IN THE MORNING, HAZEL RETURNED TO THE DINER AND PUT ON HER apron. It was right where she’d left it the night before.
“Hey, you!” Ms. Cheese called out from the office. “I know it’s you. The quiet way you shut the door and then walk all silent. Like you’re a wildlife photographer or something. I assume you’re back on a volunteer basis? Will work for patty melts? Ha. Haha. Just fooling. They’re doing an AM fryer clean-out. To celebrate your continued employment you can go help scrub the heating coils.”
Hearing the news yesterday had been like snorting a drug, some kind of upper that coated euphoria with a firm layer of panic. Mid-afternoon, the line cook Benny noticed Hazel’s hands and arms trembling at regular intervals despite the heat of the kitchen. “You know how being tickled too long starts to hurt?” she asked him. “I have felt like that for hours now but without the tickling.”
Benny nodded. “Did you know it’s impossible to tickle yourself? That’s because your brain knows what’s up.”
“Have you ever taken too much cold medicine—”
“Y-e-s,” he said.
“—and had that scalp thing where it feels like needles are connecting your hair to your head?”
Just then, Ms. Cheese entered the kitchen. “Hazel, some guy came in asking for you in the middle of lunchtime rush. ‘Does this look like an office building?’ I said to him. ‘Do you have a noon appointment with Hazel? Did you get an e-mail reminder? I don’t think so!’ Then he grabbed a pen and wrote out a note on a napkin. Winked at me and then started to leave without ordering a thing. I called out after him. ‘There’s no return address on this correspondence, sir,’ I said. ‘You expect me to deliver this without a stamp?’”
Hazel’s whole body began trembling now, so hard that she worried she wouldn’t be able to swallow. She tried speaking, but couldn’t. It felt like her mouth was filling up with water. So everything on the news had been an elaborate trick. Elaborate for anyone but Byron. Of course he’d want to fill her with hope just before he came to get her.
“Why are you shaking?” Ms. Cheese turned to the line cook. “Did you give her something?”
He shook his head no and shrugged. Ms. Cheese theatrically lay the napkin down on a cutting board and pinned it down with the tip of a large knife.
“I’m just trying to run a business here,” she said. “As you can see, good help is hard to find. Take a moment. Get yourself together. And next time you see this joker, tell him not to drop by during your shift,” she said.
Hazel sat down on the floor. That would actually be a great thing to say to Byron just before he killed her or took her away or whatever his plans were: I’m not allowed to have visitors at work.
“What does the note say?” she asked Benny.
“It says, ‘Now you’re free.’” He paused. “Did you just get dumped?”
Hazel stood and reached for the knife. Benny began to move away from her. “Don’t act in anger,” he said.
She lifted the blade and picked up the note. It wasn’t from Byron.
JASPER WAS OUTSIDE WAITING WHEN SHE GOT OFF HER SHIFT. “HUZZAH!” he yelled. He climbed up on the hood of his car, raised his hands in the air and started yelling again, yipping sounds of victory.
Hazel looked back toward the diner. Ms. Cheese was peeking out through the blinds. Hazel watched a curl of cigarette smoke drift up past the set of scowling eyes.
“Let’s go somewhere else to celebrate,” she said. “My place? We can watch the news?”
For hours in Hazel’s motel room, they pounded beers and took in the media’s coverage. There was the leaked video of Byron’s death, from The Hub’s bedroom security cameras (the ones Byron swore shut off at night when Hazel had first moved in—of course they didn’t). It featured Byron and Fiffany in bed side by side, both sleep-helmeted, when Byron sat upright moaning, intermittently gripping at his helmet and his chest. Fiffany removed her helmet and shook out her hair, then tried to figure out what the problem was. Byron couldn’t get his helmet off. Something was wrong—it was hurting him.
“This could not have been a malfunction like they’re claiming,” Hazel said. The story being told was that the helmet wouldn’t come off. Due to a software glitch or another technical failure, perhaps it had even been messing with his brain waves. He’d apparently panicked to the point of giving himself a heart attack. “There’s no way,” Hazel said. “Safeguard after safeguard prevents it. Whatever happened was intentional. Fiffany killed him. He must’ve realized that right before he died. That she’d outsmarted him.”
“Ah. How sweet is that,” Jasper said.
It was nice, Hazel had to admit, that the world at large thought Byron’s death was due to an error of technology he’d created. But the worst part of Hazel wished this had been the case. “It sucks that he knows he didn’t fail, though. At least not in his technology.”
“But he’s dead. He didn’t exactly win.”
“You’re right,” Hazel agreed. “I guess part of me still doesn’t believe it. But there’s a lot to appreciate here.” It was great to watch Byron’s escalation of panic in the video: his black-and-white image attempting to break the helmet off by hitting his head against the wall, first standing and then on all fours, knocking his head against the ground until he no longer could. If he was trying to speak actual words, they didn’t come through on the recording. Not with the helmet’s muffling and Fiffany’s supposedly frantic screams. She was a good actress.
Hazel decided to pretend the context of the video was Byron realizing the error of his ways and beating his head into the ground accordingly.
“Do you think it was really someone at the police station who leaked the footage?” Jasper asked. The way he was shoveling peanuts into his mouth made Hazel feel like they were at a movie theater.
Maybe this was true, but the threat of a lawsuit from Gogol would be too scary for most workers to risk it. “I feel like maybe Fiffany had a hand in that too,” Hazel said. If so, the act almost seemed like an apology meant just for her.
Jasper raised his bottle in the air. “Hail to the new CEO.”
Fiffany was “requesting privacy during this difficult time,” but all channels were confirming that she was going to be named as the new CEO of Gogol.
Hazel had had Fiffany all wrong. Fiffany’s ultimate pursuit had been the company, not Byron. And in killing him, she’d probably saved the world a little. One of her new VPs was already discussing what speculative changes the company might undergo with her leadership, and none of the projected initiatives included brain melds. She’d likely be bowing out of several of Gogol’s weapons contracts and wanted to increase the company’s humanitarian initiatives. “She’s quite interested in expanding development for art and education technologies,” the television said.
“Hail to the new CEO,” Hazel agreed.