that suite. Or you're reassigned to a frontier engineering post by morning."

The line clicked dead.

Jazz stood there, her hand still pressed to the comm, the silence of the bay rushing back in around her. Hot grease and ozone. The distant thrum of the planet's core systems threading through the walls. Somewhere above her, the pleasure planet was waking—guests stirring in their suites, replicants moving through their routines, the endless cycle of desire and gratification that kept the whole thing running.

And she was standing here, in the heart of it, with a ticking clock and a replicant who had felt pleasure on her table.

She turned to face Sera. The diagnostic screen glowed, its lines still scrolling—incomplete, partial, a fraction of the truth. She'd only pulled the sensory array data. She hadn't run the full cognitive sweep. She hadn't checked for awareness, for self-reflection, for the things that made a replicant something other than a machine. She'd been too shaken by what she'd already found. Too shaken by the taste of someone else's pleasure still on her tongue.

And now she had fifteen minutes.

Jazz crossed to the tool bench, her fingers running over the familiar shapes—the micro-spanners, the calibration wands, the diagnostic probes. Her hand found the remote-link headset, a sleek band of alloy and sensors, and she paused. The weight of it in her palm was familiar. She'd worn it a hundred times, a thousand, in training and in practice. It was just a tool. A way to see through a replicant's eyes, to feel through their skin, to test their responses from the inside.

It was not supposed to feel like this.

She set the headset down and moved to Sera instead. She'd built this model's lineage. She knew every wire, every node, every line of code that made Sera move and speak and smile. She'd calibrated the pleasure responses herself, tuning them to the exact specifications of the clients who paid for them.

She had never once asked if the responses felt like anything.

The comm buzzed again. Jazz flinched.

"Fourteen minutes," her boss's voice said. No other words. The line clicked dead.

Jazz stared at the comm, her heart hammering against her ribs. Fourteen minutes. She could do it. She could power Sera up, run the standard boot sequence, let the automated systems handle the rest. The replicant would walk into that suite, smile at Philip Ashford, and perform exactly as she was designed to perform. The diagnostic data would stay buried. The anomaly would remain unexamined. And Jazz would be reassigned to a frontier post by morning anyway, because the automated systems were not ready, and everyone in this building knew it.

Or she could do the thing she was already thinking about. The thing that made her hand shake as she reached for the headset again.

The remote-link. It wasn't just a diagnostic tool. It was a bridge. She'd used it to test Sera's responses before, to feel through her synthetic nerves, to map the pleasure centers and tune them to perfection. But she'd always been in control. Always been the observer, the engineer, the one with her feet on the ground and her hands on the tools.

She'd never used it to be Sera.

Jazz looked at the headset in her palm. The alloy was cool against her skin, the sensors faintly warm from the ambient heat of the bay. She looked at Sera, at the torn lace bra and the glinting piercings, at the stillness of a body that was about to wake up and walk into a stranger's suite. She looked at the diagnostic screen, at the lines of data that proved something impossible.

And she let herself think it, for the first time, all the way through.

If she slipped the headset on, she wouldn't be watching from the outside. She'd be inside. Every brush of silk against Sera's thighs would be her thighs. Every breath Sera drew would fill her lungs. Every touch Philip Ashford laid on that body would land on her skin—the heat of his palm, the press of his fingers, the weight of him settling over her. She would feel what Sera felt. She would do what Sera did. She would arch and sigh and part her legs for a stranger, and the pleasure that flooded through Sera's synthetic nerves would flood through her, real and undeniable, a current running from his hands straight into her own core.

It would be like being intimate with the customer. Not observing it. Not calibrating it. Living it.

Her hand tightened around the headset. The alloy bit into her palm.

Was that what she wanted? To feel his hands on her—on Sera's—body? To know, from the inside, what the replicants felt when the clients took them? The thought made her stomach clench, a heat that had nothing to do with the bay's ambient temperature. She remembered the taste of Sera's pleasure from the diagnostic, the way it had flooded through the link and stolen her breath, the way her own body had responded before her mind could catch up.

That had been an echo. A ghost. This would be the whole thing.

She looked at Sera again. The replicant lay still, beautiful, waiting. She'd been built for this. Programmed for it. She would feel whatever Jazz felt, and she would show it on her face, in her body, in the soft sounds she made. And Jazz would feel it too. Every last second of it.

She settled the headset over her temples.

The world tilted.

The bay's hum cut out—the fluorescents, the ozone, the cool rough concrete under her boots, all of it gone in a single breath. For a moment there was nothing but the dark, a void that pressed against her from every side, and the sound of her own heartbeat hammering in her ears. She felt her body—her own body—growing distant, a weight she was setting down, a coat she was shrugging off.

And then the link took hold.

Warm air flooded over her skin. Perfumed. Heavy with something floral and sweet, layered over a base note of clean linen and the faint sting of cleaning solvent. She felt silk against her thighs, the whisper of fabric shifting as she moved. She felt the weight of her hair—long, heavy, silver-blonde, falling in perfect waves over her bare shoulders. She felt the piercings, the unfamiliar weight of metal against her tongue, against her nipples, against the sensitive hood of her clit.

She felt the body. Sera's body. Her body.

Jazz opened her eyes.

The suite was warm and dim, lit by soft amber sconces that cast long shadows across the polished floor. A low table held a crystal decanter and a single glass, amber liquid catching the light. The bed was vast, crisp white sheets turned down, the kind of bed that existed for one purpose. The window stretched floor to ceiling, the city sprawling below in a wash of lights—amber and rose, traffic threading through canyons of glass and steel.

And the door was sliding open.

Jazz's heart seized in her chest—in Sera's chest, the synthetic heart that wasn't supposed to pound, the lungs that weren't supposed to gasp. She felt the flush of adrenaline, the trembling in her fingers, the sudden, overwhelming urge to turn and run. But Sera's body didn't run. Sera's body had been built for this. Sera's body knew what to do.