Kristen and Zach had a whole training room to themselves for their sanctioned tutoring session. The wall panels surrounding them held a complete arsenal, not only of the disciplinary implements they were here to study, but also the pleasure implements they would not begin working with until next semester.

Being left unsupervised in a room full of so many possibilities would have been an almost unbearable distraction, were it not for their secure chastity devices.

They were sitting on opposite sides of a steel table, just like those found in the visitor rooms, but unlike a real session in one of those rooms, there was no possibility of buying a release here.

As trainees, neither of them had the authority to unlock the other, and in any case, both were still serving their mandatory three-month deprivation, to prove their fortitude and enhance their empathy as future pleasure control officers.

“What are the three key indications for anal discipline?” Kristen quizzed Zach, from a list on her glowing tablet screen. She bit absently into one of the plain wheat crackers they’d brought to snack on, while she waited for his answer.

Zach covered his own screen and closed his eyes to think. He was a tiny thing, nineteen years old, just like Kristen, with East Asian features and flexibility enough to pull his heels up in front of him on the small seat of his steel folding chair. He did this now, and buried his face effortlessly in his bony knees.

“Delusions of superiority,” he listed, “lack of orgasm-driven motivation, and… uh… fuck…”

He slammed his forehead harder against his knees.

“Hey.”

Kristen reached across the table to put her hand on one of them, hoping he wouldn’t crush that with his forehead too. He didn’t.

“Breathe,” she reminded him. “You know this.”

“I don’t.”

“Not when you’re panicking,” Kristen agreed. “Take your time. There’s no penalty for getting it wrong here.”

Zach took a long breath in and out. His stress-tightened voice dropped lower afterward.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

“I told you why,” said Kristen.

“You told me why in front of Professor Lawrence and a full classroom,” Zach said, meeting her eyes over his knees. “I’m asking you here.”

“I meant what I said there,” said Kristen. “It’s not some deep dark secret.”

“You just like helping people,” Zach summed up. “More than kicking them when they’re down. Or looking away.”

“Something like that,” Kristen agreed. “So, the third indication for anal discipline is….”

Zach took one more breath, leaning his head back.

“Choice!” he exclaimed sitting back upright. “When a subject chooses it from an allowed list of alternatives.”

“Exactly!” Kristen confirmed. “See, you are learning. You just need to be patient with yourself.”

“It’s a little harder when the person standing over you has a whip,” Zach gazed across the table at her. “Seriously, how do you always manage to keep it together in this hellhole?”

“Well, it helps that this ‘hellhole’ is my best chance to live as more than a helpless subject,” said Kristen. “Isn’t that why you’re here too?”

“Sure, you could say that.” Zach scoffed. “But I didn’t mean Bureau headquarters. I meant the world.”

Kristen let out a heavy breath. The world was a bit bigger than what she was willing to take on today.

“You wake up in that thing every day,” Zach nodded downward toward her device, under the table. “Knowing there’s no escape, even if you run. Knowing that any scrap of mercy you might get depends on being perfect, not making mistakes. How can you keep facing that? Let alone risk fucking with it to help someone else?”

Kristen shrugged. “Trying to be perfect is just habit. And the risks… I don’t usually think about there being another option until it’s over. Most of the time, I’m running on instinct.”

“So, basically, your instincts are just better than mine,” Zach sighed, hugging his legs in front of him.

“Hey,” said Kristen, more sharply. “Don’t talk that way about my student.” She smiled. “Anyway, it’s not true. Your instincts are fine when you’re not beating yourself up.”

“So, you think I’ve got it in me to go on?” Zach asked.

“Of course,” Kristen said firmly.

“If you didn’t, would you tell me?” Zach’s eyes were dry when he asked this, and unsettlingly steady.

Kristen considered him for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling I’m the one being quizzed now?”

“If you thought I was someone who couldn’t hack living like this,” Zach persisted, “someone doomed to crack under Bureau deprivation, would you think I deserved to live some other way? Some softer way?”

“Zach….” Kristen swallowed, buying time to concoct an answer that never came together. “We should really get to tactile review now.”

Zach bit his lip and dragged himself to his feet.

He hiked up his white trainee tunic, clasped his hands behind his head, and bent over the table lengthwise, giving Kristen access to his ass.

“Ready when you are,” he sighed.

Kristen went to gather the implements from the last in-class quiz, the one Zach had broken down during.

She started with the anal hook he had been asked to identify, the one Kristen had then been forced to wear for the rest of the day. That had been nearly two weeks ago now, and she still found herself sitting unnaturally straight, forgetting that it was gone.

“I’ll be gentle,” Kristen promised, spreading on the lubricant.

“I know you will,” Zach said with simple, almost eerie confidence. It was nothing like how he sounded in class.

Kristen lined up the bead on the end of the hook, and no sooner had she begun to penetrate him than he said, “Anal hook three.”

“You got it,” said Kristen, pulling it out.

“It wasn’t exactly unpredictable this time,” said Zach.

“Can you just let yourself have the win?” Kristen scolded. “Okay, how about this one?”

She lubricated and lined up a mid-sized dildo that could be used for both discipline and purchased stimulation. The desirability of its effects depended on the subject’s tastes and, especially, on their freedom to orgasm during the application.

“Dildo seven,” Zach identified it almost as soon as she pushed it in.

“And how do you know that?” Kristen asked him.

“It’s a dildo because it’s a straight line and doesn’t taper down from its widest part like a plug. By the temperature, it’s steel, there’s no texturization beyond the head, and number seven is the smallest size that fits those criteria. And you would pick the smallest size for me right now.”

“Still think you’re not cut out for this?” Kristen teased.

“Kristen,” Zach said in a tone that promised something serious to follow.

“Yeah?” Kristen asked.

“Would you test me on something bigger, please?”

“Why?”

“I want to find something out,” said Zach.

Curiously, Kristen removed the dildo, only about the width of two fingers, and selected one twice the size, but softer.

“Tell me if you need to stop,” she said, applying the lube and lining it up.

Zach groaned and gripped the table as she slid the head inside him, but he didn’t form any words or sounds likely to be a protest.

“Which one is it?” Kristen prompted.

Zach lay there for a moment, eyes closed as if searching for the right number.

“Fuck me with it,” he said. “Please?”

It didn’t sound like a request for a hint.

“What are you doing, Zach?” Kristen asked.

He turned his head to look up at her. “Right at this moment? I’m asking for consent,” he said, dark eyes unreadable.

“Consent for what?” asked Kristen, holding the dildo still inside him.

Zach moistened his lips thoughtfully. “Consent to participate in something… not entirely academic, with me.”

An unexpected shiver ran through Kristen’s body.

It was such a vague yet intimate request, the kind that felt perilous even to hear without the Bureau’s knowledge and official approval.

The last time she had been propositioned in private, she had been in high school, not yet fitted with her device and surrounded by similarly unlocked teenagers.

She had also been so terrified of men that she would always dismiss their propositions out of hand, sometimes even pretending that she wasn’t bisexual at all.

For an instant, that was who she was again.

Then, she forced herself to survey Zach’s body — petite, familiar, and at her mercy on the table — and resummon the serene power she had discovered through her officer’s training.

“Do you want me to drain your prostate?” she asked directly. “I’m told it’s very unpleasant inside the cage.”

“You won’t hurt me,” Zach assured her, unfazed. “And I won’t hurt you. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ll like what I have in mind.”

Kristen’s thoughts flicked to her mentor, Officer Deacon — Leila — and to that one long kiss Kristen had stolen from her. They still had not discussed it.

It felt almost like betrayal, somewhere deep in the pit of Kristen’s stomach, to desire or indulge in any sort of intercourse without her mentor present, if it was not a required part of her training.

The desire was there, though, twanging through her, merging with weeks of deprivation, stronger for every instant she spent looking down at Zach. His receptive posture contrasted captivatingly with his sharply appraising gaze.

“If you want to keep it strictly professional,” he said, “you can take dildo twelve out of me, and make me identify whips and canes by feel all afternoon. Or we can stop now and go study in separate corners. It’s up to you.”

Strictly professional. That wasn’t a bad description for how Officer Deacon had responded to Kristen’s last advance, in fact. She’d sent her back to work without a word to acknowledge what they’d just shared.

For all Kristen knew, Officer Deacon’s more-than-professional fondness for her might be a figment of her own imagination. It might even be a calculated misdirection. A clever recruitment tactic.

No, there were no promises between them, as much as Kristen liked to imagine otherwise. No terms or conditions to exclude… whatever this was.

Kristen pulled the dildo out.

She pushed it back in.

Zach gasped, and broke into an exhilarated grin.

Kristen gave him another thrust, feeling like she’d accidentally grabbed a live, unguarded electrical cable. A force too vast and ancient to be contained in her body was running through it, guiding her buzzing muscles. She knew that her essential nerves, and Zach’s, were out of reach behind deviously well-engineered pieces of metal, that getting themselves voluntarily worked up was a pointless exercise in frustration. But the charge running through her was indifferent to such trivial, rational concerns.

Zach arched his back to bring his face closer to hers, and Kristen stepped around the corner of the table to meet him halfway, still working the dildo with one hand.

He kissed her fiercely, closing his teeth gently over her lower lip in time with each thrust, letting the rough attention make a complete, endless circuit between them.

“I wish…” he murmured against her mouth.

“Me too,” said Kristen.

“You do, don’t you?” he asked.

She kissed him harder in reply.

“Kristen,” he whispered lower, “can I trust you with a secret?”

“What kind of secret?”

“Can’t tell you that until I know if I can trust you.”

He was playful. He was dead serious. Both at once, somehow.

Kristen nodded.

Zach pulled himself up onto the table on his hands and knees. With a caress of Kristen’s face, he pushed it away from his own.

She watched as he fluttered his fingers, like a magician preparing for a trick, and ran his hand slowly down his own chest, over his white trainee’s tunic, down to the hard lump of his caged cock.

He pulled up the fabric, made a fist, and pressed his ordinary-looking class ring to the chastity device’s sensor panel.

The chains unlatched with a click.

“Oh, my god!” Kristen gasped, letting go of the dildo and stepping back, hands over her mouth in shock.

“There are no cameras in here, I promise,” said Zach. “I’ve checked everywhere.”

Kristen hadn’t even thought of this, and now whipped her head back and forth, half expecting to find herself surrounded by the movie-grade cameras that waited behind the walls of the visitor rooms.

“Where the hell did you get that thing?” she hissed, turning back toward Zach and nodding at the ring.

“What, just knowing that I have it isn’t enough secret for one day?” he joked.

“Do you know what they’d do to you if they caught you with it?”

“I can guess,” Zach answered. “Hence that whole trust question….”

He let his voice fade out with his eyes still on her, clearly waiting to find out if the answer to that question had changed.

“I can let you out, too,” he offered. “I’ll do whatever you want, and no one will know.”

Kristen pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling drugged on blended arousal and panic. A turbulent undercurrent of guilt stirred the other feelings, though Kristen wasn’t sure she could trace it to a source.

A single, whole thought made it to the surface:

She had made Zach complicit once, while trying to do him a favor, without even considering the risk to him. She wasn’t about to inform on him, given a similar gesture.

Zach picked up the bottle of lube Kristen had used on the dildo and rubbed some onto his cage, preparing to slide it off of his swollen cock, but he didn’t take that step yet.

“Are you telling me to stop?” he asked Kristen, with his hand around the full, tight steel bars.

“Zach.” She found herself hyperventilating between words. “God. I don’t know. No. Do whatever you want with yourself, I don’t care. I just… I don’t know if I can….”

Zach wriggled the cage off of himself, instantly swelling to full hardness outside its constraints. He dropped it to the floor with a metallic clatter, grabbed the neck of his tunic, and wriggled that off as well.

Fully naked except for the pleasure-proof pasties over his nipples, he sat up on the table, pressing the base of the dildo into the steel surface and grinding against it, while stroking his fugitive cock.

How fast could the two of them make this look innocent if they heard someone approaching? Not fast enough, Kristen calculated, sweating at the thought. There was no way Zach could fit back in his cage on a few seconds’ notice.

He tilted his head back, taking in shorter and shorter breaths, every skinny, tensing muscle in his body on magnificent display.

After a few moments, he slowed down, raising his head just enough to look straight on at Kristen. He rested his free hand, the one with the ring, purposefully on the edge of the table, facing her.

Kristen put a hand over her eyes, trying to seal out the temptation in front of her, but almost immediately gave in to peeking through her fingers.

He could be bait from the Bureau, her increasingly distant reason told her.

He could be planning to blackmail her.

He could be her cute, brave new friend, inviting her to play.

Kristen’s legs shook under her, both weak and restless.

She took a step, and another, and another, until the panel of her device met the precious plastic jewel on his ring.

She pulled the fabric out of the sensor’s way.

Click.

The chains released completely, for the first time since they had closed around her.

Grinning, Zach took hold of the front panel of her chastity device and tugged it away, trailing the chains behind it, to set it down next to his own.

“I knew you had it in you, rebel.”

“Unzip me,” she said, climbing onto the table in front of him.

He reached behind her, and with some rushed fumbling, managed to get the zipper of her tunic all the way down. Kristen flailed her arms out of it and tossed it to the floor on top of Zach’s.

Zach hovered his left hand over her right breast, letting her cross the last half inch to press it against his palm, while returning her mouth to his.

His lips were soft, and Kristen bet that if she’d had access to her sense of taste, they would have had a spice to savor.

He traced the edges of her pleasure-proof pastie with his fingertips.

“Want to get these off too?” he asked, leaning down to bring his teeth to one of their edges. He tugged gently on the viciously strong industrial adhesive. “A couple missing replacement packs could probably go unnoticed.”

“Let’s not push it,” said Kristen. “Just pretend they’re not there.”

In truth, the risk of stealing new pasties bothered Kristen less right now than the fact that the alcohol they would need to remove the ones they were wearing was all the way behind the walls. She didn’t want Zach to stop touching her long enough for one of them to go find it.

He brushed his fingers over her forcibly flattened, insulated nipples, and just the thought of how close he was to touching them sent a surge of wetness to her unguarded, utterly touchable pussy.

She ran a hand down Zach’s chest, between his own pasties, toward his erection. He leaned it into her hand as she reached it.

“Mirror me,” she said.

Zach raked his fingers lightly down from her breasts to brush over her clit.

Kristen barely managed not to scream out loud, just from the tingling rush of the desperately awaited contact.

She stroked him lightly, and he did his best to approximate an equivalent for her smaller, denser bud of starving nerves, completing one circle for each up-and-down she gave him.

As Kristen started to acclimate to the feeling and fall into the rhythm, something occurred to her.

“Was it an act?” she asked. “When you were whimpering to Professor Lawrence about needing to cum before you could think straight?”

“Oh, no, that was real,” said Zach, a little embarrassed. “I don’t know how you’ve survived all this time without being able to cheat at all. A few seconds of teasing and I turn into a gibbering cave man, even if I just came yesterday.”

“Is that so?” Kristen asked, pulling her hand away from his cock with one of her stern visitor room looks.

Zach laughed and pulled his hand away from her clit, taking over stroking himself instead, grinding harder against the dildo under him.

“Nice try. You can’t deprive me,” he reminded her. “Not without breaking a promise and giving up your new pleasure connection. But by all means, do that to me again, if you want to make me finish in about five seconds.”

Kristen followed his lead and began rubbing herself. An involuntary moan slipped from her mouth, half ecstasy at the simple freedom to touch her own body again, half desperate keening from the absence of Zach’s skin on hers.

“Oh, god, where was this Zach when you were supposed to be breaking me in the classroom?” she asked. “This Zach could have bent me over that desk with a dozen words.”

“Like I said, Bureau goons with whips make me nervous.”

With his point sufficiently made, he eased his hand under hers, taking over swirling her clitoral hood over the starving bump beneath, and guided her hand back to his dripping head.

“For real, though, is that what you want?” He thrusted into her already moving hand with the question. “Just this, nothing else?”

Kristen groaned at the choice. It was almost impossible to ask for anything that involved stopping the swirl of Zach’s fingers, even for a moment, but no, she couldn’t say that there was nothing else she wanted.

She wanted to sit here while he stroked her forever, and she wanted to get so much closer than this unbearable arm’s length distance. She wanted to tease him out of his mind, and also give him everything he wanted.

She wanted him soft and helpless, cocky and confident, over and under and all around her.

She wanted all the things.

He slowed his rhythm, holding out for her answer. She had to settle on one.

“I want to ride you,” she said, giving him a squeeze.

“Hell yeah.”

“Without you coming inside me.”

“The deprivation tests never end, do they?” Zach joked.

“Neither of us needs—”

“To end up explaining that,” Zach agreed.

“Can you handle that for me?” she asked.

With all of his weight on his feet and one hand, he lifted himself up and gingerly removed the dildo, setting it aside with a fond pat on the base.

“Yeah, I can handle it,” said Zach. “But you have to be ready to get off of me the second I say.”

He lay back on the table. Kristen straddled him, pausing just to marvel at his smooth warmth against her pussy. She ground back and forth a couple of times, savoring another round of gathering moisture, before lining him up and sliding down onto him.

She gasped at each of the stabs of pleasure that radiated through her, as she stretched frictionlessly around him.

He hadn’t looked that big, no bigger than the bootlegged beginner toy she had left behind in the secret desk compartment of her old room, but it had been months since she’d felt even one finger’s worth of vaginal penetration.

“Oh, oh wow,” she muttered, bringing her hands reflexively to her breasts and regretting the decision to leave her rock-hard nipples out of play.

“Uh-huh,” Zach agreed with her assessment of the sensation, pacing his breath carefully to keep his response in check.

“You’ll tell me when?”

“I’ll tell you,” he promised.

Kristen rocked her hips, shifting back and forth over his hardness, setting off more pleasure-stabs, watching his face for warnings that the ride was about to end.

She knew there was a chance Zach could last long enough to finish her, since he was apparently so much less deprived than she was, but she had learned in her first-ever Bureau appointment not to underestimate how much attention she needed, even when she was at her most desperate.

He might have to make her stop right on the edge, or even right at the start of her orgasm, wasting it completely. And maybe… maybe that was what she deserved for trying to cheat the system, said a nagging in the back of her mind.

Maybe she should just enjoy the feel of him. Maybe she could settle for that. She hadn’t crossed that last line yet. She could try to hold back until he reached his limit, and then decline any offers to get her off in other ways, lock herself back up, and pretend this had never happened. This stimulation would all still be unauthorized, of course, but would it be so bad if she only edged herself, made her sentence harder instead of easier?

She tried to decide on that, tried to wish for it, tried to hold off the building wave inside of her. When her skin was buzzing, her vaginal walls clenching around him, and her clit quivering like a bubble dying to pop, she leaned down to kiss Zach, planning to whisper something so teasing that it would force him to force her off of him at the critical moment.

“Can I?” she heard herself whisper instead. “Do I still have time? Can I, can I, can I, can I have one now?” she was slipping toward babbling nonsense and couldn’t seem to get a grip. “Please, please will you hold it in for me? Will you let me—”

“I’ve got you,” said Zach, holding her by the hips.

“Please…”

“Don’t beg, just take it. Let me give it to you. Without their permission. Stick it to them with me, rebel.”

Kristen didn’t have any more time left to think. She arched her back and cried out with reckless, blissful horror as the illicit pleasure quaked uncontrollably through her.

She dug her fingers into Zach’s chest and let her hips take every last stroke they wanted, without needing to count.

Gasping for breath and realizing how hard she’d grabbed him, she collapsed forward and kissed the soft skin where her fingers had been a moment ago, silently apologizing to each little red mark, one at a time.

“Kristen. Fuck, you’re so beautiful. Kristen.” The tone of Zach’s voice, he was calling to her. She tried to remember how to answer.

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to need you to move, now.”

“Right!” Kristen scrambled to support her weight on her tingling limbs and lifted herself off of Zach.

Zach reached down to rub himself, to keep the feeling going.

“Could you… could you hand me the cracker box?” He pointed, stumbling over the effort of thinking ahead. “Easier to sneak it into the trash that way. In case they do a blacklight sweep.”

“It’s okay,” said Kristen, backing up on her knees toward the edge of the table, guessing at his worries before he finished explaining. “I’ve got you, too.”

Wrapping her hand around his, she leaned down to take the head of his cock in her mouth, fluttering her tongue lightly under it.

Zach took in a sharp breath of surprise and then relaxed his hand, letting her move it away and suck him in deeper.

“Soon,” he gasped, legs flexing against the hard table beneath them.

Kristen continued fluttering the full length of her tongue against his smooth warmth.

“Soon… S—”

Zach’s fingers found their way into Kristen’s hair as he spasmed under her, and the thick, salty wave hit the back of her throat.

Her mouth watered at the stimulation, any stimulation, of her deadened tastebuds, and she was suddenly ravenous, for salt, for skin, even for the faint bitter undernotes and the tang she recognized as her own fluids clinging to him.

When it was time to swallow and pull away to leave Zach’s overtaxed nerves in peace, she ran her tongue along the crease of his hip joint to try to prolong the experience, until he pushed her away with a ticklish laugh.

“Holy shit,” Kristen gasped.

“I’ll say,” Zach agreed.

“I can taste you!”

“Well, yeah— oh. Oh!” Zach realized. “Hell of a moment for it to kick back in. Thanks for not choking.”

Kristen kissed the center of his chest, with tongue. “Not even a concern.”

She sat up and started surveying the floor for what they would need to put back in place, in what order.

Zach grabbed for one of the study tablets and checked the screen. “We still have fifteen minutes before we’re due anywhere. Stay with me? Just for a few?”

Kristen was anxious to get everything back to a state of apparent innocence, to know that they had really gotten away with this. But she wanted to stay more.

She lay back on the table next to Zach, stroking the wet spot on his chest that she had just kissed. In spite of the danger pricking at her mind, her body felt more relaxed than she’d remembered was possible.

“Would you believe that was the first dick I’ve ever had?” she asked.

“You’re fucking with me,” said Zach.

Kristen shook her head. “Well, the first one made of flesh and blood that my pussy has ever had,” she qualified.

Zach propped his head up slightly on his clasped hands, looking rather pleased with himself. “Was it everything you hoped it would be?”

Kristen rolled onto her side, resting her cheek thoughtfully on the back of her hand. “Hmm. now, to be fair, I was more than six weeks denied. A couch cushion with a hairbrush handle tied to it would have felt like the best I’d ever had.”

Zach’s jaw dropped with an appalled sound. He shifted to face her and reached across to give her a single, affectionate spank.

“It had to be noted!” Kristen giggled.

“So, you’re saying it was the best you’ve ever had?”

“Shut up,” she spanked him lightly in return.

“So, you’re saying it was worse than a couch cushion with a hairbrush tied to it?” He was laughing again now. “Come on. Your first live dick. Honest review.”

“Honestly, I only told you that because I thought you’d enjoy knowing,” said Kristen. “Boys and their obsession with ‘firsts’ and all that.”

“Hey! I don’t have a… eh.” Zach gave up mid-sentence, gently stroking her recovering pussy. “Okay, yeah, fine. It’s pretty hot knowing. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” said Kristen. “To me… I didn’t really have ‘hopes’ about that specifically. It wasn’t even on my bucket list.”

“And now?”

“It… wasn’t as different as I assumed it would be,” she answered.

“From being with girls, you mean?”

Kristen nodded. “I mean, it was different from anything I’ve done before because you’re a different person, and that always is. And this,” she waved her hand around the training room, the chastity devices on the floor, the whole situation, “this is all so different. But it still felt real. Close. Alive.”

She spent a while searching for more adjectives, then shook her head.

“In short, fuck comparisons. That was incredible.”

Zach grinned so widely that Kristen had to ask, “What?”

“I told you,” he snorted.

That cued another playful spank for him.

“What about you?” Kristen asked him afterward. “Was it,” she winced at how she was about to put this, “was it as special for you? Knowing that you could just sneak off and take care of yourself any time you wanted if it didn’t work out?”

“Are you kidding?” said Zach. “Nothing I could do alone in a bathroom stall with a sock stuffed in my mouth would ever make something like this less…. Nothing could even prepare me for….” he sighed, looking similarly dissatisfied with the words his thoughts had chosen to shape themselves into. “There’s, uh, there’s no substitute for the feeling of trusting someone else.”

Kristen rested her head against his chest. They were certainly going to have to hold onto that feeling now. With the urgent rush of hormones fading, she was relieved to find that Zach still felt like someone she could share a secret this big with.

“Was that too sappy?” Zach asked after a moment’s silence. “I can talk about that mouth of yours instead, if you want.” He ran a finger along her lower lip. “Only getting a few seconds of it around me, I’d call that a tease if I didn’t know what real teasing feels like.”

“Oh, you can tuck that away in your ‘firsts’ drawer too,” Kristen realized, between kisses to the side of his hand. “First dick I’ve ever been able to taste.”

She expected this to draw another grin of self-consciously silly pride, but it seemed to bring on a wave of seriousness instead.

“You’re going to report that your taste came back, aren’t you?” Zach asked.

“I mean, I’ll make up a story about how we were eating sugar-free granola bars or something when it happened,” said Kristen. “But yeah, I have to report the timing on how long the injection lasted.”

“And then get another one?” Zach asked.

“I guess so.”

“It’s still a volunteer program, right?”

“Worth twenty points a week,” Kristen noted. “The more I volunteer now, the more stimulation I’ll be able to afford when my three months are up.”

“And the faster the Bureau can finish their tests and make the injections standard practice,” said Zach.

Kristen’s heart thumped at this thought. She’d never really contemplated how the Bureau’s ongoing research might change the status quo of people’s lives, let alone whether her participation would make any difference one way or another.

“Or,” said Zach, “you could enjoy a cheeseburger with me tonight, say no to your next trial injection, and make it harder for them to take the joy of cheeseburgers away from you, me, and everyone else forever. You wouldn’t even have to break any rules.”

Kristen searched the ceiling for answers.

The Bureau of Pleasure Control was what held society together. Sure, Kristen was scared of and frustrated with them sometimes. Or, more like all the time. There were certainly things she’d do differently if she were in charge, and she did enjoy challenging the boundaries, as long as there was someone authoritative around who would be sure to keep things from going too far.

But actually working against them felt either pointless or grievously dangerous. And if it was dangerous, not only to herself. Officer Deacon had told her stories about other methods of controlling humanity, and the horrors that had come from them. Kristen wouldn’t want to be the person who plunged the world back into disease and starvation, even if she believed she had that power.

She had spent the last month and half practicing to wield the Bureau method as judiciously as possible. At some point, she had begun to think of it as more than a good career that could ensure her a modest regular allowance of pleasure for herself. Balancing honest service to the Bureau with identifying and advocating for her subjects’ needs was starting to feel like a contribution. Maybe even a calling.

Not something that could be wrong.

But then, there were probably millions of people tasting and enjoying cheeseburgers right now, without the world falling apart. How much harm could it cause for her to join them, and try to make it last?

Zach sighed, stood up, and reached for his cage. “Think about it, okay?”

***

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