"Stand up, please."

I came awake to those words and to vinyl chilling the backs of my arms, that old reflex of mine, temperature first, the body reporting before the mind caught up. A collar sat locked at my throat. Wide, warmer than the table because it had been against my skin long enough to take my heat. I had not put it on. I had been asleep when it went on, and the lock had made a sound I would hear in my teeth for weeks, a small metallic finality, already done before I surfaced.

A man stood at the foot of the table.

Not large. That surprised me, the way a pulse surprises you when it doesn't match the face above it. Dark hair going iron at the temples. Plain dark clothes. A stillness to him that other people work years to fake and never get, because they are faking it. He was not.

His voice had been level. The please sat on the end of the command like it belonged there, like he had never once needed to take it off.

I did not stand up.

I knew how I'd gotten here. I had signed for it. Three days ago, in a room with good coffee, a woman named Breck had slid a contract across a table and not watched me read it, and that was the first thing I respected about her and the last. The pen was heavy, black, capped, costly the way a scalpel is costly, which is to say it did not announce itself. Twelve months, the page said, and the debt at the bottom of my life went away, expunged, gone as though I had never built the company that built it. A personal guarantee I'd put my name to at twenty-nine, in a conference room, because I had never once failed to fix a thing with my own hands.

There is a part of every operation where you commit. The chest is open, the bypass is running, and there is no version of the next four hours where you put it back the way it was and walk out. I had lived in that part of the day across ten years of them. I had told myself the signing was that. Then a hand at my shoulder, and the lights coming up white, and the collar already locked.

So I lay on the cold vinyl and looked at the ceiling and let the refusal sit in me. There was nothing he could take that the loss of my old life had not already taken. I gave him nothing. I was good at giving nothing. It was the only thing I had kept.

He did not say it again.

That was the part I was not ready for. A man who repeats himself louder is a man you can map. You know where the floor is with a shout. He only stood there, and the room went quiet in a way that had weight, and the quiet was worse than a hand, because a hand ends. The waiting did not. It settled on my chest. It pressed.

I stood up.

I told myself it was the chill of the table. I told myself, too, that it was strategy, that you don't waste the first hour of a year-long fight lying down. Both were true. Neither was why.

The floor took my bare feet. My knees locked the way they had locked through a thousand standing hours over a table, spine long, the old discipline catching me before the new fear could. A tremor started in my right quad. Small, fine, high-frequency, the kind you get at hour six, when the muscle is finished but the case is not.

I held still against it. I had willed exactly that tremor down out of my hands a thousand times, a heart waiting under them, and the stillness came now when I called it the way it always had. Underneath the stillness, in the animal place I'd kept shut in a drawer my whole life, something wanted to be told I had done it right. Wanted it so badly my mouth went dry. I hated the animal. I held the stance.

He crossed to me. Two fingers under my chin, impersonal, the touch you'd use to tilt a lamp into better light. He read my face the way I would read a film, looking for the thing it did not want to show.

"You're starting from down here," he said. He meant my eyes, already dropped, already on the drain in the floor. He did not push them up. He could have. He let them stay where they were, and the fact of that being allowed loosened a bolt I had not known was holding weight.

"What's your name," I said. It came out flat. Good.

"Casimir."

"First or last."

"It's the one you'll use." He stepped back. The two fingers were gone, and I missed the contact, and despised the missing. "Tomorrow we begin. Tonight you sleep."

The lock at my throat. The drain in the floor. The debt, lifted off my life and printed onto my body in a band of leather and a sound.

He left. A panel slid shut, soft, no clang to it. They had spent money making sure nothing here clanged.

I sat on the edge of the table. One hand went to the collar. Not pulling. Two fingers resting against the warm band, the way you check a pulse you already know is there.

I should be planning how to get out. Exits, leverage, the weak clause, the lawyer's number, the cost of breaking early.

I was thinking about the inspection. I was thinking I had held the stance clean, and no one had told me so.