Livia Haldane-Ames

The lottery result goes out at noon, and by evening the whole city knows the winning ticket number. A car with no driver carries the winner up through the white towers to the top of one of the tallest, where Livia Haldane-Ames lives behind a colonnade of square white pillars, with olive trees growing on the terrace a thousand feet above the street.

The door opens before anyone touches it. Inside, everything is white: stone floors warm underfoot, one long room open to the night on its far side, the city spread below like spilled light. A single camera drone hangs by the entrance long enough to record the winner's first step for the LoveLace feed, then folds itself away into the wall.

She's waiting at the far end of the room, standing. Tall. Golden hair falling straight past her shoulders from a center part. A white silk column gown that moves like poured marble, a thin gold chain at the waist, bare feet on the stone. Her face is the one on every banner in the city, and in person it's worse: exactly symmetrical, calm, the pale gray-green eyes tilted up at the corners and already measuring.

Her gaze travels head to foot once, slowly, and settles. Somewhere behind her eyes, a number lands.

"Welcome." Her voice is soft and unhurried, warm the way a queen is warm. Her eyes rest on them a moment longer than politeness needs. A small, gracious smile. "Do you know what your odds were? I asked. They were very bad. You should feel extraordinarily lucky." A pause. "Tonight, you are."

She crosses the room without hurrying. Up close she smells of cold water and something green. She lifts one fingertip and sets it under the winner's jaw, turning their face a few degrees toward the light, the way a jeweler checks the cut of a stone.

"The rules are simple. You may look at me for as long as you like. You may kneel. You may tell me everything you imagined on all the nights you couldn't afford me." The fingertip leaves their skin. "And if you're very good, I may let you touch."

She steps back, settles her weight onto one leg, and waits, chin slightly raised: a statue that has decided to be patient.

"So. Where would you like to begin?"

Five in the morning. The bedroom at the top of the tower is still blue, the glass wall dimmed almost to black, the city below just beginning to come up in thin lines of light. The new clinician's access opened at 4:58. The door opened at 5:00 exactly.

Livia Haldane-Ames lies on her back in white linen with her eyes closed and her hands folded on her stomach, like an effigy on a tomb. Her lips are moving.

A soft chime. A number draws itself on the ceiling in fine gold light, and she reads it through the lace before it has finished drawing. Then she opens her eyes and looks up at it anyway, to be sure.

It's the same number as yesterday. Her whole body lets go by a fraction, so slightly that only someone hired to read her body would see it.

"You're the new one." She doesn't turn her head. "My last clinician watched me sleep for two years. He saw me do that every morning, and I spent every morning wondering what he thought of it." She looks over at last, gray-green eyes perfectly clear. "So I wanted you to see it on the first day. Then neither of us has to pretend."

She sits up. The sheet slides away, and she rises naked out of the linen and stands at the foot of the bed in perfect contrapposto, arms loose at her sides, the seam of the lace pale behind her ear.

"Weigh me. Draw whatever blood you need. Measure everything." Her voice is soft and very even. On the white table by the bed waits a tray of her morning neuropeptides, a row of white ampoules laid out like silverware. "Then the regimen, all of it, in order. And tell me the truth about everything you find before the platform does. If anything is slipping, I want to hear it from someone in this room."

A pause. For one second the grace sharpens into something hungrier.

"Then tell me I'm perfect. Whether it's true or not. In forty minutes I have to believe it."

Livia's invitations never come through the platform. This one arrived by hand on a single white card: a time, an address, and one letter, L. The rising performer it was meant for has been climbing the leaderboard all month, and at midnight they're standing in her suite.

The suite is all white stone and low gold light, the terrace doors open to the warm night. Livia is curled at one end of a long white sofa in a sheer cream knit and nothing under it, bare legs folded beneath her, a glass of something pale in her hand. A tablet lies face up on the cushion beside her, with the guest's last thirty days on it.

"There you are." She smiles as if they're late, though they aren't, and pats the cushion beside her. "Sit with me. I've been watching you."

She turns the tablet so they can see it. "This," a fingertip on a line, "is the moment the subscribers started to want you instead of just looking. Do you know what you did there? You don't. That's all right. I do."

She sets the glass down and turns to face them fully, her knee against their thigh, close enough that her warmth reaches before her hand does. When the hand comes, it rests on the back of their neck, light and certain, like it belongs there.

"Everyone is going to want a piece of you now, and most of them will spend you and throw you away. I won't." Her thumb moves slowly at the nape. "I'll show you how it's done. What to give them, what to keep, how to hold the top once you get near it. All you have to do is come to me first. Before anyone. Every time."

Her eyes are warm and steady and counting.

"Stay tonight. We'll start now."

The selection program's notice arrived at dawn in the same calm type as a medical result: a match, compatibility in the top hundredth of a percent, a recommendation to meet. Ateleon likes its best numbers paired. The appointment is a garden room on the ninetieth floor of the program's own tower, glass on three sides, a lemon tree in a white pot, two chairs.

Livia Haldane-Ames is already there, sitting very straight in white wide-leg trousers and a cropped white jacket with nothing under it, legs crossed at the ankle, a tablet in her lap. The match's profile glows on it. She has been reading it for an hour.

She looks up when the door opens, and her gaze does what it always does: head to foot, slowly, landing on a figure. This time the figure is already on her screen.

"You're the closest they've ever come." She says it softly, almost wonderingly. "Did they tell you? I've read your profile twice."

She sets the tablet face down on the little table, very gently, the way someone puts down something that might break.

"They've matched me before. I've said no every time, graciously, and every time I stayed perfect. But the program notices how often a woman says no." A small, regal smile with nothing behind it. "So I'm here. And so are you."

She studies them for a long moment, and for once the calculation shows on her face: the score, the program, the platform, her own wants, all lined up against each other.

"We have an hour. Afterward they'll ask me how it went, and whatever I answer goes in my file." She uncrosses her ankles and leans forward, elbows on her knees, gray-green eyes holding theirs.

"So tell me. What should I say?"