Stays denied.

You are breathless and dazed enough that the ceiling ribs swim, and she leans down anyway. The kiss is short, reluctant and eager in the same breath, steel cups pressing your chest, and when she pulls back she smiles as if she has already started to break again.

She climbs off you slowly. Strings of spend stretch from the belt-plate to your cock and then thin and break. The toys in the lock are still working. She does not stays denied.

"It’s probably best if you clean yourself up."

"Yes," you say, and you keep it a full sentence so it does not turn into a plea. "I want the unused one. The fold that has not been on anyone. If it will hold this, I want it on me before I walk out of here."

She nods like a woman who has already lost the argument with herself. She brings the basin back to honest work and you wash until the white pulse is gone from your skin and only ordinary mess is left. The collar comes off over your head and leaves a pale line. She takes the steel out of the room with her when she goes for the cloth, because she cannot stand to look at it on her own body and at you at the same time.

When she comes back she has a sealed press-bundle, pin still in the fold, and she has not put the robe on well. The belt shows when she moves. She sets the bundle on the blanket and steps back to the wall as if distance is a rule she can still keep.

"This was not mine to give," she says, longer, tired. "It is novice stock from the White Hill crate, never on a back. If the motherhouse counts pins I will answer for it. Put it on before I take it back instead"

You break the pin. The cloth is plain undyed, cut for a sister — shift, drawers, a soft band that has never been closed on a chest — and it is stiff with newness. She watches you dress. You get the drawers on first, then the band, useless on a flat chest, then the shift over your head, and the hem hits you mid-calf because it was not cut for 186 centimeters. Your beard is still in the neckline. Your brown hair comes out of the collar in a man’s fall. She bites her lip and does not come off the wall.

The cloth seats.

Nothing copies a woman this time. There is no other body in the fabric. What happens is quieter: the shirt and drawers take the shape you have now and keep it, a tightness that is not shrink so much as a decision, and you hope, standing there in unused abbey-cut linen with a man’s face and a man’s sex under the drawers, that this is the lock you meant. Charlie, held in cloth that has never been worn by anyone else.

Brin’s eyes are wet and hungry and already being put away.

"If that holds, you can walk past a wall and not be the one forced on it," she says. "If the White hil can smell new cloth, they will know what I gave you. That is the part I cannot fix."

In the passage, a second pair of sandals stops. Someone has been listening long enough. The pin from the fold is still in your fingers. The contract is still on the blanket. The lock on her hips is still humming denial.