Vox Mentis

I've got five, the first:

"Are you a cat person or a dog person?"

I've got five, the first:

"Are you a cat person or a dog person?"

You let yourself smirk. "The irony is that that the answer to that question never meant anything. The mere fact that you could get an answer, and the tone of the answer that followed, spoke volumes more than if they actually cared about 'cat or dog'. It was an innocuous question meant to lure the mind into a false sense of banality and security. But if you must know, I'm not into pets."

>The guy you were with when we met. He wasn't a poet. Who was he?

>Who were you, before you were Eliot?

>Until we ran into Austen, uh, ended up in the cattle yard, you still thought there were members of the Organisation you could trust, yet you've all this time Thoreau was behind it? How?????

>If I can't be compromised, how was I told to forget?

What if I told her to delay another order? Say, for a thousand years?

What if I told her to delay another order? Say, for a thousand years?

"Only continue to follow Thoreau's interests after you have personally walked on the surface of Alpha Centauri"
"Do not kill anyone before personally visiting every star in Andromeda"

what if... you told her to remember? Get her back to something resembling the her that was her, the her that loved you?

>If I can't be compromised, how was I told to forget?

this is the big one

i don't have a question coming to mind right now, but can we have one last nod to classic action movies and have danny blow up the roof with explosives rigged earlier

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Spoiler

i don't have a question coming to mind right now, but can we have one last nod to classic action movies and have danny blow up the roof with explosives rigged earlier

Stay tuned... ;)

We are now heading for the end. I'll update every 45 minutes-ish today until it's over - strap in for the finale of Vox Mentis!

>Who were you, before you were Eliot?

"Honestly, nobody. I got into the Academy fairly young, so I don't remember much about before. I was grateful to them, though - my parents, my father especially, were not... ideal. The Organization got me out of a bad situation. Atwood saw something in me that I couldn't see myself. I am- was- grateful for that."

What if I told her to delay another order? Say, for a thousand years?

What if I told her to delay another order? Say, for a thousand years?

"Only continue to follow Thoreau's interests after you have personally walked on the surface of Alpha Centauri"
"Do not kill anyone before personally visiting every star in Andromeda"

what if... you told her to remember? Get her back to something resembling the her that was her, the her that loved you?

"The problem with all of those options, Nick, is as I've said: You would only create a conflicting instruction. Nothing would get overwritten. She can be under orders to not kill anyone, and simultaneously, to kill everyone. She could remember you, even love you, but still be under orders to kill everyone. Which order she is executing at any given time comes down to how she's feeling at any given time. It's unpredictable, it's not safe, and it's not worth risking. Not for you, not for me, not for anybody."

>If I can't be compromised, how was I told to forget?

You sigh. "I have no idea. I have guesses. One guess is that something fucked up the language center of your brain at some point in some way we haven't seen before. People are far more susceptible to compromise via words rooted in their first language. Arabic speakers need Arabic morphemes, Japanese speakers need Japanese morphemes, et cetera. Maybe your first language is something else, something you're not even aware of, and she somehow tapped into that and compromised you. Another guess is that you're just a fucked up motherfucker with brain damage. Maybe she dropped an anvil on your head. Just guesses, mind you." You hear noises overhead. "Shit. This is not how I thought I was going to die."

>The guy you were with when we met. He wasn't a poet. Who was he?

>Until we ran into Austen, uh, ended up in the cattle yard, you still thought there were members of the Organisation you could trust, yet you've all this time Thoreau was behind it? How?????

“Who gives a shit?” you say. “Honestly, Danny. At this point, who cares? We are going to die. There won't be time to ruminate on these earth-shattering revelations. They're not going to take us alive.”

Danny rubs his chin, a gesture you haven’t seen before. “Under the mattress.”

“What?”

“I got you a pistol from the armory. It’s under the mattress.”

You stare at him.

“You want to maybe get it out?”

“I maybe want to shoot you with it, if it would make any difference.”

“It’s going to be all right, Eliot.”

“No,” you say, “these guys are going to kill us while Woolf watches from a distance. Sometime later, an unimaginable number of people are going to devote their lives to shifting dirt, because Thoreau has developed a hankering to dig a very deep hole in one place and pile it up in another. That’s how it’s going to be, you asshole. That guy when we met? A poet, by the way. Sebastian Brant. Those guys on the ranch? They were the ones I could persuade to leave the Organization. To leave Thoreau and Woolf. I thought Jane was one of them, I thought I had persuaded her to leave, but it has since become abundantly clear that she was compromised by Woolf, and feeding back information, such as your existence, what we were planning, and so on, the entire time, and then she turned Jane against me and I had to shoot her! I had to fucking shoot her, Nick!”

“Just get out the gun.”

“Why bother?” you shout. “Since Woolf is coming only to shower us with chocolates and kisses?”

Danny paces.

“Oh,” you say. “Oh, oh, are we having regrets?”

“Shut up.”

“Thirty years,” you say. “My entire adult life, I’ve guarded every word that’s come out of my mouth. And you know what? I’m done. I am finally, completely fucking done. So hey-o! Fuck you, Nick Parsons! Danny Walker! Whoever you are! Fuck you very much! And fuck you, Thoreau! And you, Elise Woolf! Fuck you the most of all!” You throw back the blanket. You slide a hand beneath the mattress and find metal. “Let’s go!” Your body hurts everywhere but your mind is soaring. “Here we go, hey-o, diddle diddle!”

You come out of the chopper and jog to the shelter of a falling-down building that once sold wire, apparently. You forgot about stores like this. Shops, you mean. Shops that sell only one thing, which you could not conceive of wanting. You could live a lifetime in DC and never see a wire store. If you wanted wire, you would go to a warehouse-style hypermarket and it would be one shelf in aisle twelve. But here it's a whole shop. You would go in and ask for some wire, because the roos knocked down a section of your side paddock fence again, and you would have a conversation about it.

You didn’t want to come back to Broken Hill. You've been operating for a while now as a compartmentalized person, putting different pieces of yourself in different places, and you didn’t know what Broken Hill would do to that. But you're here, because you don’t get to make choices about that kind of thing anymore, and have to do the best you can. One part of you, one of the compartments, is glad. It thinks you're coming home. The rest is pretty freaked out.

“We’re deploying,” says Plath. Plath is running around with a headset that won’t stay put, talking to security guys. You are not very happy with Plath. You've crossed paths with Plath a few times and each time Plath is more neurotic. There's something wild and jumpy in her eyes that you don't trust. Also, Plath came on board shortly after the terrible failed attempt to corner Eliot and his exception at the Portland airport, during which the poet Raine had died, and although Plath hasn’t said anything, you know she views that incident as a shameful fuckup on your part. “It’s so hot.” Plath begins to extract herself from her jacket. You are not wearing a jacket, because it had been obvious in advance that the desert would be hot. “Like an oven.”

“Yes.” You watch Plath get her jacket tangled up in her headset.

“I’ll call Thoreau, tell him we landed.”

“No.”

“He asked to be kept up to-”

“Don’t call Thoreau,” you say. You are still in charge. You are still the best in the organization at hunt-and-kill.

“We need a command center,” says a man. His voice is machine modulated, coming out of a helmet. His name is Masters. He's in control of the soldiers. Currently, Masters has EQPs spreading through Broken Hill like a toxic spill, establishing perimeters, getting fixes, whatever else it is they do. It's to help you neutralize Eliot, but you don’t like it, being around people you can’t compromise.

You remember a burger place. It's a good distance from the hospital, close enough to coordinate the action but not so close that Eliot is likely to be able to sneak up and shoot you. You had eaten there, alone, sometimes, other times not. But you aren’t thinking about that. Danny is trying to surface in your brain but you are not going to let him. The point is, it's a good location. “I know somewhere.”

A small squad sweeps the burger place while you and Plath stand outside, shielding your faces from the sun. A chopper passes overhead, whipping up hot, stinging sand. “Ugh,” says Plath. “This place.”

A soldier opens the rear door and gestures. You pass through a small kitchen, where a dark skillet lies under a layer of dust. Utensils dangle from overhead racks, surprisingly bright. Then you're in the serving area, passing familiar tables. There are no bodies. Maybe the soldiers removed them. Plath hangs back for some reason but you move to the front of the store. There are dark shapes outside, hard to see through the dirty plate glass, and you approach with some trepidation. Outdoor tables. A ragged umbrella still over one of them. A few cars. If you put your face to the glass, you can see farther down the street. You don’t look for detail but can see the shape of the hospital. Somewhere inside are Eliot and his exception.

Your phone rings. You pull it out. “I hear you’re in Broken Hill,” says Thoreau.

“Yes.” You look at Plath, the snitch.

“I find myself wondering why Eliot would go there, of all places.”

“Well, my guess is to get the word,” you say. “The exception can just pick it up.” There's silence. “Hello?”

“I’m sorry. I was rendered speechless a moment, just then.”

“The bareword,” you say. “It’s in the emergency room.”

“I have the bareword.”

“You have the copy I made. The original is still there.”

“How useful it would have been to have this information before this moment.”

“Oh,” you say. “I’m sorry.” You knew that, in one of your compartments.

“You will kill Eliot,” Thoreau says, “and the exception, and, for that matter, anyone else Eliot has managed to conjure up who doesn’t work directly for me. You will then cordon off the hospital until I arrive. Is this clear?”

“Yes.” In your head, you add: you jerk. You do this sometimes. It's a kind of game.

“I really am vexed by this exception business. I have felt decidedly uncomfortable, knowing that one exists. It is a most unwelcome distraction to my work.”

“I can imagine.” You jerk.

“Call me when Eliot’s dead,” he says. “I won’t set foot in Broken Hill until then. Oh, and Elise? At some point, you will fill me in on exactly how you managed to copy an object you can’t look at.”

“I will do that,” you say. The phone clicks. Your jaw works and for a moment you think you're actually going to say it. But you only make a little grunt, yuh. You glance at Plath. But no one seems to have noticed. So that's okay.

In the beginning, you hadn’t even been able to think it. Perhaps eventually you'll be able to say the words to his face. Hey, Thoreau! You’re a jerk! It's a fun idea. Implausible; most likely, this is as far as it can go, a mental game. You'll see. For now, the important thing is that a part of you is still you.

Eliot strides to the door, pulls it open, and disappears. This happens much more quickly than you expect, because until a few moments ago, Eliot looked very much like a guy recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound. What has suddenly revived him, you don't know. “Wait,” you say. But Eliot is running down the corridor; you can hear his footsteps.

You heft the rifle. This is going to be especially useless for close-quarters combat. You hadn’t intended to leave the room. You’d intended to stay and pick off guys until Elise got the message and came to see you. You blow air through your teeth. “Fuck,” you say, and go after Eliot. You jog down the corridor, passing two neonatal rooms that were once staffed by a woman named Helen who’d always had pink iced doughnuts, any time of day or night. You never saw her eat one. She just had them. You visited this place often, for those doughnuts.

You reach the corner and poke your head around. Eliot is nowhere to be seen. He's just fucking disappeared. You debate the merits of opening your mouth to make the kind of noise that might attract armed men, then there is a quick one-two of flat gunshots in the near distance, which decides you.

You reach the stairwell and peer over the railing to see Eliot standing below you. At Eliot’s feet is a man in a black suit with no helmet. The man looked dazed. His gun, a semiautomatic, lay a few feet away.

“Shoot them in the face,” Eliot says. “They’re armored, but it’s distracting.”

“What did you do?” The man in the black suit begins to grope for his gun. “He’s moving!” You raise the rifle.

“Don’t!” says Eliot. “He’s on the side of the angels now.”

The man retrieves his gun and gets to his feet. He looks up at you questioningly.

“He’s cool,” Eliot tells the man. “Neither of you shoot the other.” He begins to descend the steps.

“How did you...?” But Eliot has disappeared. You run after him, jumping the steps three or four at a time. You catch Eliot at the top of the second floor, which used to be the surgical wing. “Will you fucking wait?” You go to seize Eliot by the shoulder but the black-suited man slaps his gun into his shoulder and looks down the barrel at you.

“Don’t alarm my prose,” Eliot says. “He wants to protect me.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Looking for Woolf.”

“She could be anywhere.”

“Yes. But it’s a better option than sitting in that room.” Eliot looks around. His pupils are dilated. “You used to work here. What’s a clever way out?”

“I don’t know. Can you tell this guy to stop pointing his fucking gun at me?”

“He’s finding you threatening. So am I, actually.”

“You look like you’re on drugs.”

“I’m releasing a lot of dopamine,” Eliot says. “It’s a natural high. Bob! Gun down.”

The soldier lowers his gun. He stares at you with baleful eyes.

“How about a laundry chute?”

“What?”

“A chute,” Eliot says, “that we slide down to a basement or some-such.”

“No. They don’t work like that. This is a hospital - we’d lose children down them.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think,” Eliot says. “You must have lost a few patients. People who snuck out somehow. It’s not Fort Knox.”

“No one... okay, one time a guy broke into a storage room by climbing onto the roof of the building next door. We might be able to-”

“Yes. That.” Eliot looks at the soldier. “Go cause a distraction. Shoot at nothing. Report false information. Things like that.” The man nods and begins to jog down the stairs. “This storage room, then.”

“How did you compromise that guy?”

“I know him. I used to work for the Organization, you know. Storage room.”

You lead Eliot through double doors. You never liked coming here. It was the surgeons. You were never completely sure they really gave a shit. They seemed to enjoy challenges more than people. “So you, what, shot him in the face, pulled off his helmet, and used words?”

“Correct,” Eliot says.

You reach the storage room and try the handle. No one has been by in the past year or so to unlock it, apparently. But you know where the key is kept. You jog down the corridor, pull open the second drawer in the nurse’s station, and find it among paper clips and rubber bands. When you return, Eliot is tugging at the door. “Quick,” Eliot says.

“I am being quick.”

“Quicker.”

You pull open the door. You're finding the new Eliot unsettling. Somewhere in the distance is a staccato of gunfire. You wait but it isn’t repeated.

“Bob,” says Eliot, fondly.

You enter the storeroom. The window was fitted with new locks since the intruder but they won’t be much of an impediment from this side. You peer through the glass. A short climb down to a secluded part of the roof, then a short run and leap to the roof of the pharmacy next door. You don't see any soldiers.

“The real problem is finding Woolf,” Eliot murmurs in your ear. You flinch. You didn’t hear him approach. Eliot looks at you. “Where is she, do you think?”

“Can you take a step back?”

“I think you know.” He taps your forehead.

“Don’t fucking touch my head.” You begin to wrestle the window out of its frame.

“This place,” Eliot says. “It brought you back to yourself. Maybe it’s having a similar effect on her. And you know her. So tell me. Where is she?”

“That plan you had before, about getting out of Broken Hill? I’m coming around on that.”

“Where,” Eliot says.

You toss the frame to the floor and climb up the shelves. The window is narrow but you manage to work the rifle through it and drop to the rooftop six feet below. You crouch against the wall until Eliot drops beside you.

Eliot looks around. “This was a good idea.” He rises and runs to the edge of the roof, leaps across the gap, and lands on the tin roof of the pharmacy. You see his head turn left, right. Then he stops moving. You freeze. Eliot creeps back toward the edge, peers over, and drops out of sight.

You run after him. Halfway there, you hear Eliot bark out words in a strange, guttural tongue. When you reach the edge, you see Eliot in the alley standing over another helmet-free soldier. This one is bald.

You toss the rifle down and lower yourself over the edge. “I’m starting to feel like you don’t even need me.”

“Oh, I do,” says Eliot. “I don’t know where she is.” He looks at the pharmacy.

“She’s not in there. I don’t remember her ever going in there. Eliot. Eliot?”

“What?”

“You’re staring at nothing.”

“Oh,” says Eliot. “I was thinking about earplugs.”

“Is that... that sounds like a great idea.”

“It’s great against verbal compromise. It’s not so great for hearing someone coming up behind you with a gun. So there’s a trade-off.”

“Right.”

“I’d rather be shot than compromised, though.” He looks at you. “Shoot me if she manages to compromise me. Did I already say that?”

“No.”

“Well, do. I’m serious.”

The bald man says, “We’re on the third floor. We know you’re not there.”

“Thank you, Steve,” says Eliot. “Danny. Where is she?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Think.”

You look around. If you were Elise, where would you go? Somewhere near the hospital. There's a café on the other side of the block, but Elise had never liked it; she said it smelled like men. You’d usually gone to the burger joint farther down. That was actually where you’d first met. Outside of her being a patient, that is. She’d been eating and you had walked by with some girl, whoever you were seeing at the time, and she’d called out. You remember thinking she was a nutcase. Why had you thought that? The card. She’d sent you a card with something crazy written on it, TO MY HERO or YOU SAVED MY LIFE, something like that. But then you’d spoken and she hadn’t seemed crazy. There had been something about her. Something bright, to which you’d responded.

“You thought of something,” Eliot says. “I see it on your face.”

You shake your head.

“Don’t hold out on me.” Eliot leans closer. “Come on, now, Danny.”

“You are creepy as hell right now.”

“This state is temporary. I need to make the most of it. Comedown is going to be a bitch.”

“I’ll make you a deal.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I might know where she is. But if I tell you, I go in first. I get to talk to her. If it goes badly, fine. You do what you have to do. But I get five minutes.”

“Deal.” Eliot sticks out his hand.

You hesitate, suspicious. “You don’t mean that.”

“What do you want me to say?” Eliot shouts. “You’re confronting the futility of your own proposition! Shoot that guy!” This part is directed to the bald soldier, who drops to one knee and raises the semiautomatic. You turn in time to see a pair of dark-suited figures at the end of the alley, and a half dozen on the roof of the hospital looking at you. Time for the contingency plan. You fish around in your pocket and depress a button. The roof of the hospital erupts in a staccato series of explosions, and the guys immolate. The two in the alley turn to look.

“Excellent! Good work. Now Elise,” says Eliot, then grabs your arm and then you're running.

“It’s the burger place,” you pant. “Right, right, circle around the block.” You round the corner. “Five minutes. Promise me.”

“Okay, okay,” Eliot says. “Fine.” He stops, eyes widening at something on your gun. “Whoa, shit, fuck.”

“What?” you say. You can’t see the problem, and look at Eliot, and Eliot’s pistol butt is moving very quickly toward your face. And then that's all you know.

The soldiers go in and soon there is an explosion on the roof of the hospital. This is a problem. You can tell because at first Masters emits updates at intervals of fifteen seconds - who is where, doing what, and for how long they are expected to do it; a nonstop cataloging of physical facts that he seems to enjoy on a deep, sexual level - then, for no reason, a whole minute goes by with no updates at all. This manifests in Plath as a series of increasingly dramatic hair corrections, and finally a question, and Masters turns his goggles toward her and says in his machine voice, “We’re trying to fix target location.”

“I thought you had target location,” Plath says. Masters doesn't answer. “Did we not start with target location?”

“Eliot is slippery,” you say.

“We are not having another Portland.” Plath directs this at Masters, but what Masters thinks of it was unknowable. You kind of hope Masters will become so pissed off with Plath that he will unsnag one of what had to be five or six different weapons strapped to various parts of his body and do something unspeakable with it. Thoreau, Thoreau, you think, as you do at times like this. You jerk.

You rise from the table. The front glass is very dirty but you can see through it. A chopper is still hovering above the hospital, but aside from this, nothing seems to be happening.

“We’re regrouping,” says Masters. “We may have a new fix.”

“You get a fix,” says Plath. “You get a fucking fix right this second or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” Her face is flushed. Globules of sweat form a neat line all along her hairline. She's displaying an awful lot of emotion for a poet, which makes you think that Plath has reason to believe the consequences for failure are particularly terrible. You keep watching the road. You need to think like Eliot. You know him better than most. You can imagine Eliot skulking around out there, sniffing you out. That’s what he’ll be thinking about. Not escape. He will be coming for you.

A black-suited soldier emerges from the crossroad and jogs toward the burger place. “Who is this guy?” you say. Nobody answered, so you try again. “Who the fuck is this fucking guy?”

Plath comes up beside you. “Speaking for myself, I don’t mind adding a little manpower to this location.”

Masters says, “We’re redrawing our zones.”

This sounds like bullshit to you, because if your current location has become part of Masters’s operational zone, that would have been something he would have mentioned. Soldiers moving locations: That's all he talks about. You eye the approaching guy. “Oh,” you say. “That’s Eliot.”

“That’s... that’s impossible,” says Plath. But there is uncertainty in her voice. Plath is beginning to realize what you've known for a while: that you cannot underestimate Eliot. Every time you think you have him figured out, you don’t. “Let’s... let’s get some security here, huh?” Plath reaches across you to Masters, who might be barking orders over his internal radio or might be just standing there; it's impossible to tell. “Masters. Masters.”

“Unit is not responding.” Masters draws a fat pistol. “May be hostile. I advise retreat.”

Plath vanishes. You hesitate. You really do want to face Eliot and end him. But this is not the way to do it: with Eliot in heavy body armor, filtered against compromise. There is taking a risk, and there is suicide. You turn to follow Plath, then have another thought. There is always the possibility that this is another layer of sneakiness. Eliot could have deliberately sent someone who would be spotted - the exception, perhaps, or just a soldier he managed to overcome - toward the burger place from the front in order to flush you out the back. That is just the kind of thing that Eliot might do. You consider. There's a side door, leading to the dumpster. You decide to be prudent.

You push your way outside. The brick wall of the adjoining store faces you. This is the kind of thing you like: a closeted escape route. This, right here, is your element. Then you stop, because it occurs to you that maybe this is a problem. Maybe the last thing you want to do in this situation is follow your instincts, since those might be predictable to someone who knows you very well. Eliot steps around the corner.

“Shit,” you say.

Little yellow plugs poke out of Eliot’s ears. He's holding a pistol. His eyes are wide and there is a sheen of sweat on his face that tells you he's put himself into a heightened mental state. Poets can do this, if they really want. You've seen them do it. They talk and move very rapidly for about an hour, then sleep for days.
“Gotcha,” says Eliot.

You hold up your hands. You want to speak, but it seems like if you open your mouth, he'll shoot you. He'll shoot you anyway, of course. That's why he's here.

You face each other a moment. Maybe some guys will come through the door and take care of Eliot. That would be super handy.

Eliot wiggles the plugs out of his ears with his free hand. “I had to render the exception unconscious. He couldn’t be trusted.”

“Okay,” you say.

“I blame myself for what happened. I should have stopped it.” You don’t know what to say to that. “I have to kill you.”

You nod. It's been like this for a while.

His fingers flex on the pistol. “I’m sorry I didn’t teach you better.” His expression is very strange.

“Eliot,” you say.

“You have to stop.”

“Eliot.”

There are soldiers approaching. You can feel them. This idea is distressing in a way it wasn’t a few moments ago.

“I made mistakes,” he says. Around you, soldiers boil out of the air like ants. There is a great deal of noise and Eliot has every opportunity to shoot you but he doesn’t and he falls down and dies.

After this, you feel strange. People come and go, soldiers and poets, and sometimes they stop to speak to you but you don’t hear them. When they begin to package Eliot, you walk to the front of the burger place and sit at a table. Occasionally someone walks by but for the most part you're alone. You begin to cry. You don’t understand why, because you had wanted Eliot dead. You had wanted that very clearly. But there is grief coming out of you anyway, spilling from your compartments, and you're reminded that not all of your wants are yours.
A shadow falls beside you. You look up to see who is stupid enough to disturb you in this moment, and see Thoreau.

He rights a fallen chair and composes himself into it. He's wearing a beautiful dark gray suit and his hair looks fresh and bright. He's wearing sunglasses but he removes these and sets them on the table, and behind them his eyes are flat.

“Oh,” you say. You feel stupid. Of course Thoreau is here. You should have realized that.

“Congratulations.” He surveys the line of dust-blown buildings across the road. “You see now why I wanted you, specifically, on Eliot.”

You don’t reply.

“Persuasion stems from understanding. We compel others by learning who they are and turning it against them. All this, the chasing, the guns...” He gestures vaguely. “These are details. What Eliot could not escape was the fact that I understood him better than he understood himself.” Plath hovers at the edge of your senses. Thoreau says, “A glass of water, please. Let’s make it two.”

Once Plath has gone, Thoreau shrugs his jacket and passes it to Masters, who's standing like he's planted there. “I have been visiting delegates. Not all of them agree with my new direction for the Organization. Some tried to move against me. Expected, of course. Futile, since I understand them. We attempt to conceal ourselves, Elise, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.” Plath arrives with two glasses, of a kind you recognize from years before, and sets them on the table.

“I feel bad about Eliot.”

“Yes, well,” says Thoreau. “Some kind of suppressed emotional overflow, I would imagine.”

“And I’m remembering things.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“I came out of the ER. Through that door.” You point. “I went that way. People were killing each other. Because of the word. Danny came after me. He knew what I’d done. But he saved me anyway.”

“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” says Thoreau. “It’s irrelevant.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

A figure is walking toward you, coming from the direction of the hospital. In the heat haze, it could be anyone. But you have a feeling.

“Danny,” you say.

You peer over the edge of the roof at the street below. Your head throbs. Eliot had hit you. He had frowned at something on your rifle, and you had looked to see what, and woken up slumped in a doorway. Now Eliot is gone and you are on the roof of a furniture store, trying to see what's going on.

A few minutes ago, a soldier walked toward the burger place, then another emerged from the front door and approached with his pistol drawn. It seemed like they were going to have a confrontation, but they stopped at three feet’s separation and stood there as if communicating telepathically. Then they both ran back to the burger place and plenty more soldiers appeared and there was gunfire. Eventually a young woman emerged and sat down at a table. You're staring, because the woman is Elise.

You began to doubt that a little, because of Eliot. Whether she's still the same. But now everything is clear. You wriggle back from the rooftop. It's always been this way: The more people talk, the more they obscure. You don’t need to argue for the truth. You can see it. You'd almost forgotten that. You grip the rifle and go to get Elise.

Thoreau turns to look at the figure approaching out of the heat haze. “Who?”

“The exception, could be,” says Plath, peering out from a raised hand. The figure’s arms are extended from his sides. He's wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Nick Parsons. Looks unarmed.”

“Well, how about we shoot him?”

“On it,” says Masters. He gestures and two soldiers step onto the road.

“We know Parsons,” says Plath. “He’s indecisive. Untrained with weapons. He’s a carpenter.”

“Elise, you appear anxious,” says Thoreau. “Is there something I should know?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I thought Danny died. But he didn’t. I just made myself believe that.”

Plath says, “Who’s Danny?”

“Her lover,” says Thoreau, “of some time ago. He’s the exception?”

You nod.

Thoreau drums his fingers on the table. “This changes nothing.”

You watch the soldiers fan out. Danny begins to slow. You can see his face.

“Wait,” says Thoreau. “I’m missing something. Aren’t I?”

You have to answer. “Yes.”

“What am I missing?” He clicks his fingers at someone behind you. “You, too.” A poet, Rosenberg, a young guy with longish hair, steps onto the road, heading after the soldiers. “Elise?”

“Two things.”

“Name them. I am instructing you to name them.”

“I don’t think you’ve been in love. Not recently, anyway. I’m not sure you remember what it’s like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword. That’s the first thing.” Thoreau doesn’t react. If anything, he seems baffled. “The second thing is I wouldn’t characterize Danny as indecisive and untrained with weapons.”

Plath says, “Perhaps we should move inside.”

“Yes,” Thoreau says. “Quite.” He smooths his pants and begins to rise from the table. Then he stops, because you've seized him by the tie.

“Also,” you say, “you are a jerk.”

You walk toward the burger place until soldiers move onto the road to intercept you. Then you change course for the real estate office. You clamber through a space that once held a plate glass window, collect the rifle from where you left it on the counter, and jog toward the back offices. You’ve been here a few times while dating Cecilia, the real estate agent. Enough to know the layout, anyway. You take position in Cecilia’s office and wait.

A few minutes later, a soldier shuffles in. You wait until the second appears, then put a bullet into his faceplate. Both men vanish like smoke. You pull the bolt, reloading as you jog out into the corridor. You go right instead of left, ease open the rear door, and then you're in sunshine. You trot around the side of the building to the air-con vents and peer through. The second soldier is moving away from you in a crouch. You raise the rifle and shoot him in the back of the head.

When you reenter the building, you're surprised to find both guys still alive. You wouldn’t have credited a helmet with being able to stop a high-powered .28. But you guess that momentum has to go somewhere. One of the soldiers has pulled off his helmet and is vomiting down his chest. The other is crawling weakly toward the front door.

You raise the rifle. The helmet-less solder raises a hand. You shoot him. You walk around to the other one, reloading the rifle. A man unexpectedly appears outside the window, a young guy in a cheap suit and tie, stringing together nonsense words, and you shoot him through the window. You look back. The crawling soldier has stopped crawling.

You reload the rifle. You can hear a chopper approaching. Soldiers will be coming from both sides, you guess. They'll be jogging slowly, like these two guys, since they're encased in forty-pound armored ovens. They've been lumbering around in the noonday sun for about an hour. You can’t really imagine what that's like. You've seen people drop dead out here, trying to do too much. They have the idea that the worst the sun can do is make them uncomfortable. They apply their sunscreen and their hats and head out and just fall over.

You go into the bathroom and slide open the window. There's a low fence offering cover to the adjoining building, and from there you think you can make your way unseen to pretty much anywhere you want. You climb out the window and begin to crawl.

Thoreau’s eyes widen across the table. You've never seen him look shocked before. You've never really seen him look anything.

“Release me,” he says.

“You release me,” you say, although that's just to fill time; there's only one way you can ever be free of Thoreau, and you're going to have to make that happen yourself. He pulls back, reaching inside his jacket for the thing that will take away your mind again. Which shows you that Thoreau really does not get it. He thinks the word has worn off, somehow; that you no longer feel compelled to obey him.

You go after him but find yourself gripped from behind by Plath, of all people. Plath is thin and wiry, not the kind of person who can hold you for long, but you hadn’t expected to be held at all, and it gives Thoreau time to clasp something in his jacket.

“Sit down and stop moving,” he says.

“No.” Disbelief spreads across his face. Plath’s arms are already slackening, anticipating your compliance. But Thoreau’s hand is coming out, and you don’t want to face what he has, so you throw your head backward. There is a satisfying connection. You step forward, swipe a glass from the table, and toss the water over Thoreau’s shoes.

Thoreau makes a frightened, high-pitched sound. This is very beautiful in your ears, but the point is Thoreau is not making other sounds, sounds that command people to kill you, so in the moment he is occupied with the horror of his softening leather, you break the glass against the edge of the table and slice it across his throat.

He tries to speak. Little red bubbles pop along his lips. You take the bareword from his fingers as gently as can be. He drops to his knees, and you should be turning to face Plath and Masters and whoever else is back there, but instead you just stand and watch him die.

You jog toward the burger place. You think there must be soldiers about, but can’t see them. The choppers have retreated; you don’t know why. You circle around the block but see no one so you come at it from the front. Elise is there. A few bodies lie on the ground. There is a black-suited soldier but his helmet is off and he's standing with his feet loosely apart, not holding a weapon, looking around the town like he's vacationing here.

You keep the rifle ready and begin to cross the street. Elise turns to you. She has something in her hand. Her expression is strange.

“Hey,” you say. “El, it’s me.”

He comes toward you and for a moment you don’t know who it is. You've just killed a bunch of people and compromised Masters and your head is full of bees.

But you recognize his expression. It's like the last time you were surrounded by death and he came for you. He's going to save you again, you see. Of course he is. He's going to forgive you for everything, again.

“Oh, Danny,” you say. “It’s so good to see you.”

He smiles. You thought you would never see that again, his smile, and it kills you, because you know it can’t last. None of this can last.

“I love you,” you say, “but I’m sorry, I need you to do something.”

“Sure.” He slings the rifle and comes toward you, his hands reaching for yours. “Name it.”

“Kikkfhk ktaffkx kfhixu tzzkcu.” you say. “Shoot me.”

THE END