There was an introductory offer for $5.95, which allowed access to the site for five days.

At the end of that period your credit card would not be charged further if you did not sign up for one of the monthly or yearly plans. This was a one-time offer per credit card.

Pierce pulled out his wallet and used his American Express card to sign up for the introductory offer. Within minutes he had a pass code and user name and he entered the site, coming to a subject tab page with a search window. He went to the window and typed in "Robin" and hit ENTER. His search returned no hits. He got the same result with a search for "Lilly" but then had success with "girl-girl" after remembering that it was how Lucy had described the modeling session with Lilly.

He was connected to a page of thumbnail photos, six rows of six. At the bottom of the page was a prompt that would allow him to go to the next page of thirty-six photos or to skip ahead to any one of forty-eight other pages of girl-girl photos.

Pierce scanned the thumbnails on the first page. They were all photos containing two or more women, no men. The models were engaged in various sex acts and bondage scenes, always a dominant female and her subservient subject. Though the photos were small, he did not want to take the time to click on each and enlarge it. He opened a desk drawer and took out a magnifying glass. He leaned close to the monitor screen and looked for Lucy and Lilly, able to work his way quickly across the grid of photos.

On the fourth screen of thirty-six he came across a series of more than a dozen photos of Lucy and Lilly. In each photo Lilly played the dominant and Lucy the submissive, even though Lucy towered over the diminutive Lilly. Pierce enlarged one of the thumbnails and the photo took over the whole computer screen.

The set had an obviously painted backdrop of a stone castle wall. A dungeon wall, Pierce guessed. There was straw on the floor and candles burning on a nearby table. Lucy was naked and chained to the wall with handcuffs that looked shiny and new rather than medieval. Lilly, dressed in the apparently requisite black leather of a dominatrix, stood in front of her holding a candle, her wrist cocked just enough for the hot wax to drip onto Lucy's breasts. On Lucy's face was a look that Pierce thought was meant to convey agony and ecstasy at the same time. Rapture. On Lilly's face was a look of stern approval and pride.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were gone."

Pierce turned to see Monica coming through the door. As his assistant she had the combination to his office door lock because Pierce was often in the lab and she might need access. She started to put a stack of mail down on his desk.

"You told me you were only going to be -"

She stopped when she saw the computer screen. Her mouth opened into a perfect circle.

He reached to the screen and killed the monitor. He felt lucky that his face was discolored and scarred. It helped hide his embarrassment.

"Monica, look, I -"

"Is that her? The woman you had me impersonate?"

He nodded.

"I'm just trying to…"

He didn't know how to explain what he was doing. He wasn't sure what he was doing.

He felt even more stupid holding the magnifying glass.

"Dr. Pierce, I like my job here but I'm not sure I want to work directly for you anymore."

"Monica, don't call me that. And don't start with the job stuff again."

"Can I please transfer back to the pool?"

Pierce reached up to the monitor for his sunglasses and put them on. A few days ago he wanted to get rid of her, now he couldn't bring himself to look at her disapproving eyes.

"Monica, you can do whatever you want to do," he said while staring at the blank computer screen. "But I think you have the wrong idea about me."

"Thank you. I'll talk to Charlie. And there's your mail."

And she left, pulling the door closed behind her.

Pierce continued to turn slowly back and forth in his chair, staring at the empty screen through dark glasses. Soon the burn of humiliation dissipated and he started to feel anger.

Anger at Monica for not understanding. At his predicament. And mostly at himself.

He reached over and pushed the button and the screen came alive. And there was the photo, Lucy and Lilly together. He studied the wax hardening on Lucy's skin, a frozen drip hanging off one pointed nipple. It had been a job for them, an appointment. They had never met before this captured moment.

He studied the look on each woman's face, the eye contact they shared, and he saw no hint of the act he knew it to be. It looked real in their faces and that was what stirred his own arousal. The castle and everything else was easily fake but not the faces. No, the faces told the viewer a different story. They told who was in control and who was manipulated, who was on top and who was on the bottom.

Pierce looked at the photo for a long time and then looked at every one of the photos in the series before shutting down the computer.

Pierce never made it home Wednesday night. Despite the confidence he had portrayed in his office with Charlie Condon, he still felt his days in the hospital had left him behind the curve in the lab. He was also put off by the idea of returning to his apartment, where he knew a bloody mess and cleanup awaited him. Instead, he spent the night in the basement at Amedeo Tech, reviewing the work conducted in his absence by Larraby and Grooms and running his own Proteus experiments. The success of the experiments temporarily energized him, as they always did. But fatigue finally overcame him in the pre-dawn hours and he went into the laser lab to sleep.

The laser lab, where the most delicate measurements were taken, had one-foot-thick concrete walls and was sheathed in copper on the outside and thick foam padding on the inside to eliminate the intrusion of outside vibrations and radio waves that could skew nanoreadings. It was known among the lab rats as the earthquake room because it was probably the safest spot in the building, maybe in all of Santa Monica. The bed-sized pieces of padding were attached to the walls with Velcro straps. It was a common occurrence for an overworked lab rat to go to the laser lab, pull down a pad and sleep on the floor, as long as the lab wasn't being used. In fact, the higher-ranking members of the lab team had specific pads labeled with their names, and over time the pads had taken on the contours of their users' bodies. When in place on the walls, the dented, misshapen pads gave the lab the appearance of having been the site of a tremendous brawl or wrestling match in which bodies had been hurled from wall to wall.

Pierce slept for two hours and woke up refreshed and ready for Maurice Goddard. The second-floor men's locker room had shower facilities and Pierce always kept spare clothes in his locker. They weren't necessarily laundry-fresh but they were fresher than the clothes he had spent the night in. He showered and dressed in blue jeans and a beige shirt with small drawings of sailfish on it. He knew Goddard and Condon and everyone else would be dressed to impress at the presentation but he didn't care. It was the scientist's option to avoid the trappings of the world outside the lab.

In the mirror he noticed that the stitch trails on his face were redder and more pronounced than the day before. He had rubbed his face repeatedly through the night, as the wounds burned and itched. Dr. Hansen had told him this would happen, that the wounds would itch as the skin mended. Hansen had given him a tube of cream to rub on the wounds to help prevent the irritation. But Pierce had left it behind at the apartment.

He leaned closer to the mirror and checked his eyes. The blood had almost completely cleared from the cornea of his left eye. The purple hemorrhage markings beneath each eye were giving way to yellow. He combed his hair back with his fingers and smiled. He decided the zippers gave his face unique character. He then grew embarrassed by his vanity and decided he was happy no one else had been in the locker room to see his fixation at the mirror.