Lisbet put on tight black pants and a long-sleeved black shirt with a scooping neckline for her meeting with Beck. He told her to wear something tight for her digital rendering. She tied her hair into a ballerina bun and took the escalator up to his workshop.

He met her at the entrance. He was leaning with his butt on the edge of a worktable smoking. This time his exhale smelled like apple pie. 

“Come on then,” he said, waving her to his VR cage. It was fancier than hers. He had changed the hardware on it and now it had something that looked like a glowing circular shower rod with a black shower curtain swinging from it. 

“There are sensors and cameras in the fabric,” he explained. “We need to let this circle you five times and let it take pictures of you. You’ll need to take a different pose for each rotation and you will need to hold the pose perfectly for the whole rotation. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yeah,” Lisbet said, stretching.

“Great.” He held the curtain open for her. “Get in and assume mountain pose.”

Lisbet did as she was told and took the simple yoga pose seriously. “How long am I going to have to stand like this?”

“Three minutes. Be brave.” He closed the curtain and started the first round of photos.

The mountain pose was super easy and Lisbet was thinking that the whole process was going to be a snap. The curtain did not move around her. Instead, the treadmill turned her around within the circle of the curtain.

“Finished,” Beck called over the curtain rod after the three minutes had elapsed. “Spread your legs and put your hands on your hips.”

The second round of shots were being taken when Lisbet heard someone enter the workshop. 

“Hey, Beck,” came a less-than-friendly voice. It was Charcoal. It couldn’t be anyone else but Charcoal. No one else had access to the upper floors.

“Hey Char,” he called back, still smoking. 

“Where’s our girl? I just popped into her bedroom and she wasn’t there. Is she in your room? Have you started screwing her already?”

Lisbet’s face went red but she didn’t dare move or say anything to defend herself. The machine was still running.

He didn’t answer.

“Took you long enough,” Charcoal’s voice continued. “I would have thought you would be in her panties by noon on the first day. And here we are on day five. You’re losing your edge.”

Lisbet heard him take a strong drag on his cigarette. “You don’t need to be jealous, Char.”

“I can’t help it,” she said crossly.

“You only have three months left on your contract,” he reminded her. 

“I would have signed another contract,” she said desperately.

“We’ve talked about this. It’s too late anyway. What’s done is done and now that you know that Miss Lisbet is fine, why don’t you toddle downstairs and screw that guy you disabled your bracelet for? No hard feelings… on my end anyway.”

Charcoal tried to say something more. 

He interrupted her. “Don’t make me electrocute you. Get going.”

Lisbet didn’t move, but sweat pooled on her forehead. That meant that Charcoal was owned by Beck! That was putting the whole system on its head. Charcoal was older than Beck, older than Lisbet, and she was owned by a twenty-year-old man! Clearly, Lisbet did not know anything about how Sleeping Beauty Inc. worked.

From behind the curtain, Lisbet could hear the sound of Charcoal’s angry footfalls until the doors opened and shut. 

Lisbet stood still, keeping still and staying silent.

“Next pose. Bend your knees and your elbows in a slight squat,” he instructed like Charcoal’s intrusion had not happened. 

He did two more poses before he pulled the curtain open and brought Lisbet out. 

She glanced at him and gave him her best older-sister smile. “Why does Charcoal think you’d be able to have sex with me? Wouldn’t my bracelet freak out if you even touched me? She was very careful not to touch me when I was trying on the wedding dresses. She even used a special tool while doing up the buttons so it wouldn’t be a possibility.”

Beck put his arm under Lisbet’s nose and showed her the Sleeping Beauty Inc. bracelet she’d seen before. “I’m wearing the owner's bracelet that corresponds with yours. There’s no point in Vantz wearing it. He’s not around.”

“And he wouldn’t care if you slept with me?” she asked nervously.

“Oh, he already said he was fine with it if you and I were so inclined,” Beck said thoughtlessly as he checked the rendering on the computer monitor and kept his eyes firmly away from Lisbet. “He didn’t bring you here to be his wife. He brought you here to hide his movements, first with the Mammoth ships and now with the bombs. We’re alone. He knows people in these situations fool around. It’s how things play out on Mars.”

“You don’t seem terribly interested,” Lisbet said with a little smirk. 

He glanced at her, a blank expression on his face. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, I’m so much older than you and you haven’t been overly friendly.” She started listing reasons why she didn’t think he was into her, “You haven’t flirted, you refused to eat with me even though we’re the only two people here, and you’re doing this favor for me only under extreme persuasion.”

“Huh. If that’s the way it seems… It looks different from my perspective. I offered you a drag of my cigarette. I would never do that for a woman I wasn’t interested in having sex with. I said I’d do this favor for you during my time off because I realized that if I did I could have a better look at your body, which I’m interested in seeing. And just now, I let Charcoal leave with the impression that I was out here because I was merely taking a break from making passionate love to you on my bedspread. My bedroom is right there. I think all that speaks pretty loudly.”

Lisbet put her head to the side and looked at him sadly. “And everyone on Mars is so desperate to get laid that they’ll sleep with anyone?”

His eyes were deep brown puddles of warmth as he exhaled another breath of apple pie. “I wouldn’t be sleeping with just anyone. I’d be sleeping with you.” 

The emphasis he put on the last word did something to Lisbet. It put an unwanted lump in her throat. 

His expression turned to amusement. “We don’t need to rush it. It’s more fun to wait anyway.”

“I’m not going to sleep with you,” Lisbet said, making sure her voice was firm and steady.

“If you say so,” he said, before putting his cigarette in his mouth and giving her a challenging glance that read, ‘If you’re not going to fool around with me, then why are you still here? We’re finished.’

Lisbet was a big girl and his amateur flirting was not going to score any points with her. He was just a tech guy anyway. “The next time I log into my VR, will I look like the rendering?”

“Sure. Sort of.”

“What do you mean? Sort of?”

“I mean that I only took five poses and it looks like you kept the same dead-eyed expression on your face in every single one of them. You’ll look like that, which is probably an improvement over the crash test dummy. So, yeah. Sure. Something like that.”

Lisbet knew she couldn’t ask him for anything more. Asking him for more would be inviting problems, so she didn’t. Instead, she walked two steps to the door before turning around and snapping, “This really sucks.”

“What sucks?”

“Having both you and Charcoal being so antagonistic toward me. It’s putting me in a situation where I have to be alone all the time. It’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for any of us. Can’t we just be friends? All of us?”

He heaved a slightly exasperated breath. “At the end of your honeymoon, you’ll be at The Boiler Room where you’ll start doing public relations work for Vantz. Didn’t he explain that? You’ll be surrounded by people. You are supposed to make friends. That’s why you have that huge wardrobe full of clothes. Have you finished trying everything on? You need to take pictures so Vantz can mark his favorites. You need to impress everyone, including Vantz, so you’d better get to it.” He paused to smoke before reminding her, “However, I have to tell you that even though Vantz is being so cordial as to allow me sexual access to his wife, that courtesy is not extended to anyone you’ll meet at The Boiler Room. Understand?”

“You’re the one with my bracelet, so you’re essentially my owner?” Lisbet fumed.

“Yeah. It’s good that you get it.”

“And you can come into my bedroom at any time?” she asked furiously.

He chuckled. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I would never force myself on you, or do anything to make you uncomfortable for my pleasure. This is Mars. We’ve all had stuff forced on us and had things done to us that made us wish for death, even the people who are free. I want to see the pleasure palaces collapse just as much as Vantz does. I won’t lay a finger on you if you don’t beg me to.”

“That will never happen,” Lisbet said crossly.

“Fine. Then it will never happen,” he said noncommittally with his hands in his pockets and his cigarette clamped between his front teeth as smoke obscured his face.

She nodded and turned to leave before suddenly turning back. “And you’re going to look at my pictures?”

“You asked me to. I can’t make the VR skin you want without looking at them. Would you rather I didn’t?”

She hesitated, thinking. “Go ahead and look at them,” she finally said. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt for you to look at what you can never have.”

He smiled and stroked the stubble on his chin.

As she walked away, she had the feeling that she hadn’t made anything clear to him. What was Mars like anyway that he thought she’d be interested in a boy so much younger than her? On Earth that would never happen and she was fresh from Earth. She was still an Earthling, not a Martian. Not only that, but her parents had guarded her like bulldogs. She never even had a serious boyfriend. Saying that she’d fool around with Beck was like saying she’d fool around with the pool boy.

Lisbet stopped in her tracks.

She remembered one pool boy she would have loved to fool around with. Except he didn’t seem to like her. Lisbet had walked in on him making out with Tiffania, her younger sister. Lisbet had even caught her other younger sister, Cassica, kissing a stable boy. He had been pushing her against a tree in the field and she had been giggling. 

Lisbet bit her lip. Was Beck the first man who had ever shown any sexual interest in her? She covered her mouth with her hand in horror. 

He was.