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  Luckily the Throatgina’s end pouch zipped open. Her father squirted a liberal amount of industrial lubricant inside and attempted to pull downward, but that just yanked Hazel’s arm.

  “It’s not budging,” he said. When he slid the bottom up like a sleeve to reveal Hazel’s fingers, he coughed—Hazel looked down to see they had grown purple with asphyxiation. “Hell,” he said. “We’ll have to cut it off. Her throat, not your hand. You’re fully reimbursing my replacement purchase.”

  It made Hazel feel better to know they sold replacement Throatginas. She wasn’t the world’s first Throatgina wrecker.

  But instead of feeling relief when he cut the throat off, her arm started hurting worse—the extreme pressure had been anesthetizing it somehow. “Hold your shirt in the front,” he said. “Wow, is it soiled! I’ll cut it off so you don’t have to move your arm. Then you’ll need to dunk yourself in the tub a few times. When all the mess is off you, just wrap yourself in a towel and go wait on the couch. It won’t hurt to show a little skin in front of Tony. He’s a straight shooter. I like that kid. He’s married, but being his mistress would be an upgrade from your last husband in terms of the personality factor I think. If he hits on you in any way, reciprocate immediately. Full force. I’ll mention to him that you’re newly single and don’t have strong opinions. Maybe he’s looking for something fun on the side.” Her father then took a towel off the shelf and placed it over the top of Diane’s open head cavity to preserve her dignity.

  “Let me explain,” Hazel started. Per usual, the truth would not suffice. “I’d just put Diane into bed and was bent over her, pulling up the covers, when I thought I heard something fall down her throat.”

  Her father’s eyebrows rose with skepticism but Hazel soldiered on. “I figured maybe it was an earring . . . so I reached inside to check and it felt like my fingertips brushed up against something, but they pushed it down farther. So I reached in more . . .”

  Hazel bent forward to pantomime, forgetting he’d just cut her shirt open in the back. It fell to the floor, waterlogged, at which point she and her father were both surprised to see an avalanche of prescription pill bottles spill forward. She’d apparently shoved several of them into each cup of her brassiere before losing consciousness—once she felt the pills’ euphoria, she must’ve been struck with the urge to stockpile. Suddenly curious, Hazel tried to surreptitiously shift her weight from one butt cheek to the other, and lo and behold, she’d stashed some in her underwear too.

  Now probably wasn’t the time to float theories about her ex-husband having placed a microchip in her brain.

  “Clean yourself up nice for Tony,” her father said, his voice shaking a little. He put his arm around Diane; they were a unified team now, just like he’d been with her mother. Even though Diane was naked, with a towel over her head, there was something solemn about the mood she was radiating, something very look what you’ve done to your father-ish.

  TONY WORE NOVELTY SCRUBS PRINTED WITH A FLESH DESIGN OF A muscled bodybuilder in a Speedo. Hazel’s father wanted to know where he could purchase an identical pair.

  “My female clients love ’em,” Tony said and smiled.

  “She fell in the bathtub,” her father began to explain, offering up a handy excuse for both Hazel’s injury and her attire, but Tony was ready to get down to business. He cracked his knuckles, and then his neck.

  “This will only take a second. Just breathe in and I’m gonna count to three, then breathe out. One. Two.”

  On “two” Hazel felt a searing jolt of pain and noticed her eyes rolling skyward, then woke to a view of Tony’s nostrils, a tiny flashlight moving back and forth across her pupils.

  “There you are. Good as new. If you feel any complications, go right to the ER and tell them you popped it back in yourself. Technically you should get a follow-up X-ray. If you’re the sort to make a mountain out of a molehill.” With that, Tony turned to leave. Hazel’s father jumped onto his Rascal, sidesaddle, like a trick rider, and motored after him, but wheeled back a few moments later looking forlorn. “You’re not his type, he told me. I’m guessing by that he means you’re too old. Don’t worry, we’ll think of something. Listen, Hazel—”

  Her arm was sore but she could wiggle her fingers. She had to do the thing she’d sworn not to do, call Byron and forfeit a battle to win the war. The blackout in the bathtub was definitely a trick he’d pulled, though she wasn’t sure how he’d done it or even what had transpired. She needed to get to the bottom of it. “Hold that thought, Dad,” she said.

  How he’d pulled off getting her to hallucinate that way she wasn’t sure, but Hazel felt confident Byron just wanted her to think he’d put a chip into her brain. First she ran to the bathroom and did a full head and face exam for scars. She didn’t see any. Maybe he’d sent some nanobot into her father’s house that had deployed an aerosol hallucinogen. Maybe he’d lowered a powerful electromagnet down over her head through the bathroom light fixture. Who knows how he did it? His goal was likely for her to feel scared enough to go talk to him about it, enough to agree to get in a car and return to The Hub. He probably figured that once he got her back on his turf he could either woo or frighten her into staying. What she had to do was make Byron see that no matter how impressive the technological magic tricks he was pranking her with were, they were useless: Hazel wouldn’t be changing her mind.

  She went out to the safe and entered their anniversary date and tried not to be impressed by the way it opened, several pieces rising and clicking, moving into place like shifting puzzle parts against the quiet pops and hisses of microhydraulics.

  The phone inside the safe was already ringing. She answered.

  “It won’t work, Byron. Whatever bad-taste trick you just pulled didn’t leave me riddled with fear, and it certainly didn’t make me want to talk to you.”

  There was a click, a brief pause. Of course he hadn’t been waiting on the other end of the phone. Now that she’d picked up, he was being hailed.

  “Hazel,” he finally said. “So nice to hear from you. Thank you for answering my call.”

  10

  “HOW DID THE DOWNLOAD FIND YOU?” BYRON ASKED.

  Hazel scoffed. “Is that what you want me to think happened? That you downloaded information from my brain? I’ll admit, you made me wonder. I even checked for a scar. But there is no chip, is there? There’s just you wanting to make me believe something. Let’s part ways and call it a day.”

  “I never thought I’d see you in a bathtub with a sex doll. Admit it, Hazel: after all this time we can still surprise each other.”

  She felt a trapdoor of despair open wide at the bottom of her stomach, her insides slipping from their normal shelves and falling into one central pileup below her navel. No, Hazel tried to convince herself, Byron was lying. But lies could help her figure out the truth. The bathroom didn’t have windows, but he’d seen inside.

  “You put cameras in my father’s house?”

  “Your mind is the camera, Hazel.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I understand your skepticism. Ask me about anything you’ve seen, thought, touched, or smelled in the past twenty-four hours. Even your drunk memories. Actually, I might know more about them than you do. How much of last night do you remember?”

  Her having gotten drunk was an easy guess. What else was she going to do after leaving her husband? “You sound like a bad psychic,” she told him. “You want me to give you information you can read into and guess from. The more I tell you, the more you’ll incredibly seem to know. It’s not going to work.”

  “Hazel.” Then he sighed, and when he sighed Hazel really started to lose it, because he sighed when he got bored. He found it dull when people were resisting something he knew they would eventually accept. The interim, when he had to repeat himself over and over until the other person’s view finally did flip and change, was annoying tedium.

  “Hay-zel,” he said. This “affectionate” pronunciation of he
r name drove her nuts. As though it near-rhymed with “gazelle.” “After all our time together,” he continued. “After everything you know about me. You’re doubting me when I tell you I’ve done this?” When Hazel didn’t answer, he drew in a sharp breath. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s do it your way. A cold reading.”

  “Great,” she answered. Hazel thought about hanging up the phone but was curious, despite understanding that her life was absolutely over. Because if Byron didn’t have all the information he claimed, he wouldn’t dare push it. The way you avoid losing, Byron always said, is by removing any possibility of loss.

  There was a chip in her brain. Byron had downloaded everything she’d done and thought for the past twenty-four hours.

  “This will only be embarrassing for you, you know.” The tone of his voice lowered now, directed itself a little bit aside, as though he were trying to do her a favor. “You’re sure you want to rehash this?”

  Hazel swallowed. Her mouth kept growing watery. “Did anything bother you?” she asked. “Or did you find it all hysterical?”

  She sat down in the grass now, to keep things from getting too spinny. She probably needed to eat. The painkillers were wearing off. Hazel started pulling up one blade of grass after another, like the lawn was a type of rote punishment: if she ripped up every blade of grass in the backyard, she’d be allowed to wake up and this would all be a bad dream.

  “Hazel, come now. Of course the entire timeline of events troubled me. You’re my beloved wife. No, it’s not easy to see you trying to play teenager. I’m sure it’s not easy for your father, either. He clearly wants his space.”

  In the past, whenever Byron showed Hazel one of his new inventions and she tried to find a flaw in it, he always had a bulletproof answer for everything. He loved that game and he never wanted her to stop playing it with him. The trick to keeping her playing along, and she realized now that Byron had counted on this, was a delusional sense of hope on her behalf—she’d kept trying to beat him because she’d thought that one day maybe she could. It was gambling-addict thinking. This time will be different; it will make up for all the others.

  Now she herself was his newest invention, but Hazel was done playing. Trying to poke holes in his victory would only result in heartbreak for her.

  “Why be up-front about it?” she asked. “Why tell me what you did?”

  Hazel swore she could hear his smile through the phone. The scales of his lips sliding across one another.

  “I tell my wife everything.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were putting a chip in my brain.”

  “Okay. I tell my wife everything eventually.”

  “So I’ll just have it taken out.” There was a long silence—had she heard Byron just nearly laugh?

  “I don’t recommend that.”

  Now she was the one letting out the impatient sigh. “What, will it kill me if it’s taken out? What if I’d died having it put in, Byron?”

  “Hay-zel. Your life means everything to me. That’s why I still want to be there for every moment of it, even though you’d rather not spend it together. The implantation procedure is very safe. Like you said yourself, no scars. I won’t bore you, but it’s been there for a while. I hoped I wouldn’t ever have to turn it on, but then you left and I just missed you so much.”

  “What about the extraction procedure?”

  “You won’t be needing that. But I do have to warn you—if you showed up at a hospital spouting some nonsense about a brain implant, you’d appear insane. Like much of our best technology, this is truly ahead of its time. It won’t show up on any scan the doctors do.”

  “Will its performance be affected if I shoot myself in the head?”

  “Your performance will be affected. You don’t want to kill yourself, Hazel. It would make my stock rise. Sympathy buying. It’s a real phenomenon.”

  “So I’ll just go somewhere the download won’t work. Live in a mountaintop cave in Tibet.”

  “Ha. Your prototype doesn’t have an active GPS because those are detectable. Instead, each download gives us your exact coordinates. You’d have a twenty-four-hour lead, so I suppose we could have a fun chase if you wanted to, but you couldn’t outrun us every single day. You wouldn’t have the resources.”

  A wayward ant from the lawn found its way onto Hazel’s leg and began crawling across. She looked down and pondered squishing it, then realized this was the closest she’d ever come to understanding what it would feel like to trade places with Byron. She was an ant on his leg. Worse, he’d be delighted after tomorrow’s download when he found out she’d had that thought, and delighted by her horror of realizing he was going to know about it.

  Every time she went to the bathroom, Hazel realized, Byron would now see whatever she saw. Was she supposed to not look after wiping? No. Screw that. She’d look even longer.

  “And what if I come home?” Hazel was curious about the reward Byron would offer. But going home was out of the question. THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY, BYRON! Hazel thought very emphatically, since thinking something to Byron was now more or less the same as saying it to him twenty-four hours into the future.

  “Then we could proceed with the meld and I’d be the happiest man on earth. I’m probably already the happiest man on earth, of course, but with my wife at my side, I’ll be happier than the second-happiest guy by an even greater margin.”

  Hazel paused. “With the meld, would the downloads stop?”

  “It would be a real-time stream of information from your brain to mine. Not a once-a-day push. You wouldn’t feel it the way you do now when an entire day’s data gets sent.”

  “I wouldn’t get to see your thoughts though, I assume?” Nothing with Byron ever worked both ways.

  “Well, no. I deal with very sensitive information, after all. Here’s the thing, Hazel. You have important proprietary technology inside you. I cannot convey the time and financial resources that went into getting this operational. Operational inside you, in particular, calibrated to your physiology. We have years of data and research on you. It’s too great a risk for my company to have such an asset loose in the world, and too great a waste not to use it. I don’t know what might happen if you fail to cooperate. Imagine the competition finding out and abducting you.” Byron made a wincing noise. “We can’t risk that.”

  The line went quiet for a moment. “Byron?” Hazel asked.

  “I invested in you.” His voice lowered with anger. “Your noncompliance will set us back years. Not just in terms of research. Think of the public rollout, Hazel. You’re my documented wife of a decade. That’s an established social fact. People are going to be leery of melding technology. They trust love and romance, though. If we promote it as part of our marital narrative—us wanting to take our closeness and relationship to a whole new level—it will be intimate instead of invasive. I could divorce and go start a new relationship, but people wouldn’t trust it as much with someone I’d just married.”

  Hazel looked up and saw her father scoot past the window, return from the opposite direction a few moments later, then scoot past again. He was circling the couch, his scooter version of pacing. He was upset. “You know, I need to go clean up the bathroom. Let me think on all this. Will I always throw up during the downloads?”

  “I’m not sure. Let me ask. Fiffany?” Hazel blushed; she’d once again wrongly assumed Byron was alone. “Fiffany says statistical probability favors you building up a tolerance.”

  “How thoughtful of statistical probability, to shine so kindly upon me. Take care, Byron. Always a pleasure.”

  Hazel dropped the phone on the lawn and headed inside. She needed to smooth things over with her father.

  “DAD,” HAZEL BEGAN. HE WHIPPED THE SCOOTER AROUND AND PUT IT in PARK.

  He was readying to give a speech.

  “This doesn’t even have to do with what happened today. I’m still not clear about what that was. I don’t think I care to be. But I promise this is unrelated.”<
br />
  “Okay. What is it?” Hazel was trying to decide whether or not to tell him about the chip. What would be the point though? There was nothing he could do.

  “I need to rent out the back-porch room where you’re staying. I’m happy to rent it to you if you can cough up the cash. If you can’t, I’m not kicking you out. I want to be clear on that. You can sleep in the reclined La-Z-Boy, or the carport is completely empty now. Except the renter will probably have a car, so maybe the recliner is the better option.”

  “Rent?” Hazel asked. She knew giving payment in return for lodging wasn’t an unusual custom. She’d just been hoping to play the whole “daughter” card until she figured out how to disappear, if she could survive long enough to do so. But disappearing didn’t seem to be possible, now. “Do you need money, or is this more a thing of principle?”

  For the first time in her life, Hazel understood the importance of having principles and holding them sacred: Don’t marry someone evil for money; don’t place futuristic mind-sharing technology inside others without their consent, etc. Byron had cured her of her ethical apathy. Maybe telling her father that would make him proud. It seemed worth a try. “Dad, I admit that I lived the past thirtyish years of my life sans integrity. I mean I didn’t, like, kill anybody. Not that I feel I deserve a medal for that or anything. Actually I think it’s easier to get medals for killing people, right? Isn’t that crazy?”

  “I need money, Hazel. Charging your adult daughter a few hundred a month might take the sting of failure out of the arrangement for some people, but I’m not prone to sugarcoating. You took a shot at adulthood, you blew it, you’re regrouping for round two. Me imposing a residential tax on you doesn’t make you more successful or independent. I simply need cash.”

  This confession was frustrating. For years she’d been trying to lavish Byron’s money and luxury gifts on her father but he’d never accept a dime. Your husband’s geek currency is not welcome here, he’d insist. Quit trying to force the stink of affluence upon me.