Vox Mentis

Fuck it, run him over. You'll blend right in.

Fuck it, run him over. You'll blend right in.

The orderly breaks into a run at you. You contemplate running but instead opt for waiting for the orderly to get close enough to punch in the face and disarm. This is an option because the orderly is a thin teenager who plays a lot of video games, while you are not. You look at the bone saw, but you can’t fathom a use for it, and the orderly starts to get up, so you punch him in the jaw hard enough to keep him down. Then you do run, because more people are emerging from the hospital’s rear, nurses with whom you had frequently shared coffee, and, in one case, a bed, and you don't want to face them.

Not die, hopefully

When you return to the traffic bridge, Elise has vanished. You turn in a circle, cursing. You don’t know what to do. Ahead, the street looks clear. To the left, a small group wanders in your direction, one limping. To the right, not far, a woman lies motionless in the gutter. In the streetlights, her hair looks yellow. She is the only thing in this landscape you can understand, so you go to her. You kneel and check her vitals. Beth McClintock, the town librarian. Her hair is sticky with dark fluid. Your fingers find a depression in her skull about the size of a tennis ball. You sit back on your haunches and exhale.

The group approaches you. You recognize the local math teacher, his two daughters, and a woman who runs a little grocery store. Two teenage boys support the limper, who is a broad-shouldered guy you know as Derek Woodhouse. You've pumped Derek’s stomach twice in the past six months. Both times, he looked better than this. You can tell without touching him that Derek has a shattered pelvis.

“Thank Christ,” says the schoolteacher. “Danny, you have to help us.”

“What’s happening?” says the grocery store owner. She's clutching her necklace, a crucifix. “Oh God, is that Beth?”

“We have to get Derek to the hospital.”

“Car came out of fucking nowhere,” says one of the teenage males. “Fucking took aim. Then it reversed over him.”

“Hnk,” says Derek.

“We’ve gotta get him to the hospital, Danny.”

“You can’t take him to the hospital,” you say. “It’s not safe.”

“Then where? What should we do?” One of the schoolteacher’s daughters tries to push Derek’s hair out of his eyes. Derek coughs and spits meatily.

“Find a place you can lay him still and barricade yourself in until this is over.”

“Until what is over?” says the girl. You can see she's looking for a reason to give in to complete hysteria, and this could be it. “Until what?”

“He plays footy,” says one of Derek’s friends. You don’t know what possible reason the kid has for volunteering this, then realize he's saying it's a tragedy. Derek plays football and now will probably never be the same again. It's the worst thing the kid can imagine.

“He’s got internal bleeding, I think,” says the math teacher. “What do you think, Danny?”

“Is that Beth?”

“Yes,” you say. “She’s dead, and I’m sorry, Derek, but nobody can go near the hospital. They’re killing people.”

They begin to argue with you. You look for Elise. You're becoming increasingly nervous about where she is.

“Police!” says the girl. She breaks from the group and runs down the road, waving her arms, the sleeves of her dress flapping. A cop car is sailing toward the group, its lights dark, covered in dents. “Over here! Help!”

You call out to her and there's a hard, flat sound and the girl folds up and lies on the road. The cruiser continues toward you.

“What?” says the kid.

“Go,” you say. “Move. Run.”

The girl’s father, the schoolteacher, stares at her with his lips apart. In the streetlight, tiny visible hairs all over his face stand on end. You've seen this reaction once before, when a fellow paramedic helped you peel open a wrecked car to find her husband inside. You’d had to wrap her in a space blanket, because she froze. She literally froze. Like she’d fallen into ice. It had been the strangest thing you’d ever seen.

“Jess?” says the kid. He's not calling. It's a question for the group. The cop car draws closer.

“Run,” you say, and shove the schoolteacher. You pull the other girl, the dark-haired one, by her wrist. There's another flat retort. You're tempted to see who that was, the father or possibly Derek Woodhouse, but it makes no difference. The girl screams and twists in your grip in a way that means it could be either, and then you do turn, and see the cop with one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting his service revolver on the crook of his arm, his eyes moving between the road and the people he's shooting.

The grocery store woman trills like a bird and sits heavily. The father is already spread out, arms folded, as if he’s carefully laid down. One of the kids has fled but the other is dragging Derek, the one who said he plays footy, and you shout at him to run but of course the kid doesn’t. You trip on the curb, which is a handy reminder to keep an eye on where the fuck you're going, losing your grip on the dark-haired girl. She begins to walk back toward the cop car, her arms out, in order to accomplish what, you don’t know. You spit a curse and go back for her. Then you see Elise.

She's walking down the center of the road. You can’t see her face because the streetlight is behind her. There is an appeal in her posture, which you first think is directed at you, then realized it isn’t, because she's angling toward the police cruiser.

The dark-haired girl spins in a half circle. You run by her falling body. You leap onto the hood of the police cruiser, skid across, and hit the tarmac on the other side. You reach Elise and throw her over your shoulder. You hear the whine of the cop’s power window behind you. The closest shelter is a bakery, a squat weatherboard much too far away. You jag, to put a degree of difficulty into it for the cop.

“Put me down,” says Elise.

Ten feet from the bakery door, something bites your ear. The glass door shatters. You keep going and crash through it, tripping and sprawling onto the tiled floor, feeling bullets everywhere, losing Elise. The interior is lit by a refrigerated drinks cabinet. “El.” You crawl toward her in the corpse light. “Elise.” You find her hand and get to your feet and haul her up.

“I want to die.”

Leave, lock a door if you must, just don't even give them the time of day.

“No,” you say. You drag her into the back room. Your hip clips a table; a stack of baking trays clatters to the ground. You find the rear door and discover it's bolted in several different ways, some of which require keys. You release Elise and shake it. “Fuck,” you say. You abandon the door for a smaller, metallic one, with a horizontal handle like a refrigerator’s. Chill air spills around your ankles. You pull Elise inside and close the door and grope in darkness for a lock. But there isn’t one, of course. You don’t put a lock on the inside of a cool room. The door doesn’t even open the right way - that is, in a way you can block. You grip the handle and plant your feet and curse. Maybe the cop won’t chase you. There are plenty of other targets. You listen, straining for sound. The door is so thick, the cop could be right outside. You relax your muscles, for the moment when you'll need them. There's a snuffling. Elise is crying. “El,” you say. “Be quiet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Quiet.”

She keeps crying. “I did something really bad.”

“I know. Shut up.” You think you hear something outside. But it could be anything. It's incredibly cold. Too cold for a permanent hiding place.

“I should have been able to stop it.”

The handle turns in your hands. You resist. After a moment, the opposing force vanishes. You wait in the dark. Something hits the door, hard and sharp. A bullet. Then two more. You hold the handle with one hand and flail in the dark with the other, trying to push Elise down. A sizzling smell reaches you. Light bleeds through three holes in the door. You didn’t think a steel-lined refrigerator door would be bulletproof, but the confirmation is still disappointing. You find Elise’s arm and yank it. She squawks but then you have her wrapped in one arm while you hold the handle with the other, hoping the cop will please not shoot off your hand. For a while there is only your breathing. You hear the cop moving around, doing who knows what.

“Does it wear off?” you say. “The word?”

“Not until they complete the command.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“Why are you trying to save me?” You ignore this because it's a stupid question. Something outside goes: fwick. “I thought you didn’t love me.”

“Quiet.” You see a flicker. Only a glimmer through the holes in the door, but it's enough to recognize: The cop is setting the bakery on fire.

“I got everything wrong.” In the dark, she cries brokenly.

You can see it in your mind: the cop hanging back, leaning against a door frame, gun aimed at the cool room. The second you pop open this door, the cop will shoot you. Maybe the fire won’t catch. Maybe the cop will give up and go away. Or maybe not. Because it isn’t KILL A BUNCH OF PEOPLE, is it? It isn’t KILL AS MANY AS IS CONVENIENT.

“There’s something in my eye,” Elise says.

You can hear crackling. The cool room is growing brighter. “El, I need to open the door.” She has her head in her hands. “Elise. Listen to me. Wait here until I call for you. Understand? Do not move until I call your name.” Is there anything out there you can use as cover? Something you can throw? Yes. Yes, you'll hurl a baking tray at the cop, and it will deflect the bullets, and dazzle him with its reflection of the flames, which of course you'll have to run through, and then you'll disarm the cop with your superior hand-to-hand combat training. “Are you fucking listening to me?” You resist the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

“Please just leave me, Danny.”

You can feel the heat through the walls. The cop must have moved by now. Retreated to the storefront, at least, maybe right out to the street. The greatest danger now is waiting too long, until there's nowhere to go except into an inferno. You release the handle and pry Elise’s hands from her face. For a moment, you think you really do see something in her eye, but it's only the dancing reflection of flames. “El. You are pissing me off. But I will never leave you. Ever. So stop talking. We’re getting out of here.” You wind your fingers into hers. “Ready?” She stares at you. “Sure you are,” you say. You scoop her up. Her arms around your neck are stiff as poles. You take a breath, watching the door, the flames flickering behind it. You kiss her, because fuck it, you're probably about to die. Then you kick open the door and the fire roars like a living thing and you run into it.

~

You wake in a bed. No. Wrong. On a stretcher. Something portable. You're in a room full of stretchers and it smells bad. Burned. Wait. That's you. You're singed. You put your hand to your hair and it feels very wrong.

The room is very bright. Beyond wide windows, sunlight leaps from the chrome of half a dozen muscular vehicles, Humvees and trucks and Jeeps. Beyond those is endless rolling earth. You're encircled by a colorful strip of paper on which are letters and numbers and puppies and dinosaurs and elephants. The walls are lined with posters about Brazil and global warming. Beneath the windows are desks, all pushed together. It's a classroom. You're burned, on a stretcher, in a classroom.
“Oh,” says a woman. “You’re awake.”

You don’t know this woman. Which is odd, because you know everyone in Broken Hill. Also, the woman is wearing fatigues, like a soldier. She comes closer and checks your tubes. You have tubes. They run from the insides of your elbows to plastic bags on a trolley beside the bed.

“How do you feel?” Before you can stop her, the woman peels up one of your eyelids with her thumb. “You’re in Menindee. It’s a little town outside Broken Hill.” A patch on her khakis said: NIELSEN, J. “We’re using the school as a hospital. Are you in pain?”

Your hands were wrapped in bandages. Like big mittens. There are three other stretcher beds in the room but none are occupied. You try to sit up. You remember fire, smoke. Danny carrying you through it. You passed out. Then you were flying, skimming across the earth, and bouncing, being held by Danny on a dirt bike. You saw kangaroos fleeing flames. “Where’s Danny?”

“The man who brought you in?”

“Yes,” you say. “Yes, yes.”

“He’s up the hall. They’re working on him.”

“Is he all right?”

“Just relax,” says Nielsen.

You almost ask, Are you a dog person or a cat person? Because you really want to know if Nielsen is telling the truth. “Who else?”

“Who else what?”

“Made it,” you say. “Out.” You're a little freaked out by the empty stretcher beds.

Nielsen doesn’t answer. You feel ice in your heart, a thin sliver, like a stiletto. You put your face in your mitten-hands. Your eye hurts. “I’ll tell them you’re conscious,” says Nielsen. “For now, rest.”

Once Nielsen leaves, you climb off of your stretcher. There are tubes to take care of, which you do with your teeth, because your mitten-hands are useless. You're in a green smock, which flaps at your ankles and admits a a breeze at the back. Beneath this you suspect underpants and bandages. You feel padded. You peer out of a glass panel on the classroom door and see nobody so you open it. A passing soldier points at you and says, “Get back inside,” not slowing, and you say, “Okay,” and close the door and wait until he's gone. The hallway floor is warm. The adjoining classrooms are empty. Farther down the hall, behind a window almost completely obscured by posters, you see soldiers wearing face masks around a gurney. On the gurney lies someone wrapped in odd gray packages and bandages. The person’s face isn’t visible but you can see a forearm, blackened and blistered, and know it as Danny’s. You cover your mouth.

One of the soldiers in a face mask sees you and gestures, and Nielsen turns and frowns at you. You go to the door and try to open it with your elbows. Nielsen pushes it open. “Back to bed,” Nielsen says in a low, no-nonsense voice, almost poet-like, which gives you a small start. “Bloody hell, did you remove your drip?”

“Let me sit with him,” you say, but without the baritone or the persuasiveness, and Nielsen takes your arm and marches you down the hall. “Please,” you say. But Nielsen does not engage. She takes you back to your classroom and deposits you on the bed. “I want to sit with him.”

“He’ll be okay,” Nielsen says. “Stop worrying.”

For some reason this catches you unawares and you begin to shake. You can’t even say thank you.

“You love him?”

“Yes,” you say. “Yes, yes.”

“He was half-dead when he made it to the perimeter. Hard to believe he kept going. He wanted to save you very much.” Nielsen gently forces you to recline. “Rest. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

You let yourself be forced. “Okay.”

“Everything will be fine,” Nielsen says, and sunlight flashes from a car outside the windows. It's a low black sedan, very different from the other vehicles, its windows tinted dark. It pulls alongside a truck and stops.

You sit up. “How long have I been here?”

“About four hours.”

“I need to see Danny.” The sedan’s door opens and a woman in a suit emerges, pushing back her hair. You've seen this woman once before, years ago. Her name is Plath. “Are you a dog person or a cat person?”

“Excuse me?”

“Dogs or cats? Which do you like more?”

“Dogs.” Nielsen rises. “Now sleep.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Mauve,” said Nielsen, one hand on the door, and there is no time for further questions. You've spent a grand total of about five minutes with Nielsen, and there are twenty-odd sets to which she could feasibly belong, but you've spent time piecing together psychographics from first principles and have a strong feeling about fifty-nine.

“Tecto rillia gasom tav,” you say. “Come back here.”

Nielsen swivels in mid-step. “Thank you,” you say. “Thank you, thank you; take me to Danny.”

~

You follow Nielsen back to the other classroom and approach the gurney while Nielsen invents convenient excuses for why the doctors or medics or whoever these face-masked people are to leave. Nielsen says Danny will be fine, but he's swathed in layers and layers and the only parts you can see are swollen and red. His eyes are beneath soft white circles and you want these off. “Wake him up,” you tell Nielsen. “But please be careful.”

You reach for his fingers, which are poking out from gauze, but of course your hands are encased as well. “Danny, can you hear me? We’re going to get out of here.” Nielsen finishes pushing fluid into Danny’s drip and you set her to unwrapping your mitten-hands. They look worse than you expected: Your fingers are cracked and blackened, the crevices between them oozing pink fluid. You take Danny’s hand and it hurts but it feels better, too. “When he’s awake, help me get him to a car. We don’t want anyone to see us. You have to get us out of here and not let anyone stop us, understand?”

“Yes,” says Nielsen.

He makes a noise. You peel one of the white circles from his eyes and then the other. His eyes move beneath the lids. “Danny, wake up.”

The door opens. You turn. In the doorway stands a soldier you haven’t seen before, a young guy with a buzz cut. His eyes are focused and intent.

“Oh, shit,” you say. “Tecto rillia gasom tav, don’t let the guy near us.”

The soldier runs at you and Nielsen moves to intercept. They exchange flat, wordless blows and fall to the floor and Nielsen gets him in a headlock and begins to wind surgical tubing around his throat. You're surprised and impressed by Nielsen’s badassery. You return your attention to Danny. He's swimming somewhere beneath consciousness like he's under glass. “Danny, please wake up. You have to wake up. I can’t get you out of here by myself.”

Nielsen and the soldier crash into a trolley, scattering surgical equipment. The soldier gets free of Nielsen and his eyes fall on you. You abruptly see that this isn’t going to work, your whole escape plan; this guy is going to knock out Nielsen and throttle you and Danny, or not even that - the noise alone will bring more people than you can handle, people and soldiers and Plath. You feel panic. “Kill him!” you say, because maybe Nielsen isn’t going full throttle. It seems to make a difference, because Nielsen picks herself up and punches the soldier in the throat in a way that drops him immediately. “Kill everyone who tries to stop us,” you say, and something in your mind leaps, and you realize what you said.

You feel undone. You feel the realization sinking into you: that you've finally done it, found a way to screw up so badly there's no way back. You've gotten a star in your eye. There are who knows how many people dead in Broken Hill and Thoreau put instructions in your head and you carried them out. You can’t believe, in your core, that you aren’t responsible. You killed people and now there is a star in your eye that wants you to kill more.

“I’m sorry,” you tell Danny. You begin to cry, partly for yourself and partly for Danny, who tried so hard. Nielsen and the soldier grunt and gasp. You lean over and kiss Danny on each eye. “I love you.”

His eyes move rapidly, as if in REM sleep. You hesitate. “Danny,” you say. You see a response, a tiny neuroelectrical spark. It reminds you of DC, when you sought out examples of psychographic sets and tested word fragments on them. Back then you had reverse-engineered entire words.

Danny is immune. But maybe he's only immune to the words you know about. Maybe he's nothing more than a slightly different kind of machine, a psychographic set of one, which the Organization hasn’t targeted only because they don’t know about it.

“Ko,” you say. You watch his eyelids. “Ka. Toh.” You know him very well. You understand which movements are his. “Kik.” A muscle above his lip jumps. You almost gasp. Your mind moves with possibilities, sifting conjugations. “Kik,” you say again, to be sure.

The soldier gargles. You glance down and see that his face is purple. Nielsen is choking the life from him. You return your attention to Danny, ignoring everything except the forty-eight muscles around his eyes. You feed him sounds. You build your way to an attention word and that is a good start but not enough. You don’t know how much time is passing. You focus on the words.

None of this is going to save you. You know that. It's too late for you, and has been from the moment the door to the paramedic van bounced open and reflected the bareword. But it's not too late for Danny.

When you're done, you touch his face. “Danny,” you whisper. “Kikkfhk ktaffkx kfhixu tzzkcu.”

He changes. You've seen people fall under compromise a hundred times but never him and a part of you dies when you see it, his face slack, his mind open and waiting for instruction, his soul reduced to machinery. You could say run away with me and do everything I ever tell you and love me forever and he would. You'd be loved by the thing you made him into.

“Forget all of this,” you tell him. “Get away from here, forget me, forget you ever lived in Broken Hill. Become someone else. Kikkfhk ktaffkx kfhixu tzzkcu., forget me.”

You stumble away from the gurney. You can’t bear to look at him. Nielsen is standing there like a statue, which surprises you. The buzz-cut soldier is on the floor, not moving.

“Nielsen,” you say. “Thank you.”

Nielsen waits.

“Take him away,” you say. “Keep him safe.”

~

Once Nielsen has put Danny into a Jeep and you've watched it speed away into the dust, you return to the classroom in which you awoke and search around for a marker. Classrooms always have markers. You find a drawer full of colorful ones and take a fistful and go looking for a bathroom. There are many people running around and shouting, but they're mostly outside, drawn by Nielsen’s departure. You don't see Plath and are concerned about that, because the worst thing that can happen right now is Plath finding you.

You find a girls’ restroom with a long counter and low sinks, for children. You grip a blue marker in your fist, like a toddler, and begin to scrawl on the mirror. The first word is vartix. This left you slack-jawed in your dormitory room once, but you were a good student and did your exercises and are not seventeen anymore, so you manage to get through it, pausing between letters to blink at the ceiling and clear your mind. You complete vartix and keep your eyes averted from it while you write the second word, and the third, and fourth, and then you have to gag into the sink for a while. But you did it. You pick up the marker again, and, keeping your head down, add: DIE.

You close your eyes. You take two steps backward. You breathe. It will only work if you lower your defenses. I am cared for, you tell yourself. I am safe. You feel your muscles loosen. You swallow. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. You begin to do it and squeeze them shut again. Do it, you tell yourself. Do it, you bitch - you know if they find you they’ll make you tell them about Danny! Do it! You deserve it! Then you begin to cry.

You grope toward the counter and find the marker. You keep your eyes away from the command words and locate DIE and add a D. Before that, you write DANNY. Before you can change your mind, you walk away and then you look back.

~

You're sitting on tiles. Bathroom tiles. Your mind feels bruised. You have the feeling that someone has just compromised you.

Menindee. Of course. Danny brought you here. He dragged you out of Broken Hill and saved your life. But then-

“Oh, no,” you say. Danny died. They weren't able to save him. You saw him die on the gurney. A wail bursts out of you and you force it down because Plath is out there. The whole Organization is probably looking for you. You close your fist around your grief and make it anger. There will be time for grief later. The point here is that Danny had wanted you to live. You have to survive. You'll flee, and hide, and live, because you're good at that. Then you will find a way to return to Thoreau and make your vengeance terrible.

But first. You get to your feet and try to think how the hell you're going to get out of here.

PART FOUR

You shoulder open the emergency room doors. After the darkness, the sunlight feels like an explosion. You gasp air. You make it to the white paramedic van and lean against it. In one hand you have the thing. It was dark inside, but you didn’t have trouble spotting it. A piece of wood, about the size of a book, with a piece of yellowed paper speared to it. You left the paper in there. The wood is heavier than it looks and frigid to the touch, like it wants to leech the heat from your body. There's a symbol on it that looks like nothing you've seen before, and the more you look at it, the more something in your gut twists, and your eyes water, until you look away. But it doesn't change you. It's true. You're immune.

You head back to the Valiant. Then you stop, because you can’t show this thing to Eliot. Eliot was very clear about that. You glance around for something to wrap it in. The doors of the paramedic van are open. You peer inside and find a small towel and shake the sand out of it.

When you reach the car, Eliot’s eyes are closed. You pull open the door. Eliot’s chest hitches and his eyes peel open. “I did it,” you say. “I got the word.”
Eliot blinks.

“Right here,” you say, raising the towel, but Eliot’s eyes squeeze shut. “It’s okay! I covered it up. It’s a kind of symbol on a-” Eliot’s head jerks left and right. “I’m not telling you details! I’m describing the general kind of object!”

“Ssss,” says Eliot.

“I know what happened here. Why everyone died. There was something stuck to the word that-”

“Ssss!”

“Okay! I’m just saying, if you look at this thing, you won’t die. It’s not fatal anymore.” This doesn’t seem to make any difference to Eliot. “You look terrible. Have you been drinking the water?” You spot a bottle near Eliot’s feet, the lid off. The mat is wet. “Jesus, you haven’t.” You lean over Eliot, looking for the other bottles. The smell in the car is very bad. “Drink.” You twist the bottle’s top and hold it to Eliot’s lips. Eliot’s throat clicks. His Adam’s apple bobs. When water spills down his chin, you lower the bottle and wait until Eliot no longer seems to be drowning. Then you say, “More,” and tip it forward again.

“Gguh,” says Eliot.

“I have an idea. We drive to a hospital. A hospital with living people in it. Then I use this thing to make them help you. Right? I just word them. We tell them to help you but not tell anyone we’re there.” Eliot is leaking water again, so you put away the bottle. “Good plan?”

Eliot’s head turns left then right.

“Oh,” you say. “What’s your plan, then? Because it’s pretty obvious to me that you’re dying. And we both know I don’t have a hope in hell against the people who are after us all by myself, even if I do have a magic word. So it’s either a hospital or I try a little amateur surgery on you myself with whatever I can find lying around. Do you want me to do that?” Eliot says nothing. “I’m not doing that. I’m getting you to a hospital.” You close the door and jog around to the driver’s seat. “Keep drinking the water.”

You tuck the towel and its hidden package between the seats and turn the key. The engine clicks emptily. You blink. You forgot about the gas. You glance at Eliot and see Eliot looking at you with a complete lack of surprise.

What do you do?

Check the vehicles nearby for keys and take whatever works. If not that, get some tubing from the ambulance and siphon some gas out of it.

Jesus fucking christ.

...

Just do whatever honestly, I'm still a bit shook up after what happened with Elise. Fuck me.

Eliot's demanded so much of your cooperation, I think it's time to make him reciprocate?

Check the vehicles nearby for keys and take whatever works. If not that, get some tubing from the ambulance and siphon some gas out of it.

You study the roadway ahead, filled with bones and rusted metal. “I can find gas. I’ll be five minutes. Can you not die for five minutes?”

Eliot’s chin dropped.

“Don’t lie to me. If I have to, I will cut you open.”

“Ff,” says Eliot. “I. Fine.”

You eye him. But you won’t learn anything from Eliot’s face that Eliot does not want you to know. “Sure,” you say. “You’re fine.” You climb out of the car.

~

You find a dust-coated SUV with keys in the ignition and gas in the tank. This is a much better option than trying to reintroduce life to the disintegrating piece of shit that is the Valiant, so you climb in and steered around wrecked vehicles. The interior has an odd smell, which you try not to think about. When you get close enough to the Valiant, you put the SUV into neutral and jump out. Eliot seems to have deteriorated in the meantime: His skin is papery, his eyes unfocused. “Hey!” you say. “I found a better car.” You pull open Eliot’s door. “Throw your arm around me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You. Go. I. Stay.”

“No, that’s not what we’re doing. You’re coming with me. That’s the plan. We’re taking you to a hospital.”

“Bad. Plan,” says Eliot. “Gets you. Killed.”

“You have an alternative?”

“North. Two miles. Dirt road. Then. Cross-country. Forty miles. To blacktop. Town. Kikaroo. Then. Any way. You want.”

“Is there a hospital in Kikaroo? No. So we’re not doing that.”

“Must.”

“I tell you what. Look me in the eye, tell me you believe I can do this without you, and I’ll leave you here.”

Eliot eyes you.

“Unconvincing,” you say. “Put your goddamn arm around me.”

“No.”

“Get the fuck out of the car!”

“No.”

You lean in to grab him. Eliot’s head pivots to hit you in the nose: a small movement, but enough to knock you back, your vision flaring. “Mother fuck!” You turn in a circle. “You prick!”

Eliot's demanded so much of your cooperation, I think it's time to make him reciprocate?

You lunge across Eliot and grab the towel. “I’ll fucking make you!” You begin to unwrap it.

“No.”

The intensity of Eliot’s tone stops you. “Then-”

“Never.” For a moment, you think Eliot is climbing out of the car. But he's only leaning. “Never. On me.”

“Okay,” you say, intimidated. “Point made, fine.” But then Eliot slumps back in his seat, becoming less terrifying and more fragile, and you change your mind. “You know what? I am going to use it.” You peel the towel from the petrified wood. It catches on a sharp protruberance and rips. A noise comes out of Eliot, something halfway between a snarl and a moan, and his head turns away. You have to twist him back to face the bareword, then realize Eliot’s eyes are closed. “Goddammit.” You try to thumb up his eyelids while keeping a grip on the word. “Open up!” You force open one eye. The pupil dilates and the fight drains from Eliot’s body. “Okay, now,” you say. “Get out of the car.”

Eliot’s hand shoots out and grips the door frame. You retreat a step. Eliot’s other hand comes out and twitches around like a spider until it finds purchase. His body begins to shake.

“Are you, uh, okay there?” you say.

“Harrrgh,” says Eliot. His expression is very intense. He's trying to pull himself out of the car, you realize. Straining, but lacking the strength to do it. You move forward to help and realize that Eliot’s entire body is vibrating, his muscles tight bundles of wire.

“There,” you say. Eliot straightens. He throws out a foot in a jerky, searching motion. You release him. Eliot falls to the pavement. “Oh, shit! Sorry!” Eliot’s hands scrabble at the concrete. “Jesus! Eliot! Let me help you.”

“Ghee.”

You wrap your arms around Eliot’s torso. “Come on. This way.” After four steps, Eliot vomits. His eyes are wide and staring, the pupils milky. He looks dead. “Eliot, I’m sorry. But it’s just a little farther.” Eliot’s foot slides out and you maneuver it to touch the ground. “That’s it.” Eliot makes a noise like it might become a cough one day. “Please, Eliot.” Eliot's not going to make it. He's already dead, and you're making him walk to an SUV. “I’m so sorry. But I can’t let you die.”

“Haargh.”

“Don’t die! Do not die!” You're still holding the bareword and try to wave it in Eliot’s face. Whether Eliot can even see anymore, you don’t know. “Don’t die.”

Eliot’s body convulses. Flecks of spittle fly from his mouth.

“Fuck!” you say. You're inching toward the paramedic van, and you wonder if there is a sedative in there, something in a syringe, which you can use to knock Eliot out. Then Eliot will stop being so much like a reanimated corpse. “Come with me!”

You prop Eliot against the rear of the van and Eliot keels over. You climb inside anyway and begin ransacking drawers. The sensation that you've been here before descends again, more strongly this time. You can feel memories scratching at the underside of your mind, just out of reach. But you don’t have time for that. Eliot is lying in the dust and you have to get him to the SUV. You should use a fireman’s carry. Why have you been shuffling along, holding Eliot by the arm? That's stupid. You want to move someone, you put them over your shoulders. Everyone knows that. Anyone in emergency services has practiced in drills a hundred times. You look around the van. This vehicle isn’t just familiar. It's yours.

You crawl past the trolley and into the cabin, dropping into the driver’s seat. You put your hands on the wheel. Eliot is bleeding to death back there. But it's calling to you. You have the feeling you're a paramedic.

You pop open the compartment between the seats and rummage through the junk inside. Among the loose change and plastic wrappers is a yellowed newsletter. You glance at it and almost toss it aside before realizing the picture on the front is of you. You look different. You're standing with a bunch of other people in front of the emergency room. Everything is clean and bright. Your hair is long. You have a tan. Your shoulders are broader. You're relaxed in a way that you can’t ever remember feeling. You read the caption and count the figures from left to right, to be sure. DANNY WALKER. That's you. Your name was Danny.

Memories are flooding back. What do you do?

Do as you did when you were a paramedic; save the emotional fallout when there isn't a life on the line.

Assess the situation with your restored knowledge. Is there really any saving Eliot?

Try to think of the first thing you remember as Nick

These dannies were made for walking
and that's just what he'll do
someday this danny is gonna
walk all over you

MASH A SYRINGE OF ADRENALINE IN ELIOT'S BUTT

Try to think of the first thing you remember as Nick

Your head is spinning. Memories are hard to grasp right now. You don't remember anything specific... an airport, maybe.

Do as you did when you were a paramedic; save the emotional fallout when there isn't a life on the line.

Assess the situation with your restored knowledge. Is there really any saving Eliot?

How about you remember the bullshit you had to go through getting into the town? I mean sure you could probably just scrape by with getting to Menindee or even Mildura in time but with helicopters falling out the sky around you and the authorities lying in wait on the roads? Forget about it. What could you possibly do? Strap the word to the roof and paint "don't harm us" on the van? Would that even work?

First things first though stop the bleeding.

These dannies were made for walking
and that's just what he'll do
someday this danny is gonna
walk all over you

MASH A SYRINGE OF ADRENALINE IN ELIOT'S BUTT

Behind you, Eliot coughs. You think, That guy has lost a lot of blood. You blink. For some reason, you haven’t attended to Eliot’s gunshot wound. You're letting him bleed out, apparently. You feel bewildered. Why had you let Eliot go so long?

You climb back through the van and manhandle Eliot into the bed. Eliot groans. That's a positive sign. Well. It's a sign. You ransack the shelves for a scalpel, surgical gloves, dressing, and saline, all of which are in their assigned places, roll Eliot on his side, stick the scalpel between your teeth, and force Eliot’s knee up and his arm over. You cut away the shirt and there it is, an exit wound, big as your hand, pink and torn and oozing blood. You're appalled at yourself. Timely first aid would have saved this guy’s life. All you can do now is compress and close anything that looks like it's fountaining blood.

You insert a finger into Eliot’s lower intestine and gently lift. There is a sucking noise, a glunk, and a small sea of Eliot flows onto the back of your hand, which is bad, about the worst thing you could see, because that means Eliot has holes. To locate the source you have to force four fingers in there, and Eliot makes a terrible sound. You do what you can. It's not much but maybe enough. You begin to dress the wound.

As you do, memories burst in your head like popping corn. Tiny, irrelevant things. The look on a girl’s face. The smell of earth in the morning. But they are coming. Squeezing past whatever barrier was erected in your head. Something important comes to you, and you pause.

Eliot breathes. He's unconscious. His face is gray. The problem is too much of Eliot is spread across two different vehicles. Eliot is on your shirt and his coat and on the floor of two different vehicles. He's about a hair’s breadth away from hypovolemic shock and there's nothing you can do about that. You look out the back of the van at the emergency room. Twenty feet from a hospital that's full of blood product, and every pack will be black and hard as stone.

You lean forward. “Eliot.” You twist Eliot’s ear. This is extremely painful, if you do it properly. “Eliot, you motherfucker.”

Eliot groans.

“Eliot.” You put your lips to Eliot’s ear. “Eliot.”

“Uh,” Eliot says.

“What’s your blood type?”

~

You open your eyes. There's a ceiling. Tiled. A false ceiling: the kind that has pipes and wiring snaking through it. You don’t know where you are, or when.
You hear a crack. You tense. Your abdomen hurts. There's a lot of pain in your body. You try to raise your head and your vision swims. You see pale blue walls and a cracked ceiling. A corded phone implanted into one wall. Chairs, a bedside table. A bed, for that matter, in which you are lying. The air smells of dust.

Oh, Christ, you think. I’m in Broken Hill.

You explore your surroundings with your hands. Something tugs on your arm, which turns out to be a tube. You're attached to something. You lever yourself up your pillow, inch by inch, and see a hat stand, draped with tubing and three bags. One of the bags bulges with clear fluid, one has dark fluid, and one appears to have contained dark fluid until recently but is now mostly empty. You feel bewildered, because you don’t remember any of this.

A second crack. This time you identify it as a gunshot. A rifle. Your thoughts begin to order themselves. You drove to Broken Hill with the Exception, Nick. A farmer shot you. When you realized the wound was fatal, you told Nick to leave you. But Nick didn’t want to. It was one of those frustrating situations where you needed to convince Nick of something but couldn’t, because the guy is an exception. Also, stupidly stubborn. You passed out before this was really resolved. It seems that in the meantime, Nick has saved your life.

You hear footsteps. You lie still until you're sure they're approaching, then begin to feel around for a weapon. As you see it, there are two plausible scenarios. In one, Nick has driven away with the bareword, as you instructed, and the footsteps belong to someone from the Organization, coming to kill you. In the other, they belong to Nick, who was too cowardly to leave, and instead is hanging around hoping you'll wake up and tell him what to do. Either way, you feel the need to shoot someone.

The deadliest object you can see is the hat stand, which could possibly serve as a club. You tug at the covers to free your legs. You haven’t progressed very far with this when a man appears in the doorway. The man has a rifle slung over his shoulder and for a second you don’t recognize him.

“Lie down,” Nick says. He crosses the room and peers out the window.

You sink into the pillow, crushed by the weight of your own bitter disappointment. You shouldn’t have expected any different. Nick has done nothing you have asked of him from the moment you met. You were foolish to think he might start now just because everything depends on it. You pluck at the blanket. “We... leave. Now.”

Nick ignores you. He's looking at something outside. You can’t tell what.

“Listen, you... fuck,” you say. “Woolf... is coming.” You try to say more, but it degenerates into coughing. When you open your eyes, Nick is holding a cup of water. You take it. There's something different about Nick’s manner. The reason you didn’t recognize Nick before: Nick is different somehow. You have the odd, discombobulating thought: That isn’t Nick Parsons.

The Nick-person watches you drink without expression. When you finish, he says, “Lie down.”

“Have to-”

“You’re about to pass out again,” says the Nick-person. “Lie down.”

You feel the truth of this but fight it anyway. “Woolf.”

“You mean Elise. Elise Jackson.”

Oh, God, you think.

“Don’t think you mentioned that. You talked a lot about Woolf. But you never mentioned that I knew her. Knew her pretty well, as it turns out.”

“I... can... explain.”

“Yeah,” says Nick. “You’ll explain. But first, you’re going to sleep.” He hefts the rifle. “I need to shoot some guys.”

What guys? you try to say. But unconsciousness gets you first.

~

You fall into sleep, but not far. You remember a phone ringing in the dark. It was a while ago. But you were lying down, like this, feeling Broken Hill all around you.

~

You open your eyes and see curtains. A bedside clock. Hotel, you remember. I’m in a bed, in a hotel, in Sydney. The phone rings and rings but you don’t move in case it dissolves, revealing that you are back on that road, your face in the dirt, lying still.

You pick up the phone. “Your wake-up call, Mr. Eliot. It’s four thirty.”

“Thank you.” You place the receiver back on the cradle, carefully, and it does not dissolve. You rise and draw back the curtains. Beyond is the city: the famous Sydney Opera House wreathed in light; behind that, the hulking steel bridge. A few boats on the bay, lights bobbing. These things are comforting to you, the water, the steel, because they prove it's not three weeks ago, when Broken Hill died around you.

You shower and dress. A newspaper lies outside your hotel room door and you step over it. Downstairs, a limo idles for you, the bellhop already moving to open its door. The city’s winding streets slide by, tinted dark, then the bay, as you cross the bridge and navigate the zoo. On a narrow road, dark waves lap at rocks. The limousine finally draws to a halt beside a set of steep steps and the driver indicates that you should ascend them.

At the top is a colonial house. There's a terra-cotta plaza, lit by a dozen craftily concealed garden lights, with a small ornate table and chairs, and on one of these is Thoreau.

“Before you come any closer,” Thoreau says, “take a look at the water.”

You turn to look. The bay is a black mirror; you're not sure what you're supposed to notice. You turn back to Thoreau.

“It’s good to see you.” Thoreau has risen silently while your back was turned and is now coming at you with a hand outstretched. You take it. As always, Thoreau is about as readable as a wooden fence. Within the Organization, there is conjecture as to whether he’s had cosmetic surgery to paralyze his face. You tend to think yes, because you know Thoreau has a personal surgeon, but occasionally you see a contracting procerus or occipitofrontalis and doubt yourself. “How are you?”

“I was briefly paralyzed three weeks ago,” you say. “Since then, I’ve been fine.”

Thoreau gestures to a seat. “No lingering effects?”

“Not since sunrise on the second day.”

“As she instructed. Fascinating. To be honest, I remain shocked that a poet of your caliber could succumb to it.”

“‘It.’” You sit. “Let’s call it what it is. A bareword.”

“Apparently so.”

“You’ll excuse me,” you say, “but I’m feeling somewhat put upon.”

“How so?”

“You sent me to Broken Hill without telling me what I was dealing with.”

“I believe I told you it was high-testing.”

“There’s high-testing,” you say, “and then there’s that thing.”

There is silence. “Well,” says Thoreau, “obviously its efficacy took us by surprise.”

A woman appears and begins to generate tea and coffee. You wait. When she leaves, you say, “Are we going to talk plainly?”

Thoreau spreads his palms.

“You arrived in Broken Hill within hours. Clearly, you were nearby. Clearly, information has been kept from me. I want to know why. Because I’m having trouble understanding what I did to deserve less trust than Plath.”

“What was it like?”

“What was what like?” you say, although you know.

“Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light.”

“It was like being fucked in the brain.”

“I wonder if you can be more specific.”

“You had this thing in DC. I’m sure you have plenty of data from those poor fucks you put through the labs.”

“Some. But I wish to hear it from you.”

You look out at the black water. “Regular compromise feels like sharing the cockpit. Like there’s someone else in there with you, flipping switches behind your back. This gave me no sensation of being able to regain control. None at all. It felt like being worn. By something primal.”

Moments pass. “Well,” says Thoreau. “For that I apologize. It was not my intention to sacrifice you. Indeed, I selected you precisely because I consider you my most able colleague, and most likely to stop her. As for why I kept my whereabouts from you, I confess that was insurance against the possibility that Woolf would turn you against me. A selfish decision. But I have no wish to square off against you, Eliot. The very idea terrifies me.”

You let this pass. In the distance, an animal, unidentifiable, makes a very Australian sound. “So we have a bareword.”

“The first in eight hundred years,” Thoreau says. “It’s rather exciting.”

“Where is it now?”

Thoreau shrugs slightly. “Where she left it.”

“Pardon me?”

“We haven’t recovered it,” Thoreau says. “It’s still in the hospital somewhere, apparently.”

“Apparently?”

“Local authorities have sent in several teams, none of which have made it out. I presume it’s the word that’s killing them.”

You take a moment to compose yourself. “It’s surprising to me that you haven’t taken all necessary steps to recover it. I cannot express how surprising that is.”

“Mmm,” says Thoreau. He gazes into the darkness awhile. “Let me ask you a question. If the word is so powerful, why did those who wielded it fall? For they did fall; the stories are united on that. In every case, the appearance of a bareword is followed by a Babel event, in which rulers are overthrown and a common tongue abandoned. In modern terms, it would be like losing English. Imagine the sum total of our organization’s work, gone. Our entire vocabulary wiped out. And yet apparently this has happened. Apparently it happens following each discovery of a bareword, without fail. Is that not curious?”

“All empires fall, eventually.”

“But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires. Power corrupts, as the saying goes, and the bareword, Eliot, is not only absolute power, but worse: It is unearned. I need do nothing to possess it other than pick it up. This troubles me. I ask myself: If I seize the bareword, do I remain as I am? Or does it corrupt me?”

“I have no idea,” you say. “But I’m pretty certain we can’t leave it in the fucking desert.”

Thoreau is silent.

You lean forward. “Bring it back home. Seal it up. Christ, sink it in concrete. Bury it for another eight hundred years.”

Thoreau glances away.

“We don’t need it,” Eliot says. “Unless you have an urge to build a tower.”

“There is another issue. Woolf escaped.”

You close your eyes. It's unprofessional but you need to do it. “How is that possible?”

“She’s quite resourceful,” Thoreau says. “As I believe you know.”

“The newspapers said nobody made it out alive.”

“Surely you didn’t trust them.”

“Where is she?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea?”

“As I said,” says Thoreau, “resourceful. She managed to get someone out, too.”

“Who?”

“Presumably, the man she went back for.”

“Danny?”

“Yes, that name sounds familiar.”

“So let me get this straight,” you say. “There’s a bareword in Broken Hill. The whereabouts of the poet who used it to kill eighteen thousand people remain unknown. Am I missing anything?”

“No,” says Thoreau. “I believe that’s everything.”

“I feel I must be missing something,” you say, “since this situation is insane.”

Thoreau is silent.

“The bareword must be recovered. Woolf must be neutralized. Surely you see that this is indisputable.”

Thoreau tests his tea. “Yes. You are correct, of course. It shall be done.”

For some reason, you don't believe him. “I’ll find Woolf.”

“Actually, you will return to DC. Your flight is booked. You depart this afternoon.”

You shake your head. “I want to stay.”

“How are you, Eliot?”

“You already asked me.”

“I ask again, because this is the second time in our conversation that you have used the word want. Were you a third-year student, I would be appalled.”

“I’ll rephrase. It’s important to neutralize Woolf and I’m the best we have.”

“But how are you?” Thoreau’s eyes hold yours. “She has shaken you. I see it plainly. Was it the bareword? No. Something else. You were always too close to her. You developed affection. Why, I have no idea. But it clouded your judgment then and continues to do so now. You feel betrayed. You are infected with the desire to atone for your failure to stop her in Broken Hill.”

“That’s how you see what happened? As my failure?”

“Of course not. I speak of how you see it.” Thoreau gazes across the bay, to where soft fingers of sunlight edge over forested hills. “A tragedy like this, we all blame ourselves.”

Do we, you think. “I strongly believe I should stay.”

“That is why you cannot.” The sun blooms along the tree line of the far hill, throwing spears into the bay. “Ah,” says Thoreau. “Here we are. Watch.”

A menagerie of animal voices rise to greet the light, hooting and cawing. Where sunlight touches it, the water flares bright blue. It takes you a moment to realize that the glittering isn’t a visual effect: The waters are moving.

“Kingfish,” says Thoreau. “The light draws the plankton, the plankton draws smaller fish. The minnows draw the kingfish. More precisely, the kingfish are already there, waiting, since they are intelligent enough to perceive patterns and draw inferences.”

You don’t respond.

Thoreau sighs. “Stay. Search this country for Woolf, if that is what’s required to regain control of your conscience.”

You turn these words over. You can’t tell whether they are a kindness or a threat. But there is no denying how you feel. “Thank you,” you say.

~

You sense light. At first you think it's the sunlight on the bay. Then you open your eyes. The light is coming through windows. Between the windows stands Nick. Nick with a rifle. The walls are a pale hospital blue. You are in Broken Hill.

“Morning,” says Nick.

“What,” you say. “Time. Is it.” You begin to extract yourself from the sheets.

“You’re going to want to stay in that bed.”

“No. Definitely. Not.” You get your legs over the side. This causes some flaring of your vision and a looseness in your head, and you take a few moments to sit quietly, eyes closed. When you open them, Nick is pointing the rifle at something outside. You remember the noise you heard before: crack. “What are you doing?”

Nick doesn’t answer. He's holding that rifle very naturally, you notice. The barrel follows whatever Nick is tracking in a smooth line, like an extension of his body. Then it jerks. Nick steps back against the wall, pulling back the rifle’s bolt and reloading it with a cartridge from his jeans. “It’s about six in the morning.”

You feel disbelief. If that was true, Woolf would be here already. The town would be flooded with proses, or EQPs, or poets, or all three. It can’t be morning because you're still alive. “We have to leave.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Eliot.”

“We-” you begin, but Nick raises the rifle very quickly, and you fall silent. Nick’s body becomes completely still. The rifle jerks. You say, “Please tell me what you think you’re doing.”

“Shooting guys.”

“What guys?”

“Proses, I guess.”

“You’re shooting proses,” you say. “I see. When it’s a guy in a chopper and I ask you to shoot him, you hesitate. But now you’re shooting proses.”

Nick moves from one window to the other.

“There isn’t a limited supply,” you say. “If you haven’t figured that out. She’ll send as many as it takes.”

“Who? Elise?”

Oh, yes, you think. Nick has remembered. That's why he's handling a rifle like he’s used it all his life: because he has. “What do you think you’re doing, Nick?”

“Danny.”

“What?”

“My name is Danny Walker.”

“Right,” you say. “Of course, my mistake - what the fuck are you doing, Danny?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for...” Your mind reels. “For her?” Nick, or Danny, or whoever he is, doesn’t answer. But clearly yes. Clearly he has a terrible, ill-informed notion of the situation, which was going to get you both killed. It's your fault, of course. Like everything else. “She isn’t who you think.”

“Is she Elise Jackson?”

“Yes,” you say, “Woolf is Elise Jackson. But-”

“You understand why I have a problem with that. The whole thing with you wanting to kill her.”

“Are you aware you’re acting like a different person? As in, a completely different person?”

“I remembered.”

“Okay,” you say, “but I regret to inform you that what you’re remembering is no longer valid, because when you changed, so did she. She is no longer the girl you used to hang with in Broken Hill and share milk shakes and ride kangaroos or whatever the fuck. Now she kills people. She is coming to kill us.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would I lie about this?”

“Jane.”

You search for the words. “You think that’s why I hate Woolf? Because of Montana?”

Danny shrugs.

“Well, fuck!” you say. “You got me! Since she made me shoot the woman I loved, I’ve been carrying a grudge! Jesus fucking Christ!” You drag a hand across your brow. Danny regards you expressionlessly, and this absurdity, the stillness of the man you know as Nick Parsons while you rage, is not lost on you. You were a poet, once. “There is the little fact that Woolf was a murderous bitch who was hunting us both even before that.”

“You lied to me.”

“What was I supposed to do? You’re the only exception! I didn’t have the option of finding one who hadn’t slept with her. Nick, I get that you’re pissed. I do. But look at yourself. The instant you found out she used to be Elise, you gave up. I’m sorry I lied to you. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have to stop Woolf. We have to. What can I say to convince you?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to sit there and wait until she gets here.”

You sink into the bed. It's pointless. Every technique you know, useless, because Danny cannot be persuaded.

“What happened to her?”

“When?”

“After Broken Hill.”

You look at the ceiling. “She disappeared. I searched for months.”

“Then?”

“Then,” you say, “she came back.”

~

You catch the train to Blacktown and wander the streets until you find the Army Disposals store you read about the previous day. It's big, almost a warehouse, its aisles packed with quasi- and wannabe-military gear, camo netting hung across the ceiling. You squeeze between bikers and bushies and young men with large, clearly defined chips on large, clearly defined shoulders, occasionally picking up a bottle or knife or pack that seems interesting. In aisle three, a bearded man in jeans and a light T-shirt approaches you and offers assistance.

“Yes,” you say. “I’m looking for a camouflage tarpaulin that can be made into a tent.”

“Desert or bush?”

“Desert,” you say, pleased to have skipped the oh-ho-and-what-do-you-need-that-fors.

“We have tarps and we have camo netting. You can throw one over the other.”

“I want a single product, if there is one.”

“You’ll be carrying it?”

“Yes,” you say. “Exactly.”

“Then may I recommend a space bag?”

“What’s that?”

“A lightweight sleeping bag, foil interior, waterproof canvas exterior. Little mesh part on the face you can open for ventilation without letting in the bugs. Folds up to nothing. Very new. Hard to acquire, as they’re still in service.”

“How hard?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

You nod. That you can do. “It’s camouflage?”

“It’s not. But I tell you what, if that’s what you desire, I will sew some camo onto it.”

“Yes!” you say. “That would be terrific.”

He leads you to a counter and processes your deposit. “Call you in two days. Anything else I can help you with?” He sees your hesitation. “If you’re planning to spend any time in the desert, I hope you have a water system.”

“Water isn’t a problem. But I have a concern about snakes.”

“Rightly so.”

“What can I do to keep them away?”

“The general idea is to keep away from them.”

“I have good boots. But....” You gesture. “Is there some kind of electronic device that scares them? Like the ones that keep insects out of your house?” The man begins to look amused, so you guess no. “Anything?”

He scratches his beard. “You can watch where you put your feet.”

“Hmm,” you say.

“And take a stick,” he says.

~

So you're not thrilled with the snake situation, but otherwise things are coming together. The space bag is the final piece in the puzzle; with that, you can begin testing. Which is tempting to skip, but you've uncovered some alarming numbers about sweat-related water loss in the desert, and this isn’t something you want to confirm forty miles from the nearest living human being. Nearest benign human being, that is, since you're working under the assumption that Broken Hill is surrounded by proses, men and women who work in bakeries or gas stations or drive trucks or simply stand at key intersections and will, upon seeing you, become very focused and intent and proceed directly to a phone. Hence the need for a desert crossing. A few months before, when you were coming for Danny, you did it on a dirt bike. In retrospect, it seems wildly risky. But you were impatient. You hurried for him. And it ended so badly. You don’t want to think about that. This time there will be caution. There will be thirty miles of desert traversed by foot, and no one will see you coming because what you're doing is unimaginable.

Once you have the word, you'll begin the next stage of your journey, to DC. When you get there, you will rip out Thoreau’s heart, just like he tore out yours. What happens after that doesn’t matter.

~

You spend a lot of time on trains, reading dictionaries. You wear a hoodie and pull it down, in case of cameras. You can ride all day for two dollars and never be in the same spot for more than a few minutes. The last service is around two, so then you have to find a place to sleep, but that isn’t hard. You've done that before.

Sometimes you nod off on the train. You try not to, because you fear waking up to poets moving through the carriage, no way out, but it's kind of unavoidable. The dictionaries are not very interesting. So when you feel your head drifting toward the glass, the factories or fields passing by outside, you let it happen.

The day after you order your space blanket, you drift awake to find a man sitting opposite, watching you. You're half out of your seat, words forming on your lips, before you realize he isn’t Eliot. He isn’t anybody. You sink back into your seat. Your head is full of terror; it always is, coming out of dreams.

“Sorry,” says the man. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“That’s okay.” You're getting your bearings. The man is about forty, nicely dressed, sweater, a good watch. You talk to such people sometimes, as a precursor to persuading them to give you money.

“That’s a lot of books. Dictionaries?”

You nod.

“Are you a student?”

“Of life,” you say. People like this kind of quippery. It causes them to open up. “I just read them for fun.”

“Dictionaries?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun. That sounds awful.”

“Awful used to mean ‘full of awe.’ The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary.”

He blinks.

“See?” you say. “Fun.”

“That is actually fascinating. What else?”

You look at your notes. You have notes. “Cause has changed. The definition used to be ‘to make something happen.’ Now they’ve added, ‘especially something bad.’”

“They’ve changed cause?”

“They’ve noticed a change. Dictionaries record common usage.”

“I thought it was a panel of professors,” says the man, “at a university somewhere, deciding what words mean.”

You shake your head.

“So it’s bad to cause something now?”

“Yes. And to join causes, probably. Because of semantic leakage.”

“Well,” he says. “You are the most interesting person I’ve met all week.”

“Thanks,” you say, but you're getting a bad feeling. You're regretting this conversation. “My stop is coming up.” You pack your dictionaries into your bag.

“Do you have somewhere to sleep tonight?” You don’t say anything. “I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right. I mean, are you okay? You don’t look okay.”

If you can't compromise him, he's a liability. Spout some shit about the economy and how you're pretty used to living like this, dude shouldn't worry about you

If you can't compromise him, he's a liability. Spout some shit about the economy and how you're pretty used to living like this, dude shouldn't worry about you

“I’m okay,” you say. “You know.” You wave your hands around. “This economy.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m sitting close enough to smell you.” His expression looks genuine but you don’t like his eyes. There are a lot of tiny muscles there and they are not consistent with the rest of his face. “Is there any way I can help you?”

“Thanks, but no.” You stand up. “This is my stop.”

“Mine, too.”

You sit. “My mistake.”

He leans forward. He does this slowly, like he wants to get it right. “Do you need money?”

You hesitate, because you do need money. But not from this guy. You don’t even want to compromise him. You just need to get away. Your eye is starting to hurt.

“Whatever trouble you’re in, I can help. I’m a lawyer. I have money. No strings. I see an intelligent young woman who needs a helping hand. That’s all. Say no and I won’t bother you anymore.”

The train stops. The carriage is almost empty, the platform bare. You wait until you're sure the man isn’t moving, then stand and walk quickly to the doors. You get there in time, hit the button, step off, and keep walking. A night breeze stirs your hair. You want to look around but keep your head down, in case of cameras.

“Five hundred dollars,” says the man, right behind you. “Look at it.” You ignore him. “Are you stupid? Just take it. Take it.” He puts a hand on your shoulder.

You turn and shove him. He staggers backward. He really is holding a fistful of cash. Behind him, the train begins to pull out.

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Fuck off!” you shout. And you go after him, for some reason, and push him again. “Leave me alone!” He tries to catch your arm. But you're too quick for that. Whatever else he is, he isn’t prepared for someone who fights back. You shove him again. “Leave me alone!” His back hits the moving train and he rebounds a step onto the platform. Your brain is full of violence and your star is singing and another push could send him between the carriages. If you time it right. You think, Thoreau, Thoreau, save it for Thoreau.

“Jesus,” says the man. “Jesus.” He gets around you and runs away.

You stand there, breathing. You need to get out of here. You have to leave before the cops arrive. You make for the exit, your hoodie pulled tight. You can’t wait for the space bag. You'll have to call and have it mailed. You have to take yourself out of the cities, away from people, before someone gets hurt.

~

A month later, you're trudging across the desert. You have a stick. It's night, because during the day you can see for twenty miles in all directions, and you assume someone will be looking. Also snakes sleep at night. You wear a fur-lined parka and loose shorts, maybe an odd combination, but the thing is the nights are cold enough to freeze exposed sweat. A twenty-eight-pound backpack is strapped around your waist and shoulders. You're loving your boots: big, brown, comfortable shit-kickers.

You make good ground on night one and stop at the first hint of dawn. You find a depression in the dirt beside three scrubby trees, a long-dead waterhole, and spread your space bag beneath them. You sit on it awhile, cooling, watching the stars retreat and the sky lighten. Your body feels satisfyingly used. Not exhausted. You're in good shape. You eat a hard biscuit and crawl beneath the space bag and fall asleep.

You wake a few hours later in a furnace. You're swimming in sweat. You peek out, thinking maybe you've lost your shade. But no. It's just hot. You wriggle out, keeping flat to the ground to avoid presenting a profile, and unzip your backpack. You pull out four wooden stakes and use them to suspend the space bag a few feet above the ground. The idea is to remain camouflaged from above while allowing air to move around you. You strip naked, crawl under the sheet, suck water from your drinking tube, and try to sleep.

The second night is harder. Your legs feel suspiciously sore, which they hadn’t during your trials. You might be pushing yourself, walking faster than you need to. You're blowing your water budget, too. You force yourself to slow down, stop for more rests, but then worry that you're falling behind on distance, which would create new water problems. The chances are excellent that you can source fresh water in Broken Hill, in which case you have no problem. But you do not want to rely on this, since if you're wrong you will die. You keep walking, your stick ready, in case of night snakes.

You make less ground than you want and stop early, feeling dizzy. You drink a lot, even splashing some on your face. You eat more biscuits. You haven’t brought many of those, to avoid temptation, because digestion increases the body’s demand for water. That's starting to seem like a mistake. You crawl under the space bag.
Again, you're woken by the sun baking the earth and have to convert the bag to a little tent. This time, however, you realize the trees you camped beneath are basically leafless, which is a serious problem, because no shade. There is no wind and the underside of the space bag radiates heat. You lie there as long as you can, watching your skin turn mottled pink then red, and crawl out and curl against the trunk of a tree. It's better but only a little. You begin to seriously wonder if you will die. Two weeks ago, you decided against bringing the long white Bedouin robes that would have made it possible to walk in the daytime without passing out, thinking they weren’t worth the weight. This decision might kill you.

You drink your electrolytes. Every thirty minutes, you tip tiny amounts of water onto your hands and wipe them across your face and neck. The water pack grows scarily thin but it's either drink or expire. In late afternoon, a light breeze begins to shift the sand and you cry a little despite the fluid loss.

Finally the sun eases toward the earth. Sometime after that, you begin to feel human. You get to your feet and begin to pack your bag and think about which direction to go. The smart thing is to head back. It will take two nights but you have enough water and will be able to recover and rethink how you're going to do this. But it will mean starting over. And the town is only one more night away. It will probably have water. Even if the tanks have gone bad, there will be bottles. Stores and cafés with darkened refrigerators. You ignore the part of you that asks but what if and start walking.

Your feet become sore, then wet-feeling, then numb. You don’t want to blame the boots but you have the feeling they're letting you down. They're like boys who at first are cool and suave and then after a couple of weeks you realize are assholes. Around midnight you begin to hallucinate a little and forget important things like checking your compass. You come across a boulder and sit on it and wake up face-first in the sand. Your lips feel like a baked cake. You drink and drink and finish your water.

The town rises with the dawn. You walk toward it. You lose your stick somehow. You begin to pass houses, places you recognize. You see the first body and try not to look but your eyes won’t stay still. It's a woman you know. Beryl. You recognize the dress. I’m here to fix it, you tell Beryl. To say sorry. But you can’t really believe Beryl would be pleased by that, or would forgive you in any way. You suck on your water tube and remember it's empty and turn in at a gate because it's time to search for water. You walk up the path and stop because on the house’s concrete front steps lies a brown snake, sunning itself. You stare at it. “Fuck off!” you shout, and stamp your boots, and it wriggles away.

~

You pull open cupboards and pass out in a bedroom and throw up in a toilet and aren’t sure in which order that happens. You find water and sleep. When you awake the sun is throwing shadows at forty-five degrees and you have to stare at them a long time to figure out whether it's morning or afternoon. You've slept for a day and a half. You're ravenous.

You find and devour a box of fruit bars. Your brain likes this and you begin to be able to make sense of things. Empty water bottles are everywhere. You sit at the wooden kitchen table and wait for the sun to go down. Then you strap yourself into your pack.

A strong wind is blowing, tossing stinging sand at your face. You hike along the road. You've steeled yourself for the bodies, and keep your eyes up and your mind focused, but the closer you get, the more the wild, clawing terror grows inside you, wanting to turn you around and steer you out of here. Sand stings your eye and you rub at it but it makes no difference.

You pass the gas station, with its burned cars and trucks. You make yourself machinery: legs and feet and purpose. You reach the hospital. You step over a snarl of cloth and leather and gleaming bone and push open the side door. These are things you do. You walk down the corridor. You don’t recognize anything because that part of your brain is closed. You reach the double doors for the emergency room and drop your pack and close your eyes. Then you go in.

The smell is very bad. Old but wrong. Your nose begins to run. Your boots hit something and you shuffle around it. When anything blocks your path, you carefully step over it. Your fingers find the counter. You follow it along to the place where you left the bareword.

It's not there. You stand awhile, breathing. You follow the counter all the way to the wall, sweeping its surfaces. Your fingers find objects, small things you can identify like a stapler and a nameplate and larger things you drop upon ascertaining they are not what you want and do not think about. You reach the wall and begin making a low sound, equal parts moan and hum.

You circle the counter twice. You make your way back to where the bareword had been and drop to your hands and knees and begin to feel around on the floor. Almost immediately you find cloth and hair and your hum becomes a shriek and you can’t do it anymore. You can’t grope around corpses. You get to your feet. The idea creeps into your brain: I’m lost. You will never find your way out. You will spend the rest of your life crawling over the bodies of the people you let die, searching for an exit you're too afraid to open your eyes and look for. Your breaths come in hitching shrieks. You trip twice and then your hands find the doors and you crawl through them.

~

You return to the house. You could have sought out Danny’s but aren’t up to facing more memories. With four walls around you, you feel safer. You scrub your hands in a toilet cistern. You sit on the seat and stare at nothing. You feel numb. The word should have been there.

Thoreau had probably wanted to put you in exactly this position. He had probably recovered the word months ago, in secret. You had been tracked all the way in, and right now they're moving through the streets, corralling you, whispering to each other guttural words.

But this doesn't seem right. You don't understand Thoreau well, but in your experience, people with power use it. You feel the word is there. You feel that strongly.

After a while, a thought occurs to you. You rise from the seat.

~

You go back to the hospital and through the corridors to the emergency room doors. You put your pack against the wall and withdraw a digital camera, which you found at the house. You've tested its batteries already but take a photo of a fire extinguisher, just to be sure. Then you close your eyes and push through the doors.

You shuffle inside a few steps and raise the camera. Your idea is that this thing really is a word. It's on petrified wood, but the wood isn’t the important part. The important part is the mark. You press the shutter button and feel the flash on the inside of your eyelids. You shift your aim and press again. You'll accumulate photos. Most of the photos will contain unbearable things, but in one will be the word. People kept coming into this room and turning into killers, ergo the word is somewhere it can be seen. You adjust your aim, press the shutter for another photo. You'll keep taking them until the camera runs out of room. Then you'll download the photos to a computer. You'll magnify them a thousand times and inspect each picture a handful of pixels at a time. It will take forever. You'll see awful things. But you will do it. Eventually, you'll find the edges of something that looks like wood. You'll know where in the image the bareword is located. You can magnify it a hundred times, until it's too big to see all at once. And you can copy it. The word is not a thing. It's information. It can be duplicated. You can copy it one piece at a time, carve it onto wood so it will be just the same. Maybe you'll get someone to help, so you'll never hold the whole thing in your brain. Then you'll have a hundred tiny pieces, numbered on the back, which you can reassemble. You'll have to find a way to carry it safely. To keep it always close. You press the shutter again. You're thinking maybe a necklace.

~

You come out of the hospital. The air feels incredibly fresh and you gulp at it. You start walking, then running, your pack bouncing on your back. You're clutching the camera. You should stop and seal it in plastic, stash it away safely. But you can’t stop. You run through dead streets and a crow caws and you shriek back at it, an insane yodel that won’t stay quiet. You're supposed to be stealthy. They could be listening. You run, hiccupping and gibbering, desperate to put distance between you and this place, to reach somewhere you can open your lungs and scream triumph like you want.

~

You trot up the mansion steps and are set upon by butlers. You thought you had lost them at the foot of the stairs, but there are more. One attempts to steer you through the great open double doors and another begins gently inquiring if you require refreshment and a third wants to take your coat. All this is conducted in a low-register butler octave, making you feel as if you're moving through a burbling stream. You allow yourself to be de-coated. A fourth butler seizes the opportunity to step forward and brazenly adjust your bow tie. The butler who wants to infuse you with refreshments positions himself so that you need only take a step forward for a champagne flute to slide effortlessly into your left hand, but you don’t know this butler, and in no fucking universe does Henry David Thoreau allow strangers to insert fluids into his body.

“There’s Spanish,” says Eliot. He has followed you up the steps and is peering into the house. Butlers navigate around Eliot as if he is a rocky prow in a seething ocean, because he's not wearing a tuxedo. He is in a brown suit and beige coat, which apparently you will need to physically pry from his body if you ever want to see Eliot in anything else. There is a code, of course. The Organization imposes a ceiling on the quality of dress a poet is permitted to enjoy, commensurate with the poet’s level. The point is to address the situation whereby a newly graduated poet realizes there is very little in the world denied to them and begin to get about in outrageous dress and three hundred thousand dollar cars, drawing attention. And technically the code applies to you. Technically, your entire ensemble should have cost roughly half the price of your current shoes. But you do not follow the code, because you are not a twenty-year-old idiot who requires protection from temptation. You are intelligent enough to respect the intent of the code without slavishly adhering to its letter. Eliot, however. Eliot in his last-century suit, his repulsive department store shoes, his wrinkled coat. The most important thing about Eliot is that he won’t break a rule to save his life.

“Are you coming in?” you say. “I believe that some of the delegates have brought advisers.”

“No. I’m not dressed for it,” Eliot says, then realizes it isn’t a real invitation.

“Then I will see you at the office.”

“Russian’s not coming. That’s what I came to tell you.”

You hesitate. The butler with the champagne flute takes the opportunity to slide forward and you glance at him, bestowing upon the butler the terrible shame of having drawn notice. The butler falls away, mortified. “What do you mean?”

“Russian’s doing it via speakerphone.”

“You must be joking.”

Eliot shrugs. “It’s what his people have said.”

“Well,” you say. You prepare for these meetings carefully. You attempt to consider every eventuality. But a speakerphone? Is Russian that afraid of compromise? Is he not aware that employing a speakerphone will broadcast his fear, screaming his vulnerability to every delegate in this house? It is ridiculous.

Eliot is still hanging around, eyeing the swirling gowns and tuxedos inside the room. “Thank you,” you say. Eliot nods and begins to trot down the steps. You feel your mood lifting with each step Eliot takes, with each increment of distance added between you and those shoes. Butlers begin to swarm, excited by your inattention. You shrug them off and enter the house.

~

Just inside the doors is von Goethe, regaling a glittering circle that includes, if you are not mistaken, one senator and two congressmen. Goethe is German, short and sharp-nosed with dark, slicked-back hair. He is wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, which you are sure are decorative. His shoes are fine brown soles. Goethe excuses himself from the group and clasps your hands in both of his. “Guten Tag, mein Freund,” you say, which causes Goethe’s face to crumple in disgust. “Wie geht es Ihnen?”

“Rather nauseous, after that.”

“I apologize,” you say. “I do not have the opportunity to practice my German as often as I would like.”

“You are forgiven.” This exchange establishes that Goethe doesn’t wish to engage you in German, which is sensible, since it is easier to resist compromise in a learned language than a native one, but cowardly, for the same reason. You are happy to roll with it, in the spirit of the occasion. You are not here to compromise anyone. Also, you sincerely doubt Goethe is capable of troubling you in English. “A fine occasion you have arranged. So worthy.”

“Well,” you say. For the first time you take in the stage, the tables draped in white cloth, the tasteful sign by the podium that declares: A WORLD OF LITERACY. “We do what we can.”

“I was speaking with one of your politicians and he informed me that your government is investing some hundreds of millions of dollars to teach children across Asia to read.”

“We do what we can.”

“Read English,” says Goethe.

“Well,” you say. “You can hardly expect us to teach them German.” You clasp the hand of a tall, bronze-skinned woman who had met your eye across the ballroom twenty seconds ago and begun to cross it like a torpedo. “Rosalía, what a pleasure.”

“Henry,” she says. “I swear, you age backward.”

“De Castro,” says Goethe, casting an eye over her green gown, which is daring when she stands still and practically scandalous when she moves. De Castro offers her hand, which Goethe kisses. “Thoreau and I were just discussing his latest plan to seed the world with English missionaries.”

“Surely you see that a common world language would serve the Organization’s interests.”

“I suppose,” says Goethe. “But I weep at the prospect that this language would be English.”

“It won’t be,” says de Castro. “It will be Spanish. English plateaued some time ago. It will take more than Thoreau’s missionaries to reverse that.” She looks down her nose at Goethe, who stands a foot shorter. “I suppose these things are more alarming to delegates whose languages are in decline.”

“Ah, it begins,” says Goethe. “The traditional German pile-on.”

“Honestly, I admire your spirit. It cannot be easy to watch your language slip into the footnotes of history.”

“It is doing no such thing.”

“Although I suppose you must be used to humiliation,” says de Castro. “German being the second most popular Germanic language.”

“Children, please,” you say.

De Castro turns to you. “Did I hear correctly? Pushkin will be joining us via speakerphone?”

“Apparently.”

“I do hope we don’t need another Russian delegate. They’ve been dropping like flies. Alexander was doing so well.”

“It’s the language,” says Goethe. “Too many morphemes. Inherently vulnerable.”

“He can’t expect to save himself with a speakerphone. The idea is preposterous.” She uses a German word for “preposterous,” lächerlich, slightly mangling the first syllable, watching Goethe as she does. So you presume that de Castro dropped a little linguistic depth charge there. The entire meeting will be like this: delegates continually probing each other, seeking weakness. It is an inevitable by-product of the fact that the Organization is a loose coalition of independent entities; no delegate outranks any other. Technically, you are no more important than al-Zahawi of Arabic or Bharatendu Harishchandra of Hindi-Urdu. This is something you plan to change.

“Let us assume Pushkin has other motives,” you say, “and not waste our time together on speculation.”

“Agreed,” says de Castro. “Speaking of which, Henry, I was hoping you might be able to end some speculation of my own. Have you recovered your bareword?”

Your phone buzzes against your thigh, which is surprising, since everyone who knows that number should have known not to call it. “Sadly, no.”

“How disappointing,” says de Castro, “and, simultaneously, bullshit. Henry, none of us believe you would allow a bareword to lie in Broken Hill unmolested for almost a year.”

“The concept is extraordinary,” says Goethe.

“We can discuss what you are willing to believe in the meeting,” you say. “Which has not yet begun.”

De Castro glances around the room. “There is a reason the other delegates have not approached you yet. I imagine it is the same reason Pushkin is not here at all.” Her eyes settle on you. “Do you plan to compromise us?”

“How ridiculous,” you say.

De Castro watches you. Goethe says, “There is no denying you have been making efforts to retrieve it. However, the more time that passes, the more one wonders whether one is witnessing not efforts so much as charades.”

“I do not have the bareword,” you say. “For proof, please note the obvious fact that if I did, I would be using it to spare myself this conversation.” Your phone buzzes again. “Excuse me.”

You turn away, pluck the phone from your pants, glance at the screen, and repocket it. You gaze into the distance, digesting the words: SIGHTING 5+1@97.47 IN 24 POI 605066.

The message is automated, sent by a computer whenever a person of interest - a PoI - is sniffed out by one of the vast number of surveillance systems to which you have access. Because those systems are less than perfectly reliable, possible sightings become messages only when the computer has accumulated sufficiently many of sufficient quality to pass a particular confidence level. In this case, they were informing you of five sightings in the past twenty-four hours, plus one from earlier, which are ninety-seven percent likely to be Person of Interest number 605066, which, you know from memory, is Virginia Woolf.

You return to Goethe and de Castro. “Frankly,” says de Castro, as if no time has passed at all, “I see little point sitting down to discuss digital interconnectedness and social media when such an overwhelming issue remains unresolved.”

“It is resolved,” you say. “I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you.” It strikes you as remarkably suspicious that there would be a Woolf sighting at this moment, in this meeting. You wonder which delegate is responsible.

“You can tell me the current location of Virginia Woolf,” says de Castro. “That troubles me, also.”

“We looked. We didn’t find her. It seems likely she is dead.”

Goethe looks at de Castro. “He claims not to know.”

“Henry, I hear things,” says de Castro, “from people in your organization, as you no doubt hear things from people in mine. And the most disturbing tale has reached me. In it, Virginia Woolf steals the bareword and brings it to Broken Hill not out of some adolescent fit of pique, as you described, but rather at your command, as part of a test of the word’s effectiveness. Clearly, given the current population of Broken Hill is now zero, this test was a resounding success. Which is alarming in itself, Henry, for as much as we hold you in the highest regard, we are all undermined by your possession of a kind of persuasion against which there is no defense. But the part of this tale that troubles me most is the idea that Virginia Woolf, as your agent, is out there somewhere, engaged in some activity that serves your purpose. I cannot imagine what that might be. And that makes me most uncomfortable.”

Throughout this, your phone has continued to vibrate. You have developed the uncomfortable suspicion that the coincidence of Woolf’s sighting during this meeting might not be due to a delegate. It might be due to Woolf.

“Confide in us,” says Goethe. “We are your allies, William.”

are these idiots for real

yeah seriously you can't just play it like, why hello fellow member of the vast shadowy secret conspiracy society, would you please tell me everything you know and your future plans?

that's exactly why you should tell them the whole truth. they'll never believe you

While the butlers were entertaining, a house cannot have more than one. What exactly a butler does varies, but the job title means that they are the chief of all the other manservant, and that they are trusted enough to manage the wine cellar.

If Woolf is coming to you, she's almost certainly bringing the word. Every disaster is an opportunity.

SpoilerShow

While the butlers were entertaining, a house cannot have more than one. What exactly a butler does varies, but the job title means that they are the chief of all the other manservant, and that they are trusted enough to manage the wine cellar.

Ahh, yeah, unfortunately I neglected my research on butler heirarchy. Ten Poet Points™ to anyone who can come up with a good justification for the butler swarm.

are these idiots for real

yeah seriously you can't just play it like, why hello fellow member of the vast shadowy secret conspiracy society, would you please tell me everything you know and your future plans?

that's exactly why you should tell them the whole truth. they'll never believe you

“I do not have the word,” you say. “And if you must know, Virginia Woolf is absolutely alive, in possession of the word, and on her way to kill us all."

Goethe and de Castro narrow their eyes.

"Now, I am terribly sorry, but I will not be able to attend our meeting after all. Something unavoidable has come up.”

~

If Woolf is coming to you, she's almost certainly bringing the word. Every disaster is an opportunity.

You take a chopper cross-town and set down on the DC office helipad. This occupies thirteen minutes. In the meantime, you attempt to coordinate people via your phone. This proves difficult because every few seconds it wants to tell you about an incoming message, which requires a tap to dismiss, and by the time the building is in sight this is what you are spending the majority of your time doing, tapping to return your phone to a useful state. When a computer server becomes so busy acknowledging incoming requests that it has no time to respond to them, it is called a Denial of Service attack, a DoS. You are being DoSed. You surrender and put your phone away.

Freed from the helicopter, you consider the elevator but opt for the flexibility of stairs. One flight later, you emerge into tastefully muted lighting. Your assistant rises from her desk, mouth opening, full of messages. “Not now, thank you, Frances,” you say, and close the double doors behind you. The lights brighten in response to your presence. This month, your office is a paean to eighteenth-century feudal Japan: paper dividers, low, simple furniture. On the wall behind your desk a samurai sword hangs under lights. You chose none of this; it is periodically redecorated in a random style, to avoid betraying personal aesthetics. You plant yourself behind your desk and tap the keyboard to wake your screens.

Your predecessor hadn’t used a computer. At the time, they had been considered secretarial tools. Hard to imagine now. Your displays fill with red boxes. Now that the computer’s thresholds have triggered, it is vomiting up sightings from days ago, even weeks, made newly plausible by more recent data. A voiceprint from a hotel in Istanbul. A woman with matching facial characteristics in Vancouver. You inspect the picture: sunglasses, hat, nothing you would bet on, but the computer likes the cheekbones. A taxicab security photo, grainy and desaturated, from a route that corresponds with what the computer is figuring out about Woolf’s movements. That was Seattle, yesterday. The notification boxes are a moving stream but you manage to snag one with a recent time stamp. It is from the building’s security system. Its confidence level is ninety-nine percent. Woolf is outside, right now.

Your office has a balcony. You are mildly tempted to go out and peer over the railing, see if you can pick her out. But that would be risky. That is, possibly, what Woolf wants you to do. There could be a sniping issue. The fact is, as much as you believed you understand Woolf, she has been missing for a year and you have no idea how she has changed.

Your phone chimes. You feel rising excitement and wait until it is gone. “Yes?”

“I’m so terribly sorry. But there are so many people who wish to speak to you, and they’re saying quite alarming things.”

“Is one of those people Frost?” The poet responsible for building security. You spoke to him from the chopper, in between phone notifications, and asked him to execute certain important, long-planned orders. Specifically, Frost is to fill the lobby with Environmentally Quarantined Personnel, men and women with black suits and guns who see the world through a computer-filtered display and hear nothing but white-listed words. These proved insufficient to retrieve the word from Broken Hill - the teams sent in had rather spectacularly killed each other - but that means nothing, because you deliberately engineered it. You are fairly confident that they can stop Woolf.

“No, I haven’t heard from Frost.”

“I’ll speak to Frost,” you say. “No one else.” You close the speaker. Red boxes continue to slide down your monitors. You see the word LOBBY. You lean back in your chair.

So she’s entered the building. If all is proceeding as you instructed, Woolf will currently be on the floor, her hands bound in plastic, electrical tape being spread across her mouth. She will be lifted up and borne to a windowless cell. Then Frost will call.

You fold your hands and wait. A new red box slides up your screen. POI POSSIBLE SIGHTING: WOOLF, VIRGINIA. SECOND FLOOR. You look at this awhile, trying to imagine circumstances in which Security might have decided to take Woolf up rather than down. You reach for the speaker. By the time you get the handset to your ear, a new notification has arrived. THIRD FLOOR. Is there a delay on these? A few seconds? It has never mattered before.

“Frances, would you mind putting the floor into lockdown?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And please attempt to reach Frost.”

“Right away.”

Your screen blanks. The lights go out. Part of the lockdown. Nothing to be concerned about. You wait. Your breathing is steady. You feel no emotion. Minutes pass. The lights come on.

You press for the speaker. “Frances, why has the lockdown lifted?”

“I don’t know. I’m finding out.”

Noise in the background. Quite loud; you can almost feel its low echoes through the door. “Who else is there?”

“It’s... how can I help you?”

A female voice speaks. Indistinct; you can’t identify it. The phone clicks off. You slowly put it down.

You recognized Woolf’s natural aptitude for attack very early on. It would have been disappointing if she fell to Frost and the soldiers. You would have missed your chance to test yourself. Of course, there is the real possibility that she is about to walk in here and destroy you. That is a concern.

These are feelings. You don’t need them. You will prevail or you will not.

You steady your breathing and begin to pray. O God, be with me and guide my hand. Let me transcend this petty flesh and become Your holy instrument. Warmth spreads through your body. Your relationship with God is your greatest resource. It has allowed you to become who you are. So many promising colleagues have fallen to temptation. They managed their physiological needs, eating and breathing and fucking deliberately and on schedule, taking care to remain in control at all times, but their social needs - their basic human desire to love, to belong, and be loved - these were simply suppressed, because there was no safe way to indulge them. And yet they are named needs for a reason. The human animal craves intimacy at a biological level, relentlessly, insistent. You've seen many promising careers derailed by surrenders to intimacy: people who whispered confessions to whores, people whose minds lingered on having children. On such small betrayals are psyches unraveled. You have unraveled several yourself.

You had struggled in your early years. It seems vaguely amusing now. Infantile. But you remember the loneliness. The way your body reacted when a woman smiled at you, the surge of desire it evoked to join with her, not merely in a physical sense but beyond that, to confide and be understood. It had been almost overwhelming. Then you discovered God.

It had been terribly alarming. The very idea, a poet succumbing to religion! You were shocked at yourself. But the feeling was undeniable and grew week by week. You could no longer believe you were alone. You began to see the divine in everything, from the circumvoluted fall of a leaf to the fortuitous arrival of an elevator. Occasionally, when the sterility of your job pressed close, you felt the presence of God like a figure in the room. God was with you. God loved you. It was ridiculous, but there it was.

It was a tumor, of course. Oligodendroglioma, a cancerous growth in an area associated with feelings of enlightenment. The feelings it aroused could be reproduced through electrical stimulation. It wasn’t fatal, but it would need to be removed, your surgeon told you, as you looked over the black-and-white scans, because it would continue to grow. Over time, there would be less and less of you and more of the tumor. Your brain was being eaten by God.

You left the clinic in fine spirits. You had no intention of removing the tumor. It was the perfect solution to your dilemma: how to feed your body’s desire for intimacy. You were - are - delusional, of course. There is no higher presence filling you with love, connecting you to all things. It only feels that way. But that is fine. That is ideal. You would not trust a God outside your head.

~

The door opens and a woman steps through. She is wearing a long white coat that reaches the floor. The hem is spattered black with liquid that might be mud or dirt or might be Frost. She has white gloves. A necklace, something on it that twists and hurts to look at. You close your eyes. You reach into your diaphragm for your strongest voice. “Vartix ventor mannit wissik! Do not move!”

There is silence. “Ow,” says Woolf. “That kind of hurt.”

You grope for your desk drawer.

“Credit to you, Thoreau. I spent a long time preparing for you to say those words. And I still felt them.”

You get the drawer open. Your fingers close on a gun. You raise it and squeeze the trigger. You keep firing until the clip is empty. Then you drop it to the carpet and listen.

“Still here.”

There is a sword on the wall behind you. Three hundred years old, but it can cut. You have no training. But that might not matter, if she comes close enough. She might think it is decorative, until too late.

“So I’m here to kill you,” she says, “just in case there was any doubt.”

You breathe. You require a few moments to calm yourself. “Elise.”

“Woolf,” she says. “Woolf, now.”

Interesting. Has she changed sets? It is possible. She might not have merely improved her defense but managed to alter her base personality in certain important ways. It can be done, with practice. In which case, she would be vulnerable to a different set of words. Yes. She would have rejected her previous self in order to distance herself from what she had done in Broken Hill. You need to figure out what she has become. “How did you get here?”

“Walked, mostly.”

“The lobby was supposed to contain a fairly overwhelming number of security personnel.”

“The goggle guys? Yeah. They’re screened somehow, right? Filtered against compromise.”

“They are supposed to be.”

“They are. But Frost isn’t.”

“Ah,” you say. “So there were no 'goggle guys'.”

“Nope.”

Difficult to read a person you can’t see. The visual cues are so important. But it can be done. You can do it. The important thing is that she is still talking. “I gather you feel wronged by me?”

“You could say that.”

“Well,” you say. “I won’t demean us both by pretending to apologize. But may I point out that killing me will not serve your interests?”

“Actually, I disagree with you there. I mean, I thought about it. Come here with the word, make you run the Organization for me; that would be interesting. And I can’t deny there is a real appeal in turning you into my slave for life. But that’s not an option. I have a little problem, you see. I picked it up in Broken Hill, when you sent me to deploy that kill order. I kind of looked at it. I caught a reflection. It wasn’t enough to compromise me. Not completely. It was backward, you know. And not very clear. But I think a piece of it got in there. I call it my star. That’s what it feels like. A star in my eye. It’s not very nice, Thoreau. It wants me to do bad things. But I figured out a way to control it. I just need to concentrate on killing you. When I do that, the star isn’t so bad. I don’t feel like I need to hurt anyone else. So you see, you dying is kind of a non-negotiable at this point.”

You are fascinated. This part you did not know. “Then what?”

“Excuse me?”

“After you murder me. What then?”

“That’s not really any of your concern.”

“I suppose not,” you say. “Very well. We will save that for later.”

“But there’s not going to be a later, Thoreau. Not for you.”

“Mmm,” you say. You have narrowed her down to a dozen or so sets. You are mildly tempted to run through words for them all, which you can do in about fifteen seconds. That is a last-resort kind of move, though. It would spark an immediate response from her, of whatever kind. You will keep that in your back pocket while you attempt to learn more. “Before we proceed, I feel I must confess something.”

“Oh?” You hear her coat scuff the carpet.

“You are here because of me. There is no part of these events I have not engineered. The most difficult part of the exercise, in fact, was finding excuses as to why I left the bareword in Broken Hill for so long. To be honest, I expected you to move faster. It was becoming untenable. But here you are. Bringing the word back to me, filled with vengeance, according to plan.”

“Really?” she says. “I have to tell you, from where I’m standing, that looks like a really shitty plan.”

“When I came to Broken Hill in the midst of its immolation, I found myself moved. I felt desire. I realized then the danger of the bareword. It would have corrupted me. It would have been my undoing, as unearned power always is, sooner or later. And I have no intention of wasting this life on temporary greatness. What I will do with the word once I’ve taken it from you is leave a mark on this world that will never be erased.”

“You’re not making a hell of a lot of sense, Thoreau.”

You shrug slightly. “Perhaps my motives are beyond your comprehension. But I wish you to know that I do not require words to make you perform my will. You are my puppet regardless. You stand here not because you willed it but because I did. Because defeating the bareword in your hands is the challenge I set myself to prove that I am ready to wield it.”

“Dude, I’m going to kill you,” she says. “I’ve walked through every defense you have. There’s no doubt about that.”

You rise from your chair and spread your arms. You begin to increase your breathing, although she shouldn’t notice that. Set seventy-seven. You are sure of it. It is 220 with more fear and self-doubt. Often paired in families, interestingly: a 220 elder child and a seventy-seven younger sibling. It is plausible that Woolf might slide from one to the other. “Here I am,” you say. “Kill me.”

You hear her approach. There are two wide chairs opposite your desk, reducing the possible space she is occupying to a relatively small cuboid. Close enough to slice a sword through, if you are quick.

“You have no idea how much I want this, Thoreau. I know it’s bad form to say that. That I want. But I do. I want it so much.”

You can hear her breathing. Very close now. You could probably reach across the desk and touch her. You pull air into lungs, preparing to speak the words that will make her yours.

“Hey,” she says. “What’s that word? When the Japanese guys did something bad they’d atone by gutting themselves? You know? Disembowel themselves? What’s that called?”

You don’t answer.

“Seppuku,” she says. “I think that’s it.”

Doubt enters your mind. She is a seventy-seven, yes?

“I’ve been planning this awhile, Thoreau. Consider that.”

You consider. “Linnak torsef sahallin laide!” You turn. Your hands close on wood. You draw the blade from the scabbard. “Scream!” This is to locate her. To provide a signal that you have analyzed her correctly. You lunge across the desk and swipe the blade horizontally. It cuts nothing but air, and you overbalance.

“Not even close,” she says, from somewhere near the doorway.

You steady yourself, bringing up the blade. How foolish. You are disappointed in yourself. It was that garbage about her name: Woolf, now. The purest bullshit, and you had bought it. She is Elise, of course. She always will be.
You move around the desk toward the sound of her voice, holding the blade flat, prepared for a stroke. You think you hear something and jab speculatively. You turn in a slow half circle.

“This way,” she says from the corridor.

You feel your way to the doorway. In the corridor are strange whisperings. The vents? You feel surrounded. She has plans for you, apparently.

“There are people here.” Her voice floats ahead of you. “Just so you know.”

You take two steps and stumble over a chair. You feel the toe of your right shoe bend in a way that suggests a permanent crease and feel grief.

“So I have a proposition for you, Thoreau. You can open your eyes, look at this thing I’ve got around my neck, and follow my instructions to disembowel yourself. This way, nobody gets killed but you. Or you can stand there swinging that oversized butter knife while I send your own people against you. What do you say?”

You run at her. Someone grabs your arms. You slash the blade at your aggressor and there is a gasp and the hands fall back. You thrust the sword out again and feel it puncture something. Weight pulls at the blade and you retreat before you can lose it. Something thumps against the carpet.

“Congratulations,” Woolf says. “You killed your secretary.”

You swivel toward her voice, panting. The corridor is full of people. You can sense them. They are standing silently, waiting for your approach. To reach her you will need to kill them all.

“So, no surprise,” she says. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”

She is still a 220. She has practiced her defense. But you can find a way in. There is always something. A hidden desire or secret shame. With that, you can unravel her.

You explore air with the sword tip. “You were never going to be one of us. Eliot thought you could learn to discipline yourself. But the idea was laughable. You could never learn to discipline your excesses.”

“I don’t know, Thoreau. You may not be giving me enough credit there.”

You swivel toward her voice. “Do you really think you can hide your mind from me?” You swing the blade. The tip glances against something and you scramble forward, slipping and sliding, get the blade into something, and push.

“Yecck,” says Elise. “That was Frost.”

Perhaps she is unsettled by violence. “Vartix ventor mannit wissik! Scream!”

There is a pause. No screaming. “So you figured out I haven’t really changed. Congratulations. Not going to help you.”

“I can practically feel your emotions,” you say. “You radiate them. Tell me something, Elise. Why do you want me dead so much?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I think it’s because you need to blame me. You need to believe that what you did in Broken Hill was my fault.”

“It was.”

“But a part of you knows the truth. That if you had tried harder, you could have stopped it.”

“Goddamn it, Thoreau. You’re persistent. I’ll give you that. But I didn’t come here to listen to this. I was going to make you apologize of your own free will, but you know what, screw it. Open your fucking eyes.”

“You tell yourself you had no choice but you don’t believe it. That is why you desire me dead. You hope to kill a part of yourself.”

“Grab him,” she says, to whom, you don’t know. “Hold him down. Force open his eyes.”

You raise the sword. “Who killed that boy at the Academy? Was that me? He was the first to pay for the mistake of loving you with his life. But not the last.” Hands pluck at you. You flail with the sword. “Did I make you a killer, or were you already?”

“Shut up!”

“Vartix ventor mannit wissik! You killed your lover! Scream!” Hands grip you. “Vartix ventor mannit wissik!, you deserve to be punished, you deserve to die for what you did! Vartix ventor mannit wissik!, scream, you evil bitch!”

A weight of bodies bear you to the ground. Fingers grope at your face. Above this, a thin sound: a keening wail, like escaping steam.

“Vartix ventor mannit wissik,” you say. “Elise, lie down and sleep!”

Your eyelids are dragged up. You see faces you recognize, their expressions intent and focused. You know their sets but nothing you can say will dissuade them from holding you down. You can work around that. You can convince them to release you once their duty is done. Because between the seething bodies, you see a prone figure, sprawled on the carpet, her white coat gently rising and falling. Your heart sings, because it is over, and you have won.

~

You go to the eighth floor, where burly men in gray uniforms are pulling up the carpet. “What the fuck?”

“Ah, Eliot,” says Thoreau. He has a white cloth and is mopping sweat from the back of his neck. His shirt is wet beneath the armpits. You've never seen Thoreau so much as breathing quickly, so this is disconcerting. “We had a little disturbance.”

“The delegates have scattered. They thought you were about to bomb the place.”

“Really?” says Thoreau. “It’s a children’s charity.”

You back out of the way of a man carrying carpet. The walls are lightly spattered. Fine dark droplets like mist. “I’m asking you,” you say, “what the fuck?”

“Woolf came back.”

You say nothing, because surely this is a joke.

“Look,” Thoreau says, indicating a dark patch on the carpet. “That’s Frost.”

“I told you she wasn’t dead.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I asked for more time. Christ, she killed Frost?”

“Essentially,” says Thoreau. “A few others, too.”

“How did she do that?” Thoreau continues patting his neck with the cloth. There is something odd in his manner, a kind of satisfaction, which you don’t understand. Maintenance workers come forward, wanting to get at the carpet on which you're standing. “Get out,” you say. “All of you.”

The men look questioningly at Thoreau, who doesn’t respond. The men slink away, leaving the aroma of cigarettes and carpet glue.

“Did she have it?”

“Yes.”

“She had the word.”

“Just as you predicted,” Thoreau says. “I should have listened to you.”

“Where is she?”

Thoreau says nothing.

“Did you kill her?”

“Fascinating, your priorities,” says Thoreau. “I tell you that the bareword has returned to us and your first question is about her.”

“I have a lot of questions. They’re not necessarily ordered.”

“Ah, Eliot. As I have grown, you have shrunk. I offered to help you after Broken Hill. I gave you a chance to go away and find the man you are supposed to be. But no. You chose to stay. You wanted to pursue her. You actually said those words: you wanted. To make amends for failing to stop her, to beg forgiveness for failing to protect her, I honestly don’t know. I doubt that you do. But what is plain is that she broke you. A sixteen-year-old girl and you let yourself care for her. It was clear from the beginning, but what was a weakness became nothing less than a psychological disintegration. Look at you. You are an echo of who you were.”

“Well,” you say. “How refreshing to have an honest opinion.”

“I have faced the word and won. This is what I have done while you were falling into yourself. The day I realized the bareword could corrupt me, I began to prepare myself to face it. That is why I left the word in Broken Hill, for her to recover.”

“You what?”

“I have no intention of triggering another Babel event. I have worked rather too hard for that. It was only by proving myself worthy of the word that I could trust myself to resist its temptations. And I wish to wield it for such a long time. The thing that I find disappointing about empires, Eliot, is they are so transient. On reflection, it seems that real power would be not to merely rule the world but to mark it.” He shrugs. “Perhaps that’s just me.”

“You’ve become fucking incomprehensible. Woolf could have killed us all.”

He shrugs. “She didn’t.”

“She could have.”

“She set it into a necklace. In order to keep it close, I suppose.” Thoreau reaches into his jacket pocket. You shift your gaze away. “I have it wrapped, Eliot.”

You look. Whatever it is lies beneath a white cloth.

“That you think I need a bareword to compromise you is adorable,” Thoreau says. “Eliot, in your present state, I would barely need words.”

“Where is Woolf?”

“Downstairs. Confined. Sleeping.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“You know that. Eliot. It is time to let go of Woolf. Let me help you.”

You say nothing.

“She is a mass murderer. She killed eighteen thousand people. In the process of which, incidentally, she managed to inflict the word on herself. Caught a reflection in Broken Hill. An accident, I believe. But she is now under instruction to, and I quote, ‘kill everyone.’ How far below the surface that lurks, we can only guess. She has been attempting to resist it by channeling her thoughts toward me. But it is a part of her. It will never go away. She is irredeemable, Eliot. She always was. Accept this. And please do it quickly, because I have a job for you in Syria.”

“I am not going to help you rule the world.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You don’t know me as well as you think.”

“Eliot,” says Thoreau, “if that were true, you wouldn’t need to say it.”

~

You wake and feel for the necklace and it's gone. The world is yellowish. It is six feet by eight. It has a padded bench seat, which you guess doubles as a bed, and carpet you recognize. A thick gray door with a small window in it, obscured by something on the other side. You are in your underwear. Your head feels bruised. No, not your head. Something deeper than that. You sit up. You put a hand to your forehead and close your eyes a moment, because things are very, very bad.

Time passes. You stand. You pace. You grow thirsty. You discover a plastic bucket under the bed-seat, which you guess is for pee. You spend some time breaking off a long, triangular shard, and tuck this into the rear waistband of your underpants. When you position the bucket right, you can’t tell. It seems to you that this room isn’t monitored. Maybe it's unnecessary, when you have a person in a six-by-eight cell with nothing but a bucket. But if you get out of here because the organization isn’t monitoring you, that is going to be really hilarious.
These are positive thoughts. You're not actually getting out. You're just keeping busy until Thoreau turns up.

~

Someone does come, but not Thoreau. At first, you don’t recognize him. He's cut his hair. It's been eight or nine years. But his eyes are the same, and you haven’t forgotten the way they bulged in that fast food restaurant bathroom, when he’d tried to coerce you into a blow job.

You throw out some words, just in case. “Please,” says Lee. The door closes. You catch a glimpse of people out there, who would prove to be obstacles to any attempted flight. Lee gets down on his haunches. It's kind of an odd pose, but it brings his eyes level with yours as you sit on the bench seat. Your skin puckers. You feel the urge to fold your arms, but don’t, because you don’t want to give him anything.

“We write reports, you know,” Lee says. He looks odd, sickly, but that's probably the yellow lights. “When we recruit someone, we send along a little write-up, saying what we think. Yours... well, yours was negative, Elise. I won’t lie. It was extremely negative. I know what you’re thinking: I gave you a bad report because you kicked me in the balls. No. I put that aside, like the professional I am. I gave you a bad report, Elise, because you were actually going to do what I asked. It was a simple test. I used weak words. Starter words. And still you were going to do it. You’re fragile. You have no defense. And people like that don’t last in the organization.” He spreads his hands. “Imagine my surprise when the Academy accepted you. It makes sense now. Now I know you cheated your way in. Eliot taking pity on you. Now, I understand. But at the time, I was amazed. And then they made you Woolf... I took it personally. I don’t mind admitting it. It felt like an insult. I mean, my report was very clear. Candidate shows no aptitude for mental discipline nor the inclination to develop it. Those were my words. Well, look at you now. Just like I predicted. And you know what? How it’s turned out is actually pretty good for me. Now I look like a genius. It took awhile but I finally made it to DC.”

He pauses, as if for a response, but you don’t give him one because you haven’t figured out why he's here. He sighs and straightens, plucking at his pant creases. You aren’t thrilled with the new eyeline.

“So,” Lee says, “as you might have guessed, you’re going to die soon. In fact, as I understand it, the only reason you’re still here is Thoreau has become too busy with a new project to get around to debriefing you yet. When I say debriefing, I mean compromising you and getting you to dump out the contents of your brain, in case there’s anything in there that might be useful to us. Now, this is going to happen. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. But my idea, Elise, was to spare Thoreau some trouble. You see, my being here is a very big opportunity for me. A test, you might say. And if I’m able to go back to Thoreau with the information he wants, well, that would be good.”

He removes his jacket and begins to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Why am I telling you this, since clearly you have no interest in doing what I want? I’ll tell you. It’s because, Elise, I want you to understand how extremely, intensely motivated I am right now.”

You say, “Uh, Lee? The idea that you can compromise me is laughable.”

“Oh, I realize you’re not sixteen anymore. I’m not expecting it to be that easy again. In fact, I hear you’ve been working on your defense pretty hard.” He begins to unbuckle his belt. “The thing is, El, I think, deep down, you’re just the same. I think you’re fragile. You subscribed to the idea that the best defense is a good offense, and it’s served you well, sure, but... here we are.” He pulls his belt free and begins to wind the strap around one hand. “I think once we test that defense, I mean, really put some pressure on it... we might see some cracks. I’m pretty confident about that. Because once a person is under severe physical stress, a lot of the higher brain function falls away. The critical thinking. The learned behaviors.” He taps his forehead. “What am I saying? You know all this. You were in school more recently than me. You know what I’m talking about. And you know I’m not leaving this room without getting what I want. The only question is how hard you’re going to make it.” He lets the belt buckle dangle from his fist. “So,” he says, “how are we doing this?”

Let's be honest about what's really going on here.

Thoreau had to yell your words over and over again while going directly after emotional weak points. There's no way Lee is remotely on Thoreau's level. Despite his confidence, he can't compromise you, not on any reasonable timeframe at least.

He's a pawn. He's here to unsettle you through your personal connection. There isn't the slightest chance he'll persuade you, not after what you've already been through - but Thoreau, the sick bastard, wants you to remember what happened in that restroom back when you were sixteen.

And why is Thoreau doing this? Because he's afraid. Because he's not ready for a rematch, not after how close you came. Lee is here for one reason and one reason only - to soften you up emotionally so Thoreau stands a chance.

How pathetic. Destroy him.

Okay you have this pretty sharp plastic shard which probably would work as severe physical stress so let's test his theory?

Let's be honest about what's really going on here.

Thoreau had to yell your words over and over again while going directly after emotional weak points. There's no way Lee is remotely on Thoreau's level. Despite his confidence, he can't compromise you, not on any reasonable timeframe at least.

He's a pawn. He's here to unsettle you through your personal connection. There isn't the slightest chance he'll persuade you, not after what you've already been through - but Thoreau, the sick bastard, wants you to remember what happened in that restroom back when you were sixteen.

And why is Thoreau doing this? Because he's afraid. Because he's not ready for a rematch, not after how close you came. Lee is here for one reason and one reason only - to soften you up emotionally so Thoreau stands a chance.

How pathetic. Destroy him.

Slowly. Make him your slave.

kill him

Make him suck his own dick.

Make him suck his own dick.

Definitely.

Ahh, yeah, unfortunately I neglected my research on butler heirarchy. Ten Poet Points™ to anyone who can come up with a good justification for the butler swarm.

there is a butler from each represented language group

also oh my goodness i just caught up and ur story is amazing! ty!

SpoilerShow

Ahh, yeah, unfortunately I neglected my research on butler heirarchy. Ten Poet Points™ to anyone who can come up with a good justification for the butler swarm.

there is a butler from each represented language group

also oh my goodness i just caught up and ur story is amazing! ty!

+10 Poet Points!

Thanks for reading! :)

Let's be honest about what's really going on here.

Thoreau had to yell your words over and over again while going directly after emotional weak points. There's no way Lee is remotely on Thoreau's level. Despite his confidence, he can't compromise you, not on any reasonable timeframe at least.

He's a pawn. He's here to unsettle you through your personal connection. There isn't the slightest chance he'll persuade you, not after what you've already been through - but Thoreau, the sick bastard, wants you to remember what happened in that restroom back when you were sixteen.

And why is Thoreau doing this? Because he's afraid. Because he's not ready for a rematch, not after how close you came. Lee is here for one reason and one reason only - to soften you up emotionally so Thoreau stands a chance.

How pathetic. Destroy him.

Slowly. Make him your slave.

Okay you have this pretty sharp plastic shard which probably would work as severe physical stress so let's test his theory?

kill him

Make him suck his own dick.

Definitely.

Kill him with his own dick.

~

Two large men come in, wearing white uniforms that you recognize from Labs. They approach you with their hands out like claws. By this time, you're in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee is lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat and his crotch, severed genitalia in his mouth. You swipe at one of the orderlies, shrieking semi-random words, but he catches your wrist and wraps his arms around you. They twist your hands and force the bucket-knife from your fingers and hold you down for what feels like hours. Some other people take Lee away. That's the last time anyone visits you who isn’t Thoreau.

~

You pick Lee’s blood off you flake by flake. It dried hard, so this way you are able to clean yourself one piece at a time. Maybe clean is the wrong word. It's pretty disgusting, but you keep at it, because the alternative is worse. Every flake of Lee that you remove makes you feel better.

Days pass. It feels like days. You become extremely thirsty. After enough of that, you develop a tremble that won’t go away. Your bowels and bladder shut down. You can feel them inside you like stones. You're being tortured, you assume. Your physical needs are being deliberately left unmet.

You think about Eliot. About whether he knows you're here. You figure no, because if he did, he would have shown up. You just have that feeling. Of course, you had left him facedown in a ditch in Broken Hill, and it would make complete sense if Eliot hates you with a fiery passion. But you have the idea that the kind of relationship you have with him allows for mistakes, even big ones. And that when this door next opens, it won’t be Thoreau but Eliot, and his eyes will be full of reproach but there will also be forgiveness and hope.

You consider removing your underwear, which are spattered with dark brown Lee spots and make you feel permanently stained. It might even be intimidating to Thoreau. Nothing here but Elise, pal. But you don’t do it. You aren’t that badass. You make yourself climb off the bed every now and again and jump on the spot, or at least bounce up and down. So you aren’t just lying there. The light never goes off. You can’t tell how much time is passing. Your thoughts go around and around. Sometimes you catch yourself singing.

~

You swing the car into the school driveway and crawl up to the house. It's late, most of the windows dark, but not Austen’s. You sit in the car for a few moments. Then you climb out and go inside.

The corridors are empty. It's been a while since you were last here and the place feels unfamiliar, although nothing is different. You enter the East Wing and pass a boy with a white ribbon tied around his wrist and dark bruises beneath his eyes, reciting something in Latin. The boy sees you and breaks off, then looks pained. You do not stop.

You knock on Austen’s door. She calls for you to enter in the imperious voice she adopts for students and you step inside. She is behind her desk, surrounded by papers, her hair pinned up but threatening escape. She sets down a pen and leans back in her chair. “What fortuitous timing. I was about to start grading papers.” She gestures. “Will you sit?”

“I’m going to Syria.”

“Oh,” she says. “When?”

“Now. Tonight.”

She nods. “You should try to visit the museum in Damascus. They have a tablet with the world’s oldest recorded linear alphabet. It’s quite humbling.”

“I want you to come with me.”

She becomes very still. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

You look around the room. “Do you remember the watch I had? The digital one, to wake me so that I could get back to my room before dawn. I was terrified of it failing. Or sleeping through it.”

“Eliot. Please.”

“Atwood knew,” you say. “She told me as much, many years later.”

“Please,” says Austen.

“We thought we were being clever. Carrying on under their noses. And when... when we had to stop, we thought we did that in secret, too. We did it because we were terrified of being discovered. But they knew.”

Her eyes glimmer. “Why are you saying these things? Are you here to compromise me?”

“No,” you say. “God, no.”

“Then stop talking.”

“They persuaded us. Without saying a word.”

“There was no alternative, Eliot.”

“I don’t believe that anymore. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I have this idea that it would have been a girl,” you say. “I don’t know why. But I’ve thought that for a while. I find it hard to shake.”

Austen puts her face in her hands. “Stop talking.”

“She’d be grown now. A young woman.”

“Stop!”

“I’m sorry.” You catch yourself. “I’m sorry.”

“I want you to leave.”

You nod. You hesitate, almost apologize again, then move to the door. Before you close it, you glance back, in case she’s looked up from her hands. But she hasn’t.

~

You land in Damascus. Heat envelops you the instant you step over the threshold of the airplane, a taste of Australia with a different scent. You make your way across the tarmac to the airport proper and submit yourself to the impatient eyes of various mustachioed officials. Your papers are impeccable and so you are soon released into the main hall, which is large, framed with high, latticed keyhole-shaped windows, and even vaguely air-conditioned. A short man in a tight suit stands gripping a sign that reads:

السيد إليوت

“I’m Eliot,” you say. “You are Hossein?”

The man nods, extending his hand in the Western manner.

“علياتز حش عم نت,” you say. The man’s hand drops. His face relaxes. “My plane is delayed,” you say. “It is due in ten hours. You will wait here for it and that is what you will believe.” You can see the exit. There is no shortage of drivers on the pavement outside. “And when Thoreau asks you what happened,” you say, “tell him I retired.”

~

Someone enters the room. You squeeze shut your eyes as soon as you realize, so are left with only the briefest impression: a square man in a dark suit, silver hair.

“Hello, Elise,” Thoreau says.

You sit up. Your brain feels soft. Lee was right: It's harder to marshal mental defenses while under physiological stress. You need to think clearly but all you want is a sandwich.

“Lee is dead. You assumed, perhaps. But in case you were wondering about the possibility of last-minute medical heroics... no. He died. Another for your collection.”

“I’ll stop at one more.”

“No,” Thoreau says. “You won’t. I think we both understand this. You are infected with a murderous impulse. You’ve managed to ameliorate this so far by plotting my demise. If you actually succeeded... well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Since you would inevitably begin to, well, kill everyone. I think you must realize this. You must plan to kill me. But you must not do it. Quite the conundrum.”

You wonder how quickly you can get off the bed and get your hands around Thoreau’s throat. Probably not very fast. Probably to no great effect, even if you do. You need to be smarter. This is your chance; you will not get him alone again. You need your head to stop pounding.

“Was this a suicide mission? I don’t think so. It goes against your character. I think you came here with a plan to kill me and the vaguest hope that you would somehow be redeemed. For you are such an immediate girl. You live from opportunity to opportunity. Does that sound right?”

Maybe, you think. You don’t know. You're hungry. You wonder where Eliot is.

“I’m founding a religion,” says Thoreau. “I use the term religion loosely. But then, so does everyone. It’s rather a lot of work, even with the bareword, and once it’s done, that’s only the first step. So I won’t waste any further time. Here’s what’s going to happen. You will open your eyes. You will look at the bareword. I will say, Forever serve my interests.” He looms closer, a shape you can’t quite bring into focus. “I see from your expression that this is unexpected. You thought you would be killed. A natural assumption. But what I realized, Elise, is that you have made yourself useful. You are skilled, resourceful, adaptable, and you have a kill order in your head that will be triggered in the event of my death. You are, in fact, the perfect bodyguard.”

“No. I won’t do that.”

“Of course you will. You have no way of stopping it.”

You bare your teeth, trying to rise from the bed. He's right. You are alone in a cell. You don’t even have a bucket. But there has to be something. There has always been something before.

“As many people as I’ve enthralled, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who hates me quite this much. Which makes this rather fascinating, Elise, since, the brain being what it is, your mind will invent a series of rationalizations to justify why you’re choosing to serve me. How far will you bend in order to reach that place? That’s what raises my curiosity. I wonder whether the end result will still be able to be accurately called you.”

“I will kill you.”

“Well,” he says, “you’ll want to.”

“Stay back.” You think you hear him approaching, and throw out your arms. “Stay back, you motherfucker!”

“I’m not going to grapple with you, Elise. You will open your eyes of your own volition. You will do this because you see there is no alternative.”

“Eliot,” you say. “I want to see Eliot.”

“I’m afraid Eliot is in Syria. He flew out last night.”

“Tell him I’m here.”

“Oh, Elise,” says Thoreau. “He already knows.”

You don’t want to believe him. But you can’t find falsehood in his voice. Eliot, you think. Eliot, you were my last hope.

“Open your eyes, please,” Thoreau says, and you begin to shake very badly, because you are going to do it.

~

“So you left her,” Danny says.

You rub your forehead. Your throat is sore; you've been talking for some time. It's taxing, because you're recovering from a near-death experience and outside the window forces are gathering to kill you. “That’s what you get from that story? That I left?” Danny doesn’t respond. “Yes. I left. There was no alternative.”

“There’s always an alternative.”

“Well,” you say. You feel tired. “It didn’t feel like it.”

“What then?”

“Thoreau sent her after me. I had this crazy idea that I’d be left alone if I went far enough away. That I could start a new life. But she came after me and systematically murdered everyone who was in the way.”

“She’s probably compromised.”

“You think that makes a difference?”

“Yes,” says Danny, “because I can un-compromise her, with the bareword.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t erase an instruction. Not even with that. You would only create conflicting instructions.”

“Which means what?”

“It’s unpredictable.”

“Well, that’s fucking something.”

“The original instruction won’t go anywhere. It could reassert itself at any moment, based on situational factors, such as where she is, how she’s feeling. Do you want to take that chance when one of the instructions is kill everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you fucking can’t.”

A low thrumming begins outside. Danny peers out the window at the sky. “I love her.”

You shake your head. “You’re misremembering.”

“I remember that.”

“Listen to me carefully,” you say, “because over the last twelve months, I have been highly motivated to figure out exactly what happened in Broken Hill, and as a result I know for a fact that your movements diverged from hers shortly after she left me facedown in a ditch. What I pieced together from this was that when she went to you and asked you to leave with her, you said no. This is how I first began to suspect your existence as an exception. And it’s how I know you didn’t love her.”

“You said people are defined by what they want. That it’s the most important thing about them. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I know who I am.”

You look out the window. “Well, terrific. That’s terrific, Nick. I’m so glad you could find your emotional core, before your ex-girlfriend murders us. Imagine what would happen if she got her hands on a bareword again. Imagine that.”

“I’ll keep it from her.”

“Okay,” you say, “well, now we’re entering a magical fantasy land, because with all due respect to your newly regained assertiveness, you don’t have a hope in hell of keeping her from anything she wants. What’s that noise?”

“Choppers.”

“More than one? What do they look like?”

“Why would she do anything to help this guy Thoreau? She must be compromised. He’s making her chase us and you say she has to die for it.”

“You think I like it?”

“Yes. I do. Because of Jane.”

You look at the ceiling. “Well,” you say. “Maybe you’re right.”

“So?”

“So it doesn’t matter. Is it Woolf’s choice? Maybe not, but she is what she is. You, right now, are shooting at people for the crime of being compromised. Why is Woolf different? Also, may I add, she wasn’t made this way out of nowhere. Thoreau sowed that seed in fertile ground.”

Danny raises his voice over the din of the choppers. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning she wiped out Broken Hill!”

“Maybe she was compromised then!”

“You’re choosing what you want to believe! Christ! I would love to believe that I didn’t let eighteen thousand people die because I couldn’t see her for what she was. But I can’t. The truth is she was always like this and I refused to see it.”

“I tell you what, how about we kill Thoreau?”

“Sure, we’ll ask Woolf to stand aside for a minute. Don’t look at me like that’s a realistic possibility. She’ll defend him to the death. And even if she could be circumvented somehow, Thoreau being alive is what keeps Woolf in check. Remove him and she’s left with an instruction to kill everyone.”

Danny is watching out the window. The loudness of the choppers seems to have leveled.

“You want a nightmare scenario? Thoreau goes down, Woolf takes the bareword. Thoreau cannot die. Not before Woolf.” Danny doesn’t react. “What’s happening out there?”

“Guys coming out of choppers.”

“What kind of guys?”

“Military. Big black helmets with goggles. Can’t see their faces.”

“Ah,” you say. “So we are completely fucked, then.”

Danny looks at you.

“Environmentally Quarantined Personnel. They see the world through filters, to protect them against compromise.”

“Should I shoot them?”

“Sure,” you say. “Why not?”

Danny raises the rifle. A part of the window frame near his head explodes. He ducks against the wall. “Shit.”

“Yes,” you say.

Danny moves to the other window, checks outside. “They’re encircling us.”

“I would imagine they’re landing on the roof, too,” you say. “Rappelling down from the choppers, perhaps.” You close your eyes. “Any final questions for me before we die?”