Chapter 2

"You're late."

Mr. Sterling spoke toward the doorway.

I turned around.

A woman was standing outside. She wore a dark grey business suit, her hair pinned up flawlessly. Around her neck was a thin silver chain with a tiny hourglass pendant.

When she walked in, her high heels made absolutely no sound against the tiled floor.

Not a whisper.

"Hazel, this is Director Vance," Mr. Sterling introduced. "Your probation mentor."

"Hazel, sweetie." Director Vance smiled at me. Her tone was as gentle as if she were coaxing a child. "Ten years. You've gotten so thin."

I didn't know her.

I had memorized our company’s organizational chart a thousand times during my ten years of isolation. There was no Director Vance.

"I’ve never seen you before."

"Of course you haven't." She pulled out a chair and sat down, extracting a thick folder from her bag with my name printed on the cover. "I'm in charge of observation. You didn't need to see me."

She flipped open the folder.

The first page was a photo.

It was me.

Cowering in the corner of a ruined grocery store, clutching a box of expired instant noodles, my face covered in tears.

A date was noted next to it: March 17, 2015.

"This was your 87th day alone," Director Vance said, her manicured nail tapping the photo. "You cried for four hours straight. My heart honestly ached for you."

She flipped to the next page.

Another photo. I was standing on the edge of the office building's rooftop, my hair whipped wild by the wind.

"August 2016. Your first time climbing to the roof. You stood there for a long time. The wind was so strong. But in the end, you came back down."

She looked at me with a warm, maternal expression.

"I gave you a B+ for Stress Tolerance. You were so close to an A. Too bad you didn't jump."

My stomach churned.

"What did you say?"

"If you jumped, it would have been an A," she closed the file, resting her hands on top of it. "You have to understand, making an autonomous choice under extreme stress is a highly coveted evaluation metric. You backed out."

"You were watching me on that roof, hoping I'd jump?"

"Not hoping. Observing," she corrected patiently. "I don't intervene. I don't guide. I am only responsible for recording and evaluating. Every meal you ate, every breakdown you had, every single night... I saw it all."

She looked down and flipped to another page.

"Winter 2017. You celebrated your birthday with stale chocolate from the grocery store. You sang half of 'Happy Birthday' to yourself and started crying. Spring 2018. You took in a stray cat and named him 'Colleague.' When he died, you made a little grave for him. 2020. You found a working generator in a mall, dragged it back to the office, and finally had electricity."

She flipped page after page.

Ten years of my life, compressed into a file. Every page had a grade.

"Your survival capabilities have remained stable between B and B+," she said, closing the folder. "But there is one area where you have consistently failed."

"What?"

"Execution."

Mr. Sterling took over.

"Director Vance means that while you've shown excellent resilience in a simulated isolation environment, you lack a critical skill—the decisiveness to inflict harm on others."

He pointed to the colleagues sitting frozen in their chairs.

"That's why we kept them until the very end."

I gripped the scissors tighter.

Not to use them. I just needed something solid to hold onto.

"You guys aren't human."

Director Vance tilted her head slightly.

"Hazel, that's not the point."

"Then what is?"

"The point is, Chloe’s score just dropped to a D."

She glanced at her wrist. It wasn't a watch, but a silver dial embedded directly into her skin.

"Twenty-three minutes left."

I followed her gaze.

Chloe was sitting in the second row. The receptionist girl. She had been barely twenty when everyone disappeared.

There were tears in her eyes.

They couldn't flow. They were trapped in her eyelids, frozen in place.

"Hazel," Mr. Sterling pushed the scissors a bit closer to me. "You can choose to terminate her yourself before the system does. This will count toward your performance review."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then she will disappear just like Tyler did. The only difference is, your score will remain a flat zero."

Director Vance offered me a warm, encouraging smile.

"Hazel, you have to start eventually. Otherwise, you won't be able to keep a single one of them."