Vox Mentis

get ready to grab the wheel as eliot slumps over on the accelerator, dead

>Ask if he got the guy's rifle and where he put it.

Poor Eliot!

Tell him that this is the time to tell you anything you need to know. Literally anything at all.
Also, take over the wheel and tell him to clot that wound with his shirt. Even if he's definitely gonna die, you gotta do something.

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SpoilerNew reader! I gotta say this story is awesome so far. Can't wait to see how everything will play out.

come on, this guy wouldn't give us any exposition if his life literally depended on it, and it has multiple times. it's like pulling teeth to get him to unravel the mystery a bit, and i don't see why that would change now. i say forget about figuring out what's going on and just focus on being better at murder than the people trying to kill you

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Spoiler

New reader! I gotta say this story is awesome so far. Can't wait to see how everything will play out.

Glad to have you along for the ride!

Ask if he's dying but try to be chill about it

You try to keep your voice calm and level. “Are you dying?” Eliot doesn’t reply. “Eliot! Did you get shot?”

“Yes.”

“You're dying?”

“I got shot. I'm not dead. Yet.”

get ready to grab the wheel as eliot slumps over on the accelerator, dead

Tell him that this is the time to tell you anything you need to know. Literally anything at all.
Also, take over the wheel and tell him to clot that wound with his shirt. Even if he's definitely gonna die, you gotta do something.

come on, this guy wouldn't give us any exposition if his life literally depended on it, and it has multiple times. it's like pulling teeth to get him to unravel the mystery a bit, and i don't see why that would change now. i say forget about figuring out what's going on and just focus on being better at murder than the people trying to kill you

“We have to... you need to... give me...”

“If you say something stupid, I’m going to pop you in your fucking mouth.”

“Eliot,” you say. “Eliot.”

“I told you to shoot that guy.”

“I’m sorry. I tried. I’m sorry.” Outside Eliot’s window, the dust plume resolves into a police squad car. “What can I do?”

“You hesitated. Next time you have to choose between Farmer Joe and the fate of the world, you can put a bullet into Farmer Joe. That’s what you can do.”

“Okay.”

“You can kill Woolf. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “Sure you can.”

The cop car rises in the side window. A sign ahead says BARRIER HIGHWAY and STOP and clearly you're going to hit that cop car, you observe. “Slow down,” you say, but Eliot doesn’t. Instead he drops the hand brake and spins the wheel and the Valiant begins to slide sideways. It crosses the highway, passing in front of the cop car, chews dirt for a while, and lurches onto the blacktop. Behind you, a siren begins to wail.

“Find out if that cop is a prose,” Eliot said.

“A what?”

“A proselyte. Compromised. Find out if he wants to arrest us or kill us.”

“How do I do that?”

>Ask if he got the guy's rifle and where he put it.

Poor Eliot!

Eliot pushes the shotgun into you. “How do you think? With the gun!”

>His plan has a glaring hole to it, namingly waving a gun at a cop. You'll end up shot!
>Try to draw attention to the medical emergency you have going on, if he doesn't respond properly to that then he might be compromised.

>His plan has a glaring hole to it, namingly waving a gun at a cop. You'll end up shot!
>Try to draw attention to the medical emergency you have going on, if he doesn't respond properly to that then he might be compromised.

The cop car is almost right outside your window, nudging and whining like an animal in heat. You question the wisdom of shooting at cops, compromised or otherwise.

Ahead, you see BROKEN HILL 8 and NO ENTRY and QUARANTINE ZONE and DANGER DEATH. Beyond that, on the horizon, twin sets of twinkling lights like early stars. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Badly.” Eliot’s eyes flick to the rear mirror. “Fucking shit Nick you fuck!”

You jerk around. The squad car has slipped lanes and is making a run up the driver’s side. You tumble into the rear of the car. By the time you get upright, the cop car is alongside you. There's a soft thump of contact. The rear of the Valiant begins to slide as if it's on ice. The world spins. You lose your grip on the shotgun. The Valiant performs one complete revolution and Eliot guns the engine and it leaps forward again.

You retrieve the shotgun. The cop car is moving up for a repeat performance, a second round of spin-the-Valiant.

use the gun, blow out the tyres on the cop car

>Shoot the cop car's tires, that should do the trick.

Then it'll just go right into you. You need to shoot the engine

use the gun, blow out the tyres on the cop car

>Shoot the cop car's tires, that should do the trick.

There's no time to lower the window, so you plant your feet on the side door, aim the shotgun down your legs in the general direction of the cop's tires, and squeeze the trigger. The window blows out. The cop car jerks as if stung, its engine jumping half a dozen octaves, and falls out of view. You lean out the shattered window into the blast furnace of air. There's two cops in the squad car, their faces pinched with anxiety. It veers off the road, tires smoking. You crawl back inside. “They don't want to get shot.”

“Not compromised,” says Eliot. “Good.”

When you reach your own seat, the lights ahead have resolved into two shining squad cars, one in each lane, barreling toward you. “They’re not... kamikaze, are they?” Eliot doesn’t answer. You grope for your seat belt but can’t find it. Surely Eliot is about to swerve off the road. The cars balloon in the windshield, low-slung and powerful. “Eliot! Eliot!”

One squad car drops behind the other. They fly past Eliot’s window, their sirens dopplering. You breathe.

“Load that gun,” Eliot says.

You dig around the footwell for shells, break open the shotgun.

“They’re coming around. Keep them back.”

“I know.”

“Don’t talk about it. Do it.”

“I’m doing it! I just shot a cop car, did you notice?”

“Next time, shoot the driver.”

“Fuck!” you say. “What’s the difference?”

“You shoot the driver, no cop comes within five hundred feet of us, that’s the fucking difference! You shoot the car-”

“Okay! Okay!” You get your elbow out the passenger window and lever yourself up. The wind tears at you. Way back, a column of white smoke rises from the car you shot, stark against the blue sky. Closer, the two new squad cars are eating up the distance between you. You steady the shotgun. You'd hunted, once. You'd cleared land like this of rabbits and roos. When was that? You can't remember. But this feeling, the shotgun nestled in your shoulder, an endless landscape of pressed dirt spread before you, is familiar. You wait. The cops will surely see you and stay back. You don't want to shoot anyone.

The Valiant coughs. The car shivers, lurches. You clutch at the window frame to avoid falling out of it, almost dropping the gun. “Hey!” you shout. “What the fuck?”

“Gas! Becoming an issue!”

“Why are you shaking the car?”

“To extract gas from the tank!”

“I nearly fell out!”

Eliot says something you can't hear over the roar of the wind.

You lean inside. “What?”

“I said it’s important to keep moving!”

“I know that! Just give me five seconds of driving in a straight line!” You push yourself out the window. The squad cars are closer than you'd like. At this range, you can pierce the windshield. They can see that, right? They can see you have a shotgun. You wait for them to back off.

“Shoot!” Eliot yells.

Then it'll just go right into you. You need to shoot the engine

You aim at the car on the left and squeeze the trigger. Shot spatters across its hood. Its windshield cracks. Both cars’ noses dipped to the blacktop. Smoke bursts from their tires. You watch until there's a good couple hundred yards of road between you. Then you wriggle back inside. “They’re backed off.”

“Good.”

Eliot doesn’t ask why you fired at the hood. Maybe he doesn’t realize. He probably assumes you're a terrible shot. He doesn’t know that you've hunted. Well, that you remember hunting.

>Try to draw attention to the medical emergency you have going on, if he doesn't respond properly to that then he might be compromised.

“We seriously need to get you to a hospital.”

“And how does that work,” says Eliot. “How exactly do we get me to a hospital, in this situation.”

“I don’t know. But you can’t fucking die, okay? It’s not good for anyone if you die.”

“Hold on,” says Eliot. You see a turnoff rushing toward you, a dusty blacktop guarded by red and black and yellow signs promising NO ENTRY, ROAD CLOSED, QUARANTINE AREA. As you lean around the corner, the car coughs explosively. You feel a softness enter your momentum. The engine gargles. The Valiant lurches back onto the straight and mutters angrily.

“That’s not good.”

“No.”

You glance behind. The squad cars have slipped into a single file. They follow at a distance, taking the turnoff with ease. “They’re going to just sit back there until we run out of gas.”

“They’re not.”

“Let me float something,” you say. “We stop, they arrest us, we get you some medical attention.” Eliot doesn’t say anything. “Then you talk us out. With the word voodoo.” You lean forward, searching the sky for choppers. “Don’t you think the priority here is you being okay?”

“The bareword is the priority.”

“Right. The bareword.” You peer ahead. “There’s something on the road.” A chain-link fence stretches away from either side of the road, but whatever lies between is lost in the heat haze. “Is that a gate?”

“Just loose wire.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Are you really sure?” you say, but by the time you get the words out, the answer is clear. It's a solid red and yellow barrier. The Valiant plows through it and a yellow block flies at your face and ricochets off the windshield with a light boonk.

You look out the rear window. Colorful blocks roll slowly across the road.
“Plastic,” says Eliot.

“You said it was wire.”

“Last time I was here, it was.”

The police cars are shrinking. “Hey. They’ve stopped.”

“That’s because they believe what they’ve been told about Broken Hill. They don’t want to die.”

“So no one will follow us in here? We’re safe?”

“Regular people won’t. Proses will.”

“Oh, yeah,” you say, dismayed. “Proses.”

“Also EQPs,” says Eliot. “You haven’t seen those yet. When they show up, we’ll need the word.” He glances in the rearview mirror. “I’m going to pull over and let you drive for a while.”

The car coasts to a halt. You run around the vehicle, hunkering down in case of cops with sniper rifles, or helicopters, or whatever. You don't know. It could be anything. The engine stutters and you think, Please don’t die, you dick. You pull open the driver’s side door. Eliot is sitting in the passenger seat like he’s been dropped there. One hand rests on his abdomen. His face is made of paper. The driver’s seat is wet with blood. “Holy crap,” you say.

“Get in.”

Your butt presses into the wet seat. The smell is rich and loamy, like a vegetable garden after rain. “This is seriously bad, Eliot.” You pull the door closed and start the car moving before it can capitulate. “Is there a hospital in Broken Hill? A clinic, at least?” You glance at him, abruptly fearful that he’s died in the past five seconds. But Eliot is still there. “Maybe we can do something for you there.” Maybe Eliot has medical knowledge. Maybe Eliot can dig a bullet out of his body and administer the correct doses of expired medicines. He stuck a needle into your eyeball; he must know something. The engine coughs three times. A structure rises in the distance: something old and industrial. “Are you listening?”

“Yes. It’s a good plan.”

“Is it?” But Eliot’s expression suggests otherwise. “Fuck! Then what?”

“We get the word.”

“And?” Eliot says nothing. “What...” you begin, and force yourself to stop peppering Eliot with questions. You should let Eliot concentrate on holding in his kidneys. A house comes up on the right, a squat thing with sun-blistered paint, but you've seen more run-down places in Portland. It doesn’t look abandoned. It's the windows, you realize: They're intact. And there's no weeds, no overgrowth. The sun sterilized everything. You spot gray-white clumps scattered here and there and think, Anthills? One's on the road, more distinct. You swerve. “Fuck!”

Eliot grunts.

“Skeletons,” you say. Of course there are skeletons. But still. Skeletons. On the road. A lone gas station comes into view. A skeleton hangs halfway out of a burned-out station wagon. You glance at Eliot, to see if Eliot is getting this and is at least a fraction as freaked out as you are, but Eliot’s eyes are closed. “Eliot.”

His eyes open. He begins to shift himself up the seat like he's arranging something heavy. “Don’t. Let me. Close my eyes.”

“That’s why I said something.” You slow. There are more skeletons here and you don't want to drive over them. You don't want to hear the noise. The industrial structure you saw earlier is identifiable as a refinery, looming above the town like a wrecked spaceship. Like it had descended to Earth and murdered everybody. That you can believe. A death ray. A creeping light that spreads through the town, disintegrating people. You can understand how something like that could wipe out a town. Not a word. “Eliot!”

Eliot opens his eyes.

“We’re almost there.” The street signs shone, wind-scrubbed. SULPHIDE STREET. OPEN CUT MINE #3. It's like they wanted to be the site of a toxic catastrophe. Except that hadn’t happened. That's just the story. Something tugs at you, inside your mind. Some memory. “Where’s your word?”

“Hospital,” Eliot says.

You glance at him. “You want the hospital, now?”

“Word. Is in hospital. Emergency room.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just do,” Eliot says.

You slow further, because the road is littered with bones now; there's really no option, and you drive over a gray lump with a sound like splintering tree branches and wince. You see a library with its steps converted to a ramp by a year and a half of windblown sand. It's hard to believe the skeletons are people. You know but don't. You peer ahead for signs to a hospital. On the right, a fire truck sits embedded in a storefront. Whatever happened out here didn’t happen quickly. People had time to flee. Or try. You roll the car up and down blocks. Some of the skeletons have things. You don’t want to notice this but it’s unavoidable. Flesh rots but things don’t. You catch glints of light from rings on finger bones, and belt buckles, and gold hoops, bracelets, earrings. You see a skull on the sidewalk, a small one. You don’t want to be here. The feeling rises very suddenly, from somewhere primal.

You see a café and a real estate office, both of which feel familiar in a far-off, muddied way. You convince yourself to stop avoiding Oxide Street and roll the Valiant over a thicket of bone. What if a femur splinters and gashes the tires? It probably doesn’t matter. The car is near death. Like Eliot. Like yourself. You're all very fucking close to death at the moment. It's on all sides.

You see a blue sign with a white cross. “Eliot! I found it. Stay with me.” The street is a snarl of vehicles, which you thread the Valiant through. The damage here is worse, every window broken, the bones like snow. Whatever kind of building had been across the road from the hospital is a charred ruin, and this is increasingly the case farther down the street; maybe half of the little business district had burned. “You say the word is in the emergency room, right?” You are. You don't need Eliot to tell you that. You're just trying to keep talking. You see a sign for EMERGENCY and squeeze the Valiant between two burned-out pickups. A white paramedic van lies splayed across the curb, its rear doors open. Beyond it, you can see wide glass double doors and a red sign. You yank on the hand brake. Before you can euthanize the car, it burbles and dies.

You contemplate the best course of action.

Haul ass

> You can't let Eliot die. You don't really give a shit about the bareword, but you've gotten kinda attached to Eliot. Find some medical equipment in the van.

Seconding Zephyr. Eliot isn't a nice man but he isn't exactly evil either, and besides you need him. Does anyone anything in the van seem familiar?

“Eliot. We’re here.”

Eliot’s head bobs. “Good.”

“You want me to help you inside?” He shakes his head. “I forgot. You have to stay here. I’ll go look for the word.”

“Don’t...”

“Don’t tell you anything about it. Got it.” Eliot nods. He's been forced to take your advice: he's loosened up. He's relaxed control. Eliot is no longer in charge. “I’ll be right back.” You climb out.

> You can't let Eliot die. You don't really give a shit about the bareword, but you've gotten kinda attached to Eliot. Find some medical equipment in the van.

Seconding Zephyr. Eliot isn't a nice man but he isn't exactly evil either, and besides you need him. Does anyone anything in the van seem familiar?

You're not prepared for the silence. You shut the car door and the sound evaporates. Your shoes crunch sand. Hot air closes around you like a fist.
You move towards the paramedic van, one eye on the emergency room. The glass doors are a strange kind of black. Not painted. Stained. You slow without knowing why. Well. You do know. It's because you're not incredibly keen to face whatever reduced three thousand human beings to belt buckles and bones. You glance inside the paramedic van. A flatbed trolley, cloth straps, equipment, little bottles; nothing you wouldn’t expect. But it makes your brain crawl. You feel another tickle of familiarity. You hesitate, thinking. Eliot could benefit from some of these supplies. He could use some water. You climb into the van. You gather anything that looks medicinal and return to the Valiant with your arms full of supplies. Eliot’s eyes are closed. “Eliot!”

His eyes pop open.

“Stay awake.” You dump your load of bottles onto Eliot’s lap. “I got this stuff for you.”

Eliot stares.

“Some medicine. And water. You should drink the water.”

“What...”

“You know, I think you’re right. I did live here. It’s starting to feel familiar.”

“The fuck,” says Eliot. “Word.”

“I haven’t gone in yet. I thought you could use this stuff.” Eliot’s eyes bulge. “All right! I’m going! Jesus!”

You walk back to the emergency room. You get close enough to see shapes against the dark glass. You know what they are. There have to be two or three dozen corpses jammed up against the glass. And they're just the ones you can see. You wondered if it's airtight in there. The air could be toxic. It could actually kill you. You jog back to the car.

“Fuck!” says Eliot.

“Hang on one second,” you say. “I just want to ask this. Are we sure we want to open this box? Because what’s inside, you know, it killed a lot of people. We are talking about something incredibly dangerous. It’s striking me as kind of stupid to walk on in there and try to pick it up. That seems like a big risk. You know? You say I’m immune, but do you know that for sure? What if I just avoided it somehow the last time? I lay in a ditch and it passed over my head? I’m just saying, that emergency room, it’s wall-to-wall dead people, Eliot. It’s wall-to-wall. And there’s, I don’t know, something about a room full of corpses that makes me think about whether I want to go in there. Don’t look at me like that. I know. I know.” You shake your head. “I’ll go in. I will. It’s just... you’re asking me to maybe die, Eliot. Give me a second. Give me one... I know you’re hurting. I’m going. But appreciate what I’m doing. That’s all I want. I want you to acknowledge... for one second... the simple fact that I’m about to die. All right? I’m probably about to die. I’m happy to do it. I’m going. It’s fine. I only wanted...”

You turn away. You walk. The glass is so dark. Your feet scuff. You reach the emergency room doors. Your fingers touch the door plate. It's warm. Like there's a beating heart inside. It's not that. It's just the sun. Everything here is warm. You look back at the Valiant but can’t see it behind the paramedic van.

“If I don’t come out, Eliot,” you shout, “fuck you!” Your voice shakes.

Haul ass

You push open the door.

PART THREE

You try to catch Danny at inconvenient moments. When he's stepping into the shower, or just after he closes his eyes at night, or reaching for the car door, late for work. “Do you love me?” you ask. You smile, so he knows you're teasing.

“Maybe,” he says. Or nothing. Sometimes the look he gives you is like: Of course, why ask? and other times it's more like: Stop it, I’m running late.

He does love you. You're sure of it. All evidence points to yes. So why not say it? This is the part that nags at you. Yes, okay, in Danny’s world, you don’t need to say something to make it real. But come on.

You've said it. You've said it a lot, starting three weeks ago and increasing in frequency since, with the exception of a four-day drought the week before, which you'd hoped might trigger something but didn’t. And it's driving you crazy because you could force him. You don't have a lot of words, but you do have tricks, and you've figured out his set, and there's no doubt in your mind that you could compel Danny Walker to say whatever you want. But if you did that, it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be him. It would be you, speaking to yourself, through him. It's very frustrating.

~

“That car has been all over town,” says the woman making you a sandwich. You turn. Across the street sits a dark sedan, windows tinted, engine running against the heat. A skirt of dust betrays some serious long-haul driving. “You see it?”

“Yes,” you say.

“Not from around here.”

“No.” You look at the sandwich that the woman, Beryl, is making. You've visited this shop nearly every weekday lunchtime for the past four years. You've practically married Beryl’s sandwiches.

“It’s been to the mines.” Beryl gestures with the knife. “Look at the tires.”

You look. The tires are caked in red earth.

“Someone from the city, I suppose. Government.” Beryl flips the bread. “Salt and pepper, love?”

“No, thanks.”

“I keep thinking you might change your mind,” says Beryl, sawing bread. “I can’t imagine how you eat it so plain.”

“I like plain,” you say. You carry the sandwich out of the shop, although you no longer feel like eating it. The car crouches in your peripheral vision but you don't look at it. When it pulls out, you cross into the pedestrian mall, where it can't follow, and walk the roundabout route to Tangled Threads. You lock the door and sit behind the counter. You don’t know how to feel. Two years ago, maybe even one, you would have chased that car down the road. You would have beaten your hands against its side and begged it to stop. But now things are different. And yet...

A young man in an airy gray suit appears at the door. He pulls the handle, pushes it, then puts his hand to the glass and peers inside. When he sees you, he points at the handle and mouths: Open?

You unlock. He's young; a boy, really. You can tell from his skin that he came from nowhere near here. “Thanks,” he says. He comes inside. He brushes aside his hair, which is a style you don't know and dangles in his eyes. “Whoo. Hot.”

“What can I help you with today?” you say.

He smiles, as if he appreciates the pretense. “It’s good news. You can come home.”

You say nothing.

He glances out the window. “That was a genuinely long drive. They told me it was long, but... it’s really something. Or nothing, rather.” He looks at you. “Nothing and nothing, for as far as you go. Did you get used to it?” You don't answer. “It seems to me it would be hard to get used to.”

“You can get used to anything.”

“Of course,” he says. “We can leave right away.”

“Today?”

“Is that a problem?” His eyes are gray, like his suit.

You shake your head. You don't want problems. “Give me your phone number. I’ll call you in a couple hours.”

“I wouldn’t bother packing. There’s nothing here you’ll need again.”

“If I don’t tell people I’m leaving, they’ll look for me. I’ll be reported missing. It will get messy.”

He's silent. He's going to tell you the Organization can handle a missing persons report. But then he shrugs. “As you like.” He digs in his pockets. Had this boy attended the school? He might have been one of the kids, a skinny cavorting stick boy too small to register. But you're not sure. It all seems so long ago. “You really made yourself a part of this place, huh?”

“It’s small,” you say. “There’s no other way.”

He smiles like he doesn’t believe you and extends you a card. “I’ll be in the car.”

~

You phone the owner of Tangled Threads, Mary, and say you need to leave right away, your mother is dying. Mary’s voice floods with sympathy and tells you it's fine, take as much time as you need. She says, “I didn’t know you were still in contact with your family.”

“I wasn’t,” you say. “I just heard from them.”

Then you drive to the hospital and wait. You can never tell where Danny will be, but the best place to wait is the emergency room. Sometimes you sit and read magazines alongside farmers with their hands wrapped in black towels and mothers with green children. The emergency room has glass double doors and when the paramedic van pulls up, the sun bouncing off its white hood, it's always thrilling, like winning a prize.

But when you see him, you burst into tears. It's unexpected and shocking and if that Organization boy was around to see it, who knows what would happen. Danny comes to you, alarmed, and you hear the lie fall out of you about a mother, cancer. You hug him and inhale him while you can.

“Do you want me to come?”

“No,” you say, grateful for the offer. “You can’t.”

“How long will you be?” He shakes his head. “You don’t know. It’s okay. Take your time.” He kisses your head. “But come back.”

“I will,” you say, and as the words came out, you're surprised at how true they feel. “I will, I promise.”

Eventually you pull away. There are people watching, and the longer this goes on, the harder it becomes, so when he offers to drive you to the house you refuse. You have to walk away while you can. “I love you,” you say, and he smiles sadly, and in retrospect, it was very obvious, wasn’t it? You should have seen it coming. But love makes people stupid, and you're so very much in love. The emergency room doors part and you walk through them and the only thing that makes this bearable is the conviction that you'll be back.

~

An hour later, you're in the black sedan, watching dust swallow Broken Hill in the side mirror. The boy brings the car up to ninety miles an hour and manipulates his phone with one hand. “Sleep, if you want,” he tells you. “There’s a whole lot of nothing for the next eight hours.”

This is true. But you can't do it. The boy keeps glancing at you and you curl up in the seat, putting your back to him. A while later, a car passes, heading in the opposite direction, gleaming on top and pancaked with dirt on the bottom. You watch it recede in the mirror. A minute later, there's another one just like it, then another.

“Are there more of you?”

“Hmm?” he says.

“The cars,” you say.

He shrugs. “Probably locals.”

You slouch back down. A truck appears on the road ahead, following the cars, a black eighteen-wheeler with no signage, hauling a steel container unlike any you've ever seen, but this time you don't say anything.

~

The journey is thirty-four hours, long enough to develop a burning hate for the Organization boy and everything he stands for. You're glad the first-class seats are like capsules, which give you space to hide your misery. You don't know what triggered the arrival of the boy, whether it was simply enough time passing for the Organization to consider you suitably chastened, or they were observing you, or something had happened, or what. But whichever it was, you'll be expected to be in charge of your emotions.

You deplane, disoriented and bruised somewhere in the core of your body, into DC winter sunshine. A limo whisks you to a grand hotel, where the boy bids you farewell, and you sleep for fourteen hours. You wake to a blinking red light on the bedside phone. You press for voice mail, thinking it might be Eliot, which would be frightening, or Thoreau, which would be more so, but it's neither. Instead, a girl you don't know tells you you're expected at a particular fashion store in thirty minutes. The girl ends her message without saying good-bye, as if she’s cut off, although you know she wasn't.

You catch a cab downtown and try on skirts and sheer shirts. In the mirror, you look freakishly tan. “This will take more than a jacket,” says the man, who introduced himself as a personal style adviser. “You’re a cavewoman in a suit, dear.”

He forwards you to a salon, where a bald man drags a brush through your hair with occasional exclamations of dismay. Now that you're alongside other women, you start to see the problem. Your hair is the wrong kind of blond: the kind from the sun. There's a gritty quality to your skin. You've absorbed Broken Hill. You've soaked it up and become savage. “Do not worry,” says the hairdresser. “We’ve beaten worse than this.”

Afterward, the floor a graveyard of fallen hair, you find herself with a short bob and bangs like a steel door. It seems like they tried to hide her face. You look strange to yourself. “Do you wear glasses?” asks the hairdresser. “You should consider that.”

You're shuttled back to the first clothing store, where your new look is praised effusively. You actually start to feel good and then the personal style adviser says, “Well, it’s an improvement, anyway.” You forgot how indirectly people speak here. You've become accustomed to taking people literally.

Hours later, laden with shopping bags, you're driven to a tall glass office building that offers no identifying logo. You enter a simple lobby, feeling newly manufactured in your gray woolen suit and stiff black shoes, your heart pounding in case you're about to meet someone you know. But there's no one. A red sofa, a few paintings; it could be anywhere. You wait at the reception desk until a young man with invisible eyebrows emerges from the rear office. “I’m Elise Jackson,” you say.

“Just a moment.” When he returns, he has a plastic card, which he places on the counter. It's blank except for the code NL-L5D6. You look at him.

“That means level five, desk six.”

“Oh,” you say. “Thank you.” You heft your bags. It takes you a minute to figure out the elevators; you have to insert the card into a slot before the buttons will do anything. Then the doors close and you rise toward whatever is up there.

~

It turns out that level five is nothing but anonymous corporate space with a dozen or so roomy cubicles. Almost all are empty. It's very quiet and as your shopping bags rustle and bang you wish you left them with the receptionist. You pass a young woman on the phone and a boy with long hair and glasses who looks up from his computer screen but his expression doesn’t change and you don’t stop walking.

You spot identifying plates on the desk corners and begin to triangulate D6. It's in a corner, with a pretty amazing view over south DC. It has a chair, a phone, a computer, and that's it. You stash your bags beneath the desk and test the chair. You wait. The phone will ring, you guess. Eventually.

After a minute, the boy with glasses appears, accompanied by a girl whose hair is the good kind of blond. She looks familiar, although you can't place her. She seems very young. “Wow. Welcome.”

“Hi,” you say. “Thank you.”

“Isaac Rosenberg,” the boy says. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Raine,” says the girl. “Kathleen Raine.”

“Hi,” you say again. There's an awkward silence. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Typical,” says the boy, Rosenberg. “We only got word a couple days ago that you were coming. You’re in NL.”

“Neurolinguistics?”

He nods. “Testing and Measurement. Have you done any NL work before?”

You shake your head.

“It’s good for a theoretical grounding, supposedly. Anyway, we’ll get you started. Teach you the system. If that’s okay with you.”

“Sure,” you say. The girl, Raine, is still looking at you like you're missing something, so you say, “I’m sorry, have we met?”

Several expressions flit across the girl’s face in quick succession, one of which says yes and another that tells you you're not supposed to ask. “No,” the girl says, but you remember now: You met at the school. You forgot because it was in that first week, and the girl had failed the tests and not been admitted. She was very young. You tried to make her feel better by saying she could try again the next year. Her name was Gertie.

“Hey, I apologize if this is inappropriate,” says Rosenberg, “but they really haven’t told us much and we don’t want to tread on any toes, so I’m wondering if... you know, if you actually want to do NL or if we should just leave you alone.”

“I think I’m actually here to do NL. I’m just another graduate now, I guess.”

Rosenberg and Raine laugh, then stop. “I’m sorry,” says Rosenberg. “I thought you were joking.”

“Why would that be a joke?”

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

“You haven’t. But please, tell me what you know about me.”

“Well, nothing. Just your name.” He points to your partition. There's a gray rectangle of plastic. A nameplate you didn't notice before. Your first thought is that you're at the wrong desk. Then you realize you're not. Because of Thoreau. Because four years ago, he said: I have a name for you, when the time is right. The nameplate says: VIRGINIA WOOLF.

How do you spend your first day?

Learn as much as you should for a first day in Neurolinguistics. Pick the computer apart, to learn how you'll be monitored and to perhaps throw you back to an earlier time

Learn as much as you should for a first day in Neurolinguistics. Pick the computer apart, to learn how you'll be monitored and to perhaps throw you back to an earlier time

yeah this is the best suggestion you're gonna get

Learn as much as you should for a first day in Neurolinguistics. Pick the computer apart, to learn how you'll be monitored and to perhaps throw you back to an earlier time

You're reminded how much you dislike neurolinguistics. You forgot that, since school. At first, it's fascinating; it's all Amazonian tribes using recognizably Latin words and how saying guh could make you hungry. Then comes syntax and semantic violations and synaptic coupling. It requires enormous amounts of rote memorization - all of which you've lost over the past four years - and the ability to juggle symbols in your head. At school, students didn’t talk much about what they thought of specific subjects, but when you'd mentioned you were studying neurolinguistics to Jeremy Lantern, he had looked sympathetic. This is like those classes again, only now you're expected to know everything.

Rosenberg and Raine teach you how to use the computer. There's a ticket system; when people want you to do something, they log a ticket. And when you're finished, you plug your work into the ticket and close it. Mostly, the people who want you to do something are from Labs, which you gather is located somewhere else in the building, although it's clear that other people are reading the tickets, too, because they sometimes request clarifications. Those people, you think, are higher-ups. Organization people like Eliot. But there's no names in the ticket system, only numbers. Throughout the day you'll sometimes read a ticket over and over, wondering if there's anything of Eliot’s mannerisms in it, but you can never tell for sure. After a while, you stop expecting to see Eliot. Apparently you're to be left alone. To do what, exactly, you don’t know. Maybe they really do want her to relearn NL. Maybe they're secretly observing you. You covertly disassemble pieces of the computer, poke through the registry. But there's nothing. Anyway, if they are observing you, what they're observing is nothing very interesting.

~

The woman on the phone you passed earlier turns out to be Sasha. The last time you saw her was on the hockey field at the school. “Screw me sideways,” says Sasha. “You’re Woolf?” She looks at you with her hands on her hips. Sasha's grown up. She's become a woman. “We thought you’d died.”

“Nope.”

“Holy cripes. Where have you been?” She shakes her head before you can answer. “Don’t answer. Stupid question. Wow. Look at you. You’re so different.” You smile awkwardly. You're not sure that's a good thing. “What on earth did you do to earn that name?”

“I don’t know.”

Sasha looks at you and you realize she doesn't believe this at all. “You look great.”

“You, too.”

“Patti Smith,” says Sasha. “That’s my name now. Smith.”

“Oh, Smith’s good,” you say.

“Ah, fuck off,” says Sasha, smiling. For a second it's like being back at school.

~

You get to visit Labs. It turns out to be in the bowels of the building, underground. It's brightly lit and full of techs in white coats and has two plastic, keypad-protected doors between you and anyone more senior than a receptionist. They interview people down here, you learn: attach them to probes and run them through fMRIs to record what happens when they hear words. Then they send the data upstairs to NL for analysis. Where these test subjects come from, you don’t know. Although once while looking for a pay phone near George Washington University, you'd seen a paper stapled to a light pole offering fifty dollars for volunteers for a psychology experiment, so maybe that. When the data comes through the ticketing system, sometimes under OBSERVABLE EFFECTS it says psychotic break, or loss of function, or coma. You try not to think about this too much. But it's obvious that people get hurt down there.

~

Sasha - Smith, as you'll never feel comfortable calling her - has changed a lot. She laughs, which she never did at school, and finds everything amazing. This strikes you as unlikely behavior, since Sasha should have been guarding her personality to prevent setting. You decide it's feigned; a behavioral smoke screen. The higher levels don’t do this; you talked with Eliot plenty and have no idea of his set simply because he gave nothing away. But it makes sense for a newer poet. It makes you wonder if you should be doing the same thing, and if Sasha thinks you're trying to figure out her set, and if Sasha is trying to figure out yours.

One day, as a tall, handsome barista delivers coffees to your café table, Sasha opens her mouth and a snarl of unintelligible words trip out. “Love me,” Sasha says, and the barista spills the coffee and goes away and comes back to ask for Sasha’s phone number. This is how you discover that in the four years you had been selling blouses in the desert, Sasha had been learning words. You murmur your appreciation, but the truth is you're shocked. You hadn’t realized how far behind you are, in terms of your knowledge of the words. How are you supposed to catch up? You have no one to ask but Sasha, and although you're friendly with her, you're afraid to expose your ignorance. How do you go about figuring out words?

Do you remember Sasha/Smith's attention words from way back when? You should do, they were Jeremy's too.

Given the fact your new name has a hell of a reputation, just being able to say "I know your set" and demanding her cooperation with any inquiries would probably work. She's likely to assume your knowledge of her set came from higher up, and not from school way back when.

You don't need Words. You nearly broke the headguy (what was his name again?)'s lock with only will, and seduced an entire town with only natural charm.

Who's your boss? Go through the official channels to request training.

Do you remember Sasha/Smith's attention words from way back when? You should do, they were Jeremy's too.

Given the fact your new name has a hell of a reputation, just being able to say "I know your set" and demanding her cooperation with any inquiries would probably work. She's likely to assume your knowledge of her set came from higher up, and not from school way back when.

"Look, Smith," you say. "I know your set. Don't ask how, just know that I know it." A flicker passes over Sasha's face. "I need to know everything you know about words, and I'd really like your cooperation with that."

Sasha's eyes search yours. She smirks, and holds her hands up in mock surrender. "Hey, Woolf, whatever your deal is, I have no desire to get mixed up in it. But I don't really understand the question. I'm not really an expert, anyway." She launches into a story about a high-speed joyride down the I-48, a police officer on a motorbike, and a speeding ticket she had hilariously failed to talk her way out of. She tells you she has trouble with set 198. “I get korantifa,” says Sasha, leaning forward. “I can get to deforiant. But then I’m lost!” She gestures expansively. “I can never remember.” This might be a dead end. Anything you can learn from Sasha is only going to be surface stuff - rote memorization. You're looking for something deeper.

You don't need Words. You nearly broke the headguy (what was his name again?)'s lock with only will, and seduced an entire town with only natural charm.

You consider forgoing learning words entirely, but reject the idea. If you are ever going to get back to Danny, you have a feeling words are going to be important. Charm can only get you so far, and charm will get you exactly nowhere with the Organization.

Who's your boss? Go through the official channels to request training.

Unfortunately, you have no idea who your superior is. Things just sort of happen. You got assigned an apartment, a bank account, and a cell phone. All this is arranged with no apparent direction from anyone. If there is an official channel, you don't know what it is.

You decide to hope that one day somebody, some boss-figure, will appear to educate you. In the meantime, you read data and try to pound it into thoughtful conclusions. The organization is interested in refining its psychography model, in finding ever-better ways to classify people more accurately into fewer sets. You look for responses in graphs that shouldn’t be there, tiny bumps in blue lines, and write reports on possible psychographic overlaps, and set boundary blurring, and possible new avenues for setting. You have access to a vast database of shopping habits, Internet usage patterns, traffic flows, and more; if you wanted, you could drill right down to an individual and look up where they went last Tuesday and what they bought and did. But that's not very useful. No one is interested in individuals. You're supposed to look for connections between them: neurological commonalities that allow them to be grouped together and targeted by a common word. Whether anybody acts on your work, or even reads it, you have no idea.

~

Your apartment balcony overlooks the meatpacking district and sometimes you stand out there with a bottle of wine, wrapped in a jacket that never really keeps out the cold, watching the city breathe.

Every few days, you do something stupid. You stay up late, or set the alarm early, and leave the apartment in the freezing dark. You walk in a random direction for a random amount of time and find a pay phone and plug coins into it. As it rings, you remind yourself to modulate your voice, avoid identifiable phrases, and end the call as soon as possible. You tell yourself, This is the last time for at least a week. Because if you're caught, you have no doubt that the consequences will be terrible. But then the line connects, and Danny’s voice fills you, and you forget about that.

As time goes on, though, it becomes harder to find a pay phone you haven't used to call Danny before. Every night, as you walk the streets, you half-expect Eliot or Thoreau or maybe that kid in the airy suit to step out of the darkness. And then everything will be over. But that never happens, so you keep doing it.

~

One day you get a corrupted data set from a ticket, so you pick up the phone and dial Labs. You're not supposed to do this. At least, you're supposed to do it as little as possible. Techs are isolated from analysts for security reasons, since techs aren't poets and are therefore vulnerable to compromise. Why an analyst might want to compromise a tech, you have no idea. It seems pretty pointless. But that's the rule. It doesn’t seem very effective, either, since although the techs are supposed to be anonymous, they give themselves away in their writing styles; one overuses evidently, one has never heard of apostrophes, that kind of thing. So you don't have a great deal of respect for the rule.

“Hello,” you say when Labs picks up. “This is Analyst three-one-nine. I need a validation check on a data set, please.”

“Open a ticket,” says a male voice. You've seen no evidence of women in Labs.

“I did open a ticket, and it came back the same. I want it done again.”

“What’s your ticket number?” You tell him. There's a pause. “That data set has been recompiled.”

“I know it’s been recompiled. But I want it re-recompiled, because it’s still wrong.”

“The data set is accurate.”

“Guy,” you say, “I’m looking at it right now. The m-graph is blank. I don’t know if you’ve got a format error, missing data, or what, but the graph cannot be blank.”

“It’s not blank.”

You open your mouth, because that's preposterous. You've seen thousands of m-graphs and know what they're supposed to look like: mountain ranges. Sometimes they have many peaks, sometimes just one, but the point is they are jagged. The lines go up and down. But as you look at it again, you realize Labs is right. There is a line. You didn't notice because it runs along the very top of the grid and is dead straight.

“Clear?” says Labs.

“Yes,” you say. “Thank you.” You put down the phone. You look at the graph awhile.

You walk to Sasha’s desk. “Hey,” you say. “What’s syndesis?”

“What’s the context?”

“It’s in a new ticket. After ‘subject response,’ instead of a rating, it says ‘syndesis.’”

“Well, syndesis is just compromise,” says Sashona. “But they shouldn’t use that term. That’s sloppy.”

“Why?”

“It’s the ideal. The theoretical state of perfect compromise. Doesn’t exist in real life.”

“Oh,” you say. “I see.”

“Tell them to say what they mean,” Sasha says, returning to her work. “Probably someone new.”

“Right,” you say.

You do your best to write a meaningful report about the oddly flat graph and dutifully submit it to the ticket system. Another ticket is waiting, but you feel distracted, and gaze at passing clouds instead. You have the feeling something is going to happen.

Six minutes later, the power goes out. You roll your chair back from your dead monitor. Heads poke up from cubicles. “I thought we had a backup generator,” says Sasha. Her voice sounds loud. You didn't notice the hum of the air-conditioning until it was gone.

An alarm begins to jangle. People’s voices rise. Rosenberg speculates about fire in Labs, which would be a problem, because a lot of those doors are time-locked.

They make for the stairwells but you don't follow. Sasha hangs in the doorway. “Woolf?”

You shake your head. You're feeling stupid. You waited too long. You should have walked out of this building six minutes ago. You should have done it the moment you saw that graph.

“Woolf! It’s not optional. Time to go.”

Come down from there

They expect you to take the stairs, so use the elevator instead. The odds of it being an actual fire are low.

Elevators can be disabled by a passenger with a fire key so that they only go to a floor when the button is held down from within (and the close door button also needs to be held to close the door) . You might be forced to take the stairs, but see if you can't get off on the wrong floor, take a staircase that doesn't end on the ground, that type of thing.
Sasha might know the building better than you, tell her it was actual syndesis, we need to get out of here in a nonstandard way.

Edit: now would actually be a great time to use Sasha's attention words if she isn't listening. Not to compromise her, just so that you can communicate the situation quickly.