Vox Mentis

Wait why do we want to fuck about in a potentially on fire building that will lock you into it if you don't act now?

Well, that report on the Syndesis word, filed six minutes ago, would indicate that this word compromises anybody and everybody perfectly. That word is so good that setting doesn't even matter.
We want to get out in a way that leads to us not being compromised.

if we must go downstairs with everyone else, let's bring a tape recorder. Who knows when a perfect (bare?) word would be useful. Edit: see if you can't get a recording device into someone else's pocket with your pickpocketing skills.

It'll be fine. The fire won't spread past Labs. It's all designed to be sealed off; nothing is going to make its way upstairs.

Come down from there

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

You run through floor plans in your head. There's no fire escape or elevator. You hadn’t realized that before. No glass cases saying IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. No one ever gathered you all in a conference room and explained where to go in an orderly fashion in the event that you need to evacuate.

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

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

"Cosugar," you say. "Sasha, I-"

Sasha winces, her lips going into a flat line, then stares at you in disbelief. "What the fuck are you doing? Are you crazy? Do what you want, I'm getting out of here." Sasha disappears and the door slams.

Wait why do we want to fuck about in a potentially on fire building that will lock you into it if you don't act now? The last time you dicked about too hard with not following protocols you wound up in hellholemcnowhere'sville for god knows how long. Do you want to take that risk? Don't be daft get going.

Well, that report on the Syndesis word, filed six minutes ago, would indicate that this word compromises anybody and everybody perfectly. That word is so good that setting doesn't even matter.
We want to get out in a way that leads to us not being compromised.

if we must go downstairs with everyone else, let's bring a tape recorder. Who knows when a perfect (bare?) word would be useful. Edit: see if you can't get a recording device into someone else's pocket with your pickpocketing skills.

It'll be fine. The fire won't spread past Labs. It's all designed to be sealed off; nothing is going to make its way upstairs.

You grab a tape recorder from your desk, just in case. You can go up or down. Those are your only options. You enter the stairwell and start going up. You doubt there's a fire, and even if there is, you're probably safe up here. You hear disembodied voices rising around you like departed spirits. A door booms and there's silence but for your own breathing. You don’t hear anyone else going down, you realize: no one from other floors. You stop to kick off your shoes, which are helping no one. You poke your head in on a few floors, but they are bare. You climb and climb and finally see daylight. You even jog up the last few steps but find yourself at a scuffed steel door that's chained and padlocked. You try it anyway. You sit on the concrete and try to figure out what next.

Somewhere far below, a door clacks open, then slams. This happens eight or nine times. You listen but can’t hear anything more. “Fuck,” you say. You're pissed at yourself. You spent too long in Broken Hill, not needing an escape route. You ball your hands into fists. Think. There's a skylight. It's secured, but how well? You go back to the door and put one foot into a loop of chain and pull yourself up, searching for fingerholds. Balancing, you reach for the skylight, but it's too far away. You hear a rasping. What the fuck that is, you do not know, but it's coming from below and getting closer. You manage to inch your way up until you're standing on the bar of the door. The chain swings and clanks like a bell. Like you're deliberately trying to attract attention. Your fingertips brush the skylight but that's the best you can do. If you release your grip on the door frame, you could possibly grab this thing and pull it out of the ceiling as you fall. There's a very slim chance of that happening. You hear footsteps. Boots on concrete. The rasping punctuates the air at regular intervals, like breathing but not. You should have found a way to learn words. You shouldn't have waited for someone to teach you. You should have found them somehow. You leap at the skylight and your fingers skid uselessly over the plastic and you fall to the concrete and bang your knee. “Fuck,” you say. A man comes up the stairs. A kind of man. He's wearing black from head to toe and his eyes are black, bulky goggles, like night vision gear, set into a fighter pilot’s helmet, with bulging plastic hemispheres over the ears. He looks like he could walk through fire. The rasping is his air regulator.

“Fakash heva clannigh lanoe!” you say. This is a mess of attention words for random segments. The chances of it having any effect are about a thousand to one. “Lie down!”

He extends a gloved hand. “Come with me.” These words come out flat and computer-modulated. You don’t move. If he comes closer, you could jump him. You don’t see a gun. You'll go for those goggles. If you can even just dislodge them, it'll make it hard for him to chase you.

“Hurry.” The man gestures to the stairs. “There’s a fire.”

“There isn’t,” you say. “Is there.” He doesn't answer. You figured out now that he can’t hear you. You begin to walk down the steps.

~

The lobby has been converted to a makeshift hospital, full of white cloth screens. The windows are blacked out with plastic sheeting. Black-suited spacemen move between them, respirators hissing. You see no one’s face you don’t know from level five. You glimpse Sasha on a trolley bed but then lose her behind a screen. You're told to stay where you are. Nobody speaks to you. Or to each other, at least that you can hear. An hour later, a spaceman draws back your curtain. He isn’t wearing his helmet and you're surprised at his youth. He has a mustache, thin and fluffy. You wonder if this is the guy who fetched you from the top of the stairs. If so, you should have gone with karratan.

“You can go.” He begins to disassemble screens.

“What was all that about?” But you're not really expecting an answer. Outside, you find the others huddled on the street. It's dusk, the tail end of rush hour.

“A drill,” says Sasha. She doesn't speak to you. She won't look at you. “But for what?”

“No point wondering,” says Raine. “We’ll never know.”

“True, that,” says Sasha. You can tell she's angry. She's wondering why you hadn’t come downstairs with them, why you had used an attention word on her. And, by extension, what you know that she doesn’t.

You can’t hang around any longer. You start walking and by the time you reach the subway, you're shaking. You won't do anything rash. You'll come to work in the morning, go to your desk, and do your job, like always. But this has been a lesson. A reminder. The next time something like this happens, you tell yourself, you'll have a way out.

~

You keep a notepad and write down syllables you notice are used more frequently by one psychographic than another. On the train, you listen for deviations from the average. You pick apart the words you know, looking for patterns. You're surprised at how obvious they are. Liberals overuse -ay and -ee, the front vowel sounds. Authoritarians are thick with fricatives. You develop hunches from newspapers and TV and websites, track down a suitable representative, at a bar or church meeting or the grocery store, and try trotting them out. Like a safecracker listening for tumblers. Sut. Stut. Stuh. You slide guesses into sentences and usually people don’t even seem to register them. They don’t make it past the perceptual filter, ignored as verbal static. At worst, they think you're stuttering. Your hunches are usually wrong. But sometimes you see a flinch. A tiny flare across the muscles of the face. And that's a tumbler.

It's a hard way to learn words. You could do this for a year and still know less than Sasha. But it's very thorough. It forces you to understand the underlying principles. You deduce a preference for alliteration in a set from what you know of the sets around it, leaping from there to vavvito, a command word, and this thrills you more than anything you've been taught. Because you found it yourself.

You think back to Sasha's police story about set 191 and are astounded. Apparently Sasha can’t see that the words of set 191 are bound together. You could understand if Sasha had forgotten the entire tree. But if you know one, you have half of the others. Sasha doesn't seem to get this. She memorized them one at a time, as if they were unconnected. Like a tray of random objects in a child’s puzzle game.

~

One thing you never get over is the feeling of being watched. You're not sure how, but it's happening. You try varying your route to work, checking reflections, doubling back unexpectedly, but never see anyone. At home, you double-bolt, but feel no safer. Your feeling is that Thoreau is in the apartment. That's your impression. One night, you dream he comes into your bedroom like a black wind and leans over you, watching you without emotion, as if you are a thing beneath glass.

~

On the first Tuesday of your sixth month in Washington, you leave your apartment and walk to the local train station. You ride escalators down to the platform and wait for the red line. It's warm; you're thinking about getting to your desk and taking off your shoes. A man at the end of the platform has a guitar and is banging out a song you loathe, for personal reasons: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The train begins to pull in. In its passing windows you glimpse Eliot.

For a moment you're not sure whether you saw him inside the train or reflected behind you. Then the train grinds to a halt and the doors open and he says from behind you: “Let it go.”

You watch the train pull out. You're sixteen years old again. Just like that. But then you turn and he isn’t so frightening. He's aged around the eyes. He's just a man, after all.

“Are you in love?” Eliot says.

You don’t answer.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Yes.”

He looks away.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’ll stop.”

“Your next mistake will end you. This is as far as I can go to protect you. You need to appreciate this.”

“I do. I promise.”

His eyes search you. “No more calls. Not one.”

“I’m done. I’m done, Eliot.” In this moment, you really mean it.

He walks away. You stand on the empty platform.

~

You don't call Danny that night. The following day, you don't call him. You've gone longer than this without hearing his voice but now it's different, because it's the end. You feel sick. You can’t taste anything. It's crazy but you can no longer taste food. At work, you click through tickets and write reports but can’t tell if they make any sense. When it gets too much, you go to the bathroom and put your head between your knees. You make herself repeat: Do not call him. You feel possessed, by a cruel, heartless Elise who does not love.

You surrender on the third day. It's a terrible betrayal of Eliot; you realize that. He stuck his neck out for you in ways you can’t quite comprehend and you promised to stop. But the fact is you can’t. You tried but you can’t. It's been six months and home is still on the other side of the world.

You can’t call Danny again. Eliot would know, or, worse, others would. There's no stay-but-keep-calling-him option. You can only leave.

Years before, in San Francisco, you and a girlfriend had been crossing a McDonald’s parking lot and found yourselves boxed in by a group of barely pubescent boys with low pants and twitchy smiles. One of the boys had a gun, which he kept putting away and getting out again, swapping from hand to hand, and the others began to ask you and your friend if you knew what hot bitches you were and how badly you were about to get fucked up. This was a bad situation even without the gun, but you had been young and stupid, so you walked up to the boy with the gun and pulled it right out of his hands. You had good fingers, even then, because of the card tricks. You didn’t know a thing about guns, except which end to hold, but that was enough, so the boys stood around looking scared while you and your friend made a lot of silly threats and walked out backward.
The lesson here was probably that people are dicks. But also, when you're outmuscled, if there's a gun around, you could get control of the situation by getting the gun.

You're outmuscled. You don't have a gun. But you suspect there is one in the basement.

~

Beneath your desk is a gym bag. The top layer is clothes you actually wear while working out, and under those is a second set you stashed there for just such a day as this. You log out of the ticket system and sling the bag over your shoulder. On your way out, you pass Sasha, who's on the phone, and you mouth, “Gym,” and Sasha just turns away. You feel a small pang, because although you've never been friends, you feel like what you had you might have lost by using her words, and now you're never going to see her again.

You walk two blocks to a small café, a place you come sometimes for lunch. In the restroom, you change into the clothes from your gym bag: a T-shirt, a pair of frayed jeans, and an old denim jacket. You scrub the makeup from your face, collected a nice film of grime from the floor tiles, and dab this under your eyes and across your hairline. Your work clothes and the gym bag you stash behind a toilet. You don’t expect to see those again, either.

You circle the block and approach the office from the lane on the other side. Here is a nondescript door with a sign that said THE RITA DOVE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH. It looks like just another doomed business renting space on the wrong side of the building. But it's not. It's the public face of Labs. You press the intercom and wait.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” you say. “My name is Jessica Hicks, I did one of your, like, tests a couple weeks ago, and you said I should come back if I wanted?”

The door buzzes. You push it open and go up the narrow steps. At the top is a small waiting room, with empty chairs and an energetic television. A woman with high hair sits behind sliding glass. “Take a seat,” she says.

You sit and flip through People. You've been here before. The first time, the day after you'd determined to start planning, you'd found the entrance but not gone inside. You looked up “Rita Dove Institute” in the phone book and called them - from a pay phone, for what that's worth - and determined that yes, they were interested in volunteers for testing, and walk-ins were accepted between eleven and one o’clock. They'd wanted you to come in the next day, but you demurred, because you hadn’t acquired a false identity yet. It took you a week to find Jessica Hicks, a girl your age who had no fixed address and little interest in the world beyond where she might score her next hit. Jessica took to you straightaway, maybe sensing a shared history in addition to the potential to scam some money, and gushed more personal information to you than you really needed. In exchange, you pressed a hundred-dollar bill into Jessica’s hand and squeezed her and said, “Keep this safe,” then stole it back when Jessica wasn’t looking, because, honestly, that wasn’t going to help anyone.

The institute had asked you to fill out a questionnaire. You went through this carefully, answering the psychographic questions honestly, which exposed you completely, of course, to anyone who divined that Jessica Hicks was you. You are set 220, you already know. Which should be good, because Labs could never get enough 220s.

After the questionnaire, they’d taken you to a small, bright room with a forest of video cameras. They attached electrodes to your skull and showed you TV ads. These were kind of funny, because they were not ads at all, or at least not for real products. They were excuses to broadcast words. After forty or fifty, you blacked out, and when you woke up everyone pretended you had just fallen asleep. You didn’t know what they had done to you until the report bubbled through the ticketing system. When you’d seen SUBJECT SET: 220, you’d scanned it anxiously, but there was no mention of permanent damage. You were pretty sure that Labs wouldn’t do destructive testing on a walk-in, but it would have been a bad thing to get wrong.

A few days later, the prepaid cell phone you kept to answer as Jessica Hicks rang, and a man chatted with you about whether you would be interested in coming in again. You said yes if there was money in it and he asked why you hadn’t put down a home address and you explained about it being a tough time and just needing to catch a break and would you get paid or not, what did it matter where you lived. Once you’d established that no one would notice one way or the other what happened to Jessica Hicks, the man said to come in anytime, they would love to see you. And here you are.

“Jessica,” the receptionist says. You look up from your magazine. “You’re up.” The door buzzes.

~

You follow a white-coated man with no chin through corridors lined with steel-caged lamps. “So I get a hundred dollars for this,” you say. “Right?”

“Right,” he says.

“Last time I fell asleep.” You're trying to engage him, to figure out if he's anyone you know through the ticket system. “I hope the ads are more interesting this time.”

You reach a double set of elevators. “We won’t be showing you ads today.”

“No? What, then?”

An elevator arrives. The man gestures for you to enter. “It’s a product.”

The doors close and despite yourself, your chest tightens. It's a small elevator. It feels like a very small elevator. “What kind of product?”

He scans his clipboard. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that without potentially polluting your reaction.”

“‘Polluting your reaction.’ You guys are weird.” The elevator numbers tick down. “Is it, like, a bottle of shampoo, or a car, or what?”

“It’s strongly important for our tests that you don’t have any preformed expectations.”

“Oh, okay. No problem.” Strongly important. That's an odd phrase. You've seen that one in the ticketing system.

The doors part. The corridor walls are pale blue. A calming color. The tech starts walking and you follow him to a set of plastic doors, where he has to swipe his ID tag and tap a code into a keypad. Fifty yards later, the same thing happens again. During this process, you eye ceiling-mounted video cameras. There's a second elevator and when this one stops the walls are bare concrete, no more psychological blue. You don’t like this much. The corridor ends at a perfectly round steel door that is twice as tall as you are. It looks like a bank vault. The door stands open and beyond it you can see a small concrete room with a single orange plastic chair. By the vault door stands another white-coated man and a gray-uniformed guy who looks like maybe security.

Your chinless tech says, “Verifying, I have prototype nine double-zero double-one three eight.”

The other man says, “Confirming prototype nine zero zero one one three eight.”

“Verifying subject, Hicks, Jessica, identifying number three one one seven nine.”

“Confirming subject, time is eight-fifty-eight, time lock has released and chamber is open.”

“What is all this?” you say. You try to grin.

“Security,” says your tech, not looking at you. “The product is very valuable.” He enters the concrete room, which requires stepping over a thick metal rim. “Follow me, please.”

You do so. The air is freezing. The walls are featureless concrete but for six bulbous yellow lights in wire cages. Four tripod-mounted video cameras are aimed at the plastic chair. In the middle of the room is a box. A huge, steel, coffin-shaped box.

“Please sit.”

“Mmm,” you say. “Mmm, mmm.”

“It’s all right, Jessica. It’ll be just like last time. Only this time we’re showing you a product instead of ads. I’m going to fit you with the helmet so we can measure your brain activity, okay?”

“Yeah,” you say, although you're thinking no, no, no. You sit. Even the plastic is icy. The steel box has no lid. Not that you can see. Around its sides are thick vertical rods. Pistons? You stare because you can't imagine what the deal is with this box.

The tech touches your hair. You flinch. “Just relax.” He begins to fit the helmet.

“Hey, what is this again? What kind of-”

“Just a product.”

“Yeah, but it, you know, seems pretty weird for a product. So what kind of product is it?” He doesn’t answer. Turn him, you think. “Strongly important”: you have read a hundred tickets from this guy and he's set fifty-five, no question, and you've figured out words for that. You could compromise him in two seconds flat and make him walk you out of here. You don’t know what next. There is no next in that scenario. Not one you want. But why is there a box? Why the fuck is there a box?

“Almost done, Jessica.”

You had not anticipated a box. You thought maybe an envelope. A man sitting opposite, preparing to read a word. And before he could, you would take it from him, because he wouldn’t be prepared for a poet. These guys, these isolated techs, you don’t think they even know what poets are. They just do what they're told. But that plan is clearly fucked, because whatever is in this box, this thing that turns a person’s m-graph into a flat line, causes syndesis, is too important for an envelope. You had been foolish to imagine that.

“There’s a small needle in this one.”

You feel a sliver of cold enter your skull.

“All done.” The tech moves to the video cameras and begins turning them on. Red lights gleam at you. “Just clear your mind and look at the product.”

“What product?”

“The product that will come out of the box after I’ve left.”

“What do you mean, it will come out of the box?”

“I can’t tell you without-”

“Without polluting my reaction, I know, but why is there a box? What’s inside it?”

“Don’t worry about the box.”

“Just tell me why there has to-”

“I don’t know what’s in the box,” he says. “Okay?”

You see it's true. And now that you look, you notice how the video cameras are covering only you. Not the box. It's so that later, after it's done and the box has closed again, people could study the tapes without being exposed. You notice the tech has been avoiding eye contact. You know what that means, right?

He places a black device on the floor. “This is a speaker. I won’t be able to hear you, but I’ll keep talking to you throughout the process.”

“I changed my mind,” you say. “I don’t want to do this.”

He glances over his shoulder. The man in the gray uniform hovers outside the vault door. Bolteen, you think. Tarlocc dissinen lox, save me from that guard. It might work. The two aren’t far apart; the tech might reach him before he draws his gun.

The guard says, “We have a problem?”

“No,” you say. “No, I’m okay.”

“Time,” the guard says. “Thirty seconds.”

“Just relax,” the tech tells you. He steps out. Shortly afterward, the vault door begins to move. You expect it to clang but it closes as gently as a shadow. Then bolts fire like gunshots and you jump. The echoes last forever and then all you can hear is your own breathing. Danny, you think. Danny, I may have fucked this up.

The black speaker the tech left on the floor emits a burst of static. It takes you a moment to realize it's talking. “Jessshhhica.” It sounds like he's broadcasting from the moon. “We’re going to give you a few minutes to relax.” Drenched in static, it sounds like relaxssschh. “Please breathe normally and remain in a calm, natural state.”

What do you do?

Get ready, get set

You're better at attack than defense. Let's have a staring contest with the basilisk.

Hey, so you know that thing (I'm guessing it's a new word they've been slowly perfecting «ie. the bareword -- but she wouldn't know that») that turned somebody's mind completely flat? That's what they're about to do to you. Good job getting yourself into this situation.

So I didn't notice any point where they took any stuff off her, such as her cell phone.

Start recording. They won't like that. Should buy you some time to think of something else.

At a minimum, get something reflective in the shot, get them worried. Even a reflected glimpse of it could affect their ability to evaluate you. If you don't want to give away the game just yet, when they come in to ask what you're doing, you can act like you're playing with whatever-it-is to help yourself calm down.

So I didn't notice any point where they took any stuff off her, such as her cell phone.

Start recording. They won't like that. Should buy you some time to think of something else.

At a minimum, get something reflective in the shot, get them worried. Even a reflected glimpse of it could affect their ability to evaluate you. If you don't want to give away the game just yet, when they come in to ask what you're doing, you can act like you're playing with whatever-it-is to help yourself calm down.

You pull out your cellphone. It's dead. Did they put you through some sort of EMP field? You look at the video cameras.

“I have some good news, Jessshhica. We can actually pay you a little more. One thousand dollarsshh for your time. How does that sssound?”

You glint the phone at the cameras, flash light in the lenses. There's no indication they can see you right now. As far as you're concerned, they are blind and deaf.

“Think about what you might do with that thousand dollars, Jessshhica. Ssssomething pretty great, I bet.”

There are thin wires coming out of the helmet in a bunch of places and you follow these to a tiny gray container strapped to the underside of your chair. Everything in this room is self-powered, you realize. The cage lights, the video cameras, the radio speaker. They're so careful to let nothing in or out, the room isn’t even wired. The cameras aren't wireless. They're recording you, but they can't see you live. They'll review the tapes later. They can't risk anything. They probably don't even let air in or out. If that door doesn’t open in the next few hours, you'll suffocate.

So the box is on a timer. And these techs probably don’t have any control over it; they probably just know when it's scheduled to open. Which means there are safety margins. A little time for everyone to get settled, which you can use.

“Jussshht another minute, Jessica. Almossst there.”

reveal the ruse, but say you were faking 220. throw them off, maybe, or at least get them to stop lying so you can get a better bead on what's going on

They can't hear her, or see her. The recording is for later. Everything is happening on its own now.

Look for a way out of the chair. I assume they've got something keeping her in it.

They can't hear her, or see her. The recording is for later. Everything is happening on its own now.

Look for a way out of the chair. I assume they've got something keeping her in it.

Nothing is keeping you in the chair, except the helmet. You begin to peel it from your head. Part of it resists. When you finally get it off, you see that it's the needle, which is four inches long and wet with clear fluid. You put that on the floor and try not to think about it.

You get up and inspect the box under the chair that the helmet is attached to. There's nothing but a chip and a battery. You stand up and circle the chair. It's just a chair. You look at the video cameras. There's nothing unusual. They stand on heavy metal tripods, gazing at the empty seat.

“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.” No indication they have any idea what you're doing.

“Gahh,” you say. You begin to walk toward the box, but your heart fails you and you retreat back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purrs. A seam cracks open and the top of the box begins to rise.

close your ears

Panic.

Maybe if you panic enough you won't be focused enough to process the word. Or you'll pass out and hopefully you have to be conscious for it to affect you.

No you're not thinking about it that rationally, you're just panicking.

At your command,

close your ears

You squeeze your eyes shut, just in case, and grope your way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging your ears with your fingers. That song you’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; you used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before you learned card tricks. It was how you’d met Jimmy: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Jimmy said, so that was mainly what you sang. You must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first you liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing you could do and nowhere you could go without it running across your brain or humming on your lips, and God knows you tried; you was smashing yourself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Jimmy played the opening chord and you just couldn’t do it. You could not sing that fucking song. Not again. You broke down, because you were only fifteen, and Jimmy took you behind the mall and told you it would be okay. But you had to sing. It was the biggest earner. You kind of lost it and then so did Jimmy and that was the first time he hit you. You ran away for a while. But you came back to him, because you had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like you had a truce: You would not complain about your bruised face and he would not ask you to sing “Lucy.” You had been all right with this. You had thought that was a pretty good deal.

Panic.

Maybe if you panic enough you won't be focused enough to process the word. Or you'll pass out and hopefully you have to be conscious for it to affect you.

No you're not thinking about it that rationally, you're just panicking.

Now there is something coming out of a box, and you reach for the most virulent mental earworm you know. “Lucy in the sky!” you sing. “With diamonds!”

~

Time passes and you do not die. You don't lose your mind. In the spaces between song words, you hear things. For this reason, you keep singing. Shrieking out the words. Then you catch a burst of static and realize it's just the tech, talking to you through the speaker. You don’t think you have to fear the tech. Only the box. So you lower your voice, a little, and eventually unplug one ear.

“Ssscchtand on one leg,” says the speaker.

You remove your other finger from your ear. You don’t move for a while, in case the box is going to talk and you need to replug your ears. But they had said they wanted you to look at something, hadn’t they? Not listen.

“Toussscccchh your left elbow.”

You begin to feel your way across the concrete. When you reach the box, you feel your way up its side. Above the seam there is no more steel. You slide your hands over the lip and feel something cool and rigid. Plastic, maybe. You press against it. It yields slightly, just enough to detect. You sit back on your haunches and think about this.

“Now your right elbow, please, Jessica.”

You crawl across the floor until you reach a wall and follow that to a video camera. You drag one back to the box. It's probably catching glimpses of you. You confirm the contours of the box, the plastic bubble that seems to encase whatever is inside, and get to your feet and heft the camera by its tripod.

“Take off your sshoesssssch.”

You raise the camera. Like golf, you think. You swing and there's a glass explosion that tells you that you missed the plastic. You adjust your grip and try again. This time you receive a more satisfying sound. You put down the tripod and grope at the plastic, seeking damage.

“Sssssit down.”

A scratch. A minor deformation. Not big enough to work with. But it's something. It's proof of concept. You get to your feet and raise the tripod again.

“Put your foot in your mouth as far as it will go.”

You swing and swing until your arms ache and sweat runs down your face. You drop the tripod, sure that you'll find nothing but shattered plastic, but it doesn’t feel as ruined as you’d expected. Your hands move over sharp plastic edges like rough knives. You begin to pry these apart and force your hand between them.

“You want to run through the protocols again?” the speaker mutters. Then: “Okay. I’ll finish.”

Your middle finger touches something cool but you can’t grip it. You press and it bites. “Ow,” you say. “Ow, ow.” It's sharp. Thicker than you expected. Irregularly shaped. You had been thinking paper, maybe cardboard, material on which a word could be inscribed, but this is neither. You begin to work it out between the plastic knives.

“Jessschica, come over to the walkie-talkie. To where my voice is coming from.”

The thing gets stuck on the broken plastic mouth and you waggle it back and forth. You can’t figure out what it is. And yet it feels familiar. You pull with all your strength and hear a tearing, a ripping that you hope mightily is plastic and not some vital part of whatever you're withdrawing. Then it pops free. You clutch it, panting.

“The speaker here has a compartment on the underside. Open this. There are four red pills inside. These are cyanide pills. If you eat them, you will die. It’s important that you know this. If you understand that eating the pills will kill you, nod.”

You shrug your denim jacket off and wrap it carefully around the thing. It probably would have been smart to keep track of which way it was facing, in case it has a good side and a bad side - you're thinking of words written on paper again - but it's too late for that. When you're sure no part of it is showing, you open your eyes. You're surprised by the room’s size. In your imagination, it had grown enormous.

“Swallow all the pills.”

Behind you is the box. Empty, you hope, of whatever had been going to take away your mind and leave you amenable to the speaker’s terrible instructions. But you are not going to test that theory. You look at the bundle of jacket. It takes an effort to do that. The thing seems roughly book-shaped, but irregular and heavy. You steal a hand into the jacket and probe at its surface. Freezing. Like metal. You find a little protuberance with vicious edges, and realize this must be what cut you, so at least you know which way it faces.

The door bolts fire. You're out of time. Your fingers trace grooves, rough indentations in a smooth surface, and when your mind tries to piece these together, something thickens there and you withdraw your hand with a gasp. Nausea crashes over you. You feel yourself beginning to faint and fight it, because that would be the end. Here, you tell yourself. I’m right here.

The room fills with light. A shadow appears, bisecting the brightness. “Oh, God,” says someone. The tech. You hear footsteps.

You begin to unwrap the jacket. Years ago, in a hidden library at the school, you had read tales of mass enthrallment. Of towers and the splintering of language. Myths, you’d thought. Everything they’d taught you said there was no way to compromise everyone at once. The Organization’s words are keyed to particular psychographic sets; that's how they work. And they do not push an m-graph flat. They do not trigger syndesis. Something that can do that is not a regular word. It's the kind of word from the tales. If anything is worth flooding a building with guys in black space suits who can’t hear or see except through helmets, and burying in a concrete tomb with a time-locked steel door thicker than you are, you think that would probably be it.

The man in the gray uniform rushes in, his gun drawn. The tech is just standing there, shocked. Your jacket drops to the floor. Wood. You recognize the feel of it now. The thing is petrified wood. You press its back to your chest, keeping your eyes up. If you're wrong, now is when you'll find out. That would be pretty hilarious. At this point, unless it's exactly what you think, you are pretty screwed. You say, “Don’t move.”

The guard stops. There is silence. In it, you start to believe.

hop on one foot

“Hop on one foot,” you say. “Both of you.”

They hop. Your spine tingles. It's one thing to understand the concept. It's another to see it. You take a breath. That's the first part. Now for the next. You say, “Tell me how to get out of here.”

~

One coffee shop in Broken Hill doesn’t have a view of the quarry. This was what you had ascertained after three months of study: that the town offers coffee at five different locations and four stare at the quarry. You patronize the fifth. It's not that the quarry is ugly - although it is, deeply and thoroughly - but rather that it is everywhere. The town streets are wide, its buildings well spaced, the land as flat as any you've seen, and this makes it impossible to remain unaware of the forty-foot battlement of desiccated dirt and shattered stone that stands like a rib cage at the town’s core. You keep taking it for a wave, a great rolling crest of vomited earth about to engulf the town. Which it is, in a sense; wind and erosion and the constant addition of new mullock must push it a little closer every year. Given time, it will swallow everything. This will be a serious improvement. That's another thing you ascertained, while waiting here in case Woolf shows up.

You sip coffee and browse the Barrier Daily Truth, an eighteen-page newspaper that comes out weekly. This edition is leading with “Five Decades of Happiness,” a story about an elderly married couple. You read it twice, searching for the part that is always missing in these kinds of articles, namely, how the hell that is possible. You are genuinely unsure whether these idyllic unions exist or people merely pretend because the alternative is so unpalatable. Every time you think you've settled on the latter, you see something like this, “Five Decades of Happiness,” and start to wonder.

These are loose thoughts, of course.

Your phone rings. You fold the paper. “Yes?”

“She’s here. Coming down the Barrier Highway. White sedan. Alone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Got a lot of technology here, Eliot.”

“Yes. Thank you. How long?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“Thank you. I’ll take it from here.” You toss a few bills onto the table, leave the coffee shop, and walk to your car. Once the engine is running and the air conditioner moving, you make a few short calls. Just to confirm that everyone is where they are supposed to be. It's been three months since Woolf fled Washington with a stolen word; everything that needs to be in place already is. But still. When it's done, you put the car into gear and drive toward the wall of mullock.

~

You drive about a mile out of town and park your car to block the road. It's symbolic: Woolf will have no trouble steering around you. The idea is that seeing you will impress upon her the futility of continuing.

You climb out and wait against the car. It's winter, supposedly. A rush of birds pass overhead, filling the air with their grating calls. Cockatoos. At dawn, the noise is incredible. Like the whole world is tearing apart. You were sleeping in a motel and one night woke to find an insect the size of your palm on the pillow. You didn’t even know what it was. You had never seen anything like it.

You feel an urge to call Austen. You've been thinking about her again. It's this assignment; too much time, too much waiting. It's Woolf. Watching her kick down the walls planted the thought in your head that it could be done. Call Austen, you think. Right. Ask how she’s doing. No reason. Just feel like a chat.

You and she had been students together, almost twenty years ago, attending the school that she now runs. You still remember the bounce of her hair the day she came to class, the books clutched to her chest, the angle of her nose. You basically fell in love with her on the spot. Well, no, that's not accurate; that implies a binary state, a shifting from not-love to love, remaining static thereafter, and what you did with Austen was fall and fall, increasingly faster the closer you drew, like planets drawn to each other’s gravitational force. Doomed, you guess, the same way.

You both held out a long time. Years? It felt like years. But maybe not. You had been seniors, anyway, not far from graduation. You knew this because Austen had given you her words. A yellowed envelope, curling from use, and inside were dozens of slips of paper, each bearing a word.

“Use them,” she said. The lights were off so you would be able to detect anyone approaching by the shadows thrown beneath her door. But you could see her face clearly enough. “I want you to compromise me.”

You can't remember your own response. You might have tried to talk her out of it. Might have not. You’ve thought a lot of things and it's too long ago to tell the difference between choices real and imagined. Almost all of your memory is about her: the way she lay back on the bed, her bare shoulders gleaming. Her face as you whispered the first words. You were clumsy, that first time. It took you a while to find the place between awareness and compromise, the sub-lucid state of low consciousness that lay the body open to suggestion. When you put her under too far, her face would slacken; when you brought her too close to the surface, her eyes would focus and she would tell you to do more. You touched her breasts and they felt hard and urgent against your palm. Her hips rose from the bed. “Fuck me,” she said. “I want you to fuck me.” She whimpered and growled like an animal. You worried about the noise, said, “Quiet,” and she began to hiss, a kind of noise you never heard anyone make before. Goose bumps undulated across her skin. Waves followed the touch of your fingers. Her hips rose and fell, and when you touched her there she issued a high, barely audible keen, like escaping steam. You worried you’d broken her, and brought her up, and desperation flashed across her face and she begged you to take her down again. When you did, she gave a long sigh of satisfaction, a noise of complete unself-consciousness that signaled you were very close to the core of her. Her words became a chant, gasped into your ear over and over as her fingers clawed at your back, and you were unable to stop yourself. You unbuttoned your pants and brought things to their conclusion.

You lay together for hours. You knew you should leave before dawn, lest someone see you slinking from her room, but you couldn’t bear to part with her. You held her as she gently rose toward full consciousness. You kissed. When light began to leak into the sky and you couldn’t put it off any longer, you rose from the bed. She walked you to the door - her naked body in the moonlight, you'll never forget that - and said, “Next time, I do you.”

A cockatoo screeches from a nearby tree. You draw breath, exhale. This is not a time for reminiscing. You won't be calling Austen. It's ancient history. And it ended badly. Or perhaps not badly, but not well. Then you both had graduated and gone to different parts of the organization and that was that. You have no idea whether she thinks about that time anymore, whether she does so with shame or regret. It's impossible to tell. Impossible to ask, without exposing yourself.

One day, I’ll kiss her again. The corners of your mouth twitch. One more kiss. What a thought. Ludicrous. Still. There's no harm in fantasy. Not if you recognize it as such. You'll let yourself keep this one, you decide. It's a nice thought to have.

~

Two hours later, you hear tires crawl across dirt. A white sedan noses around the corner. It's driving very slowly and stops as soon as it sees you. The windshield is a solid sheet of sunlight. The engine dies. The door opens. Woolf emerges. Elise. She's thinner.

You say, “I appreciate you stopping.”

She raises a hand to her eyes and turns in a circle, scanning the terrain. She's wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Possibly the word is tucked into her waist, although it doesn’t seem like it. Did she leave it in the car? Maybe she already realizes it's over.

“How did you cross the Pacific?” you say. “I ask because there’s a pool going.”

“Container ship.”

“We searched a lot of those.”

“You searched mine.”

You nod. “Fairly pointless, when people can’t be trusted to report when they find you. It’s why you’re shoot-on-sight now.”

She looks at you. Her expression is very measured, very controlled. If she’s been shedding her training, it's not evident. “So what are we doing, Eliot?”

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Oh? You’re here to kill me?”

You say nothing.

“Well, that’s disappointing. Kind of extremely disappointing, coming from you.”

“I thought you might respect it, coming from me.”

“Yeah, you know what? Not so much. Not so much.” She shakes her head. “How about this, Eliot: You pretend like you never saw me. I go to Danny. Him and me disappear. End of story.” She watches your face. “No? Not even that?”

“You must understand, I have no choice.”

“I love him. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“If you did, you’d know I don’t have a choice, either.”

You say, “I can give you one hour. You can spend that with him. Then you say good-bye and you walk back down the road. That’s the best I can offer you.”

“And I decline your shitty offer. Three months I’ve spent getting here, Eliot. Three months. And they have not been easy months. I didn’t go through that for an hour.” She shakes her head. “I think we should be clear on the fact that you can’t stop me from doing anything I want.”

“Where is it? In the car?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Do you know what it is?”

“A bareword.”

Her head tilts. “Is that what it’s called? Huh. I just know what I read in old books. They didn’t have a name for it. Or rather, they had lots of different names. The only thing those stories had in common was every time a word like this turned up, it was followed by mass enslavement. And death. Also towers, for some reason.”

“You are describing a Babel event.”

“This word compels everyone,” she says. “Everyone.”

“Yes.”

“So let me ask you something, Eliot. Do you really think Thoreau trusts you to bring it back? Because I only met him that one time, but it doesn’t strike me as his style. It seriously doesn’t. You ask me, how this plays out is you make it about halfway back to Adelaide and somebody runs you off the road. Somebody in a black suit and helmet.”

“I will take it to Thoreau,” you say, “and Thoreau knows that.”

She squints. “You’re kind of spineless, Eliot. I’m just realizing. You present as badass, but you’re weak as piss. That’s a little local flavor, if you’re wondering. Holy hell. You would actually take this thing to Thoreau and give it up. That’s amazing to me.”

You don't respond.

“Fuck Thoreau. Fuck him. He’s not here. Do something unexpected for once in your life. You and me, right here, we have power. We have all the power we need.”

“I’m not interested in power.”

She sighs. “This has been a very disappointing conversation, Eliot. I’m not going to lie. I feel like I’ve moved past you.” She begins to walk back to the car.

“Stop.”

“Or what?”

You go after her and put one hand on the car door before she can open it. It's more than you intended, but it's her final chance, and you want her to have it. “There are snipers. At a signal from me, they will drop you. If you attempt to remove any object from your person, or get back in the car, or strike me, they’ll drop you. They’ll drop you if you try to leave Broken Hill regardless of what I do. This is set. This is the reality you have created. The best I can do for you in this reality is to give you an hour before you die. Please take it.”

Her eyes search yours. “You really don’t get it. The basic concept of love. Of valuing something that you feel. You have no comprehension of that at all.” She shakes her head. “Let me go, Eliot.”

So that's that. You step back, one step and then another, leaving her isolated for the snipers.

“Oh,” she says. “Here we go.”

Her hands pluck at her T-shirt. You close your eyes and give the signal, spreading your arms wide.

Nothing happens. No shots. No noise. You open your eyes and she's there, arms at her side, her hands empty, just watching you.

“I’ve been scouting this town eight days,” she says. “You and your people, you stick out like crazy here. You glow.”

“Vart-” you say, beginning the sequence that will compromise her, and her hands move in an odd way. You're not sure what she's doing and she throws one hand toward the windshield and it's a magician’s trick, you realize, a dummy move to draw the eye, but your gaze has already shifted and the windshield is no longer obscured by the sun’s reflection. On the dashboard is an object with something black twisting and crawling across its surface and the blackness kicks you somewhere in the core of your brain and everything goes still. Something inside you revolts, a long way down.

“Lie down,” she says.

You lie in the dirt. An ant crawls across the sand in front of your eyes.

“You could have helped me, Eliot. I gave you that choice.” Her boots appear before you. “But you chose Thoreau.”

The words roll by you. They evoke no reaction. You are patient, waiting for the words that will tell you what to do.

“Lie still and don’t talk or move until the sun rises the day after tomorrow. After that, I don’t care what you do.” Her boots crunch toward the car. “You and me are done, Eliot. Next time, I won’t leave you alive.”

The door slams. The engine turns. The car rolls away.

The ant reaches your nose and begins to tentatively feel its way up. You lie still. You breathe. You do not talk. You do not move.

~

You drive to the homestead in Eliot’s car and kill the engine. The metal ticks as it cools. You can see Danny’s paramedic van, and the garden, which has gone to crap since you were last here. Through the living room window you can see the back of your sofa, the lamp in the shape of a dog, a corner of a table: small proofs of your old life. You look at these awhile, because there were times over the past three months when you wondered if they existed.

You collect your satchel and climb out into the blazing sun. You feel curiously fragile. Transparent. You ascend the steps and knock. The thing is, if Danny's not pleased to see you, you're in kind of a tough spot. You're kind of completely fucked. He will be pleased to see you. You know that. It's just hard to stop thinking about, since the consequences would be so horrific. You shift your weight from one foot to the other. You knock again. Danny is here somewhere; you made sure of that. You wait.

You leave the front door to circle the house. The land is wide and empty of dust clouds that might signal he's out on one of the bikes. You peer in the kitchen window but see only plates and cups. You try the door and the handle turns. That means nothing; it's never locked. You go inside.

“Danny?” You touch your satchel for reassurance. You feel tempted to pull out the word, in case there are poets lurking around corners, behind sofas. Crazy. There are no other Organization people in Broken Hill. You watched this town for a week. But still. “Danny?”

The living room looks like you left it yesterday. The sofa cushions are bowed: Danny imprinted himself on one and you think you can see a hint of yourself, the briefer denizen, on the other. You were here. You affected things. You touch your forehead, because you're having trouble thinking. All your planning and he's not here. You should have considered what to do about that. But he should be here. An odd thought occurrs to you: that he knows you're here, and that is why you can’t find him. He doesn’t want to see you. “Danny,” you say. You want to explain. You've been through a lot. You hadn’t talked to him in three months because that was the only way to keep him safe.

Outside, three kangaroos bound across the driveway, one after the other. The world feels uncertain. You're afraid. This is going badly, very badly indeed. You're beginning to think that after all your hopping, with the ground growing hotter beneath your feet, you might not make it to Danny after all.

You hear an engine. You run to the kitchen and see him bouncing across the earth on a dirt bike. He goes right past the window without glancing and you don’t move because your body is staked to the floor. The tires chew earth. He kicks the stand and comes up the back steps. His eyes meet yours.

You open your mouth to say hello and he disappears. You blink. The back door bursts open and he comes at you like a train. You raise your hands and he crashes into you. You're enveloped by the scent of earth and motor oil. “Mother fuck!” he says. “How are you here?”

“I just am.”

“El!” He squeezes you until you think you'll pass out. “Jesus, El!”

“Let me go.”

“No.”

You wind yourself around him. “Where were you?”

“Me? Where was I? Where the fuck were you?” Your T-shirt moves. You realize he's undressing you.

“Wait. Wait.”

“I have waited,” he says. And you cave, because he's right, and so have you. He pulls your shirt over your head and throws it onto the counter. He pulls you to him by the waistband of your jeans. His mouth mashes yours. You know you should stop him, because you won't be safe until you're both a thousand miles from here, but he holds you tightly and you forget about that.

“I missed you so much,” you say.

~

You lie in the curl of his arm, slick and sated. You play with his hair. After a while, you poke him. “Danny.” You scratch his chest. You wish you could do this forever. But you can't. “Danny.”

He opens his eyes. His lips stretch, rubbery. “I thought you were a dream.”

“I have to tell you something kind of crazy. And then we need to leave.”

He sits up, smiling. “What?”

“This is hard to explain.” You feel the need to put on some clothes. Your satchel is on the floor somewhere. You have a vague memory of leaving it with your pants. The most powerful weapon in history, and you don’t know exactly where you left it. “There are people looking for me. I stole something from them.”

“What did you steal?”

“It’s...” you say. “It’s a word.”

“A word?”

“Yes. But not an ordinary word.” You hesitate. “There are words that can persuade people. This one is very persuasive. The people looking for me, they want it back. They’ll kill me for it. Kill both of us.” His expression hasn’t changed. “I wasn’t supposed to come back here. I was supposed to never see you again. But I had to. That’s why I stole the word. And it’s taken me a long time to get here, but I made it. I know how this sounds, but you need to trust me. We need to leave.”

“Are you high?”

“No. No.”

“You stole a magic word?”

“Not... actual magic,” you say. “I mean, yes, magic, in the classical sense, but not the way you mean it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just trust me. Will you trust me?”

“And leave?”

“Yes.”

“For where?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I have to work this afternoon.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Well, it does,” he says. “I’m a paramedic.”

“Danny,” you say. “This thing I stole, it’s probably the most valuable thing in the world. Do you get that?”

“You’re freaking out, El.”

“I can prove it. Just come with me. When we’re safe, I’ll show you how it works.”

“Look, no one’s leaving, okay? I’m happy you’re home. But you need to calm down.”

You recoil. “Danny-”

“I haven’t seen you in almost a year. I haven’t heard from you in three months.”

“I was coming home.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“If you love me,” you say, “trust me.”

He throws back the sheets. “I’m going to work.”

What do you do?

Stage an impromptu, very public demonstration and call an ambulance

Go grab the word first, at any rate

do you even have a choice at this point?

do you even have a choice at this point?

You really don't have any choice. You don’t want to compromise him. You've never wanted to do that: reach into the essence of who he is and change it. But you knew it might be necessary, and planned accordingly. “Aorce fashal mollicsin namming. Get dressed and start packing.”

He screws up his face. “What?”

You blink. Did you mix up his set? Surely not. You know him completely. “Aorce fashal mollicsin namming. Get dressed.”

“You sound fucking crazy.”

You slide off the bed, unnerved. Danny’s personality is unusual. He's close to the edge of his set. But you can’t have misjudged him that badly. You're not new at this. You're not new to him.

Go grab the word first, at any rate

You run to the hallway and find your satchel. You withdraw the bareword from it and hold it waist-high. You turn and his eyes move to it and he grimaces. You feel further unsettled, because you haven’t seen anyone react like that.

“Do everything I say.” You don't say ever, because you love him.

He looks at you. His expression is wrong. He isn't compromised. He looks at you like he’s never seen you before.

“El,” he says. “I have a shift. Why don’t you chill out until I get back.”

You have the bareword facing the right way, don’t you? You resist a tremendous urge to look down. Did it break? Is it covered somehow? You run your fingers over its grooves and nausea rises in your brain. It's there. “Danny,” you say. “Danny.”

He scoops up his pants. “El, you need to get out of my way.”

“Look at this. Do what I tell you.”

He pushes past you.

“Danny!”

He grabs his work bag from the living room and heads for the front door, buttoning his shirt. You run to cut him off and thrust out the word. His eyes flick to it and away. “El. Please. Get out of the way.”

You lower the word. You can’t believe what is happening. You thought you’d planned for everything. Immune? And yet a part of you isn’t completely surprised. You know he resists persuasion. That's why you like him.

“El. I’m serious.”

“Don’t you love me?”

“El.”

“Danny? Don’t you love me? If you love me, come with me. Trust me and come.”

His eyes shift. The thought bubbles in your brain, breaking into awareness: He doesn’t love you. Not like you love him.

“I’m going to work,” he says.

You raise the word. “Love me!” You know it's useless but do it anyway. “Love me!”

He pushes you aside. Your back hits the wall and your breath escapes in a rush. He goes down the steps and by the time you go after him, he's climbing into the van. You run and keep running as he shifts into reverse, thinking - what? To throw yourself under it? Something. But he shifts gears and the tires tear at the dirt and he drives away, leaving you in the dust, naked, with your stupid, powerless word.

~

You gather your clothes. You find your shirt crumpled under the bed and your underpants in the sheets. You go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and begin to dress yourself. You don’t know what to do. But you can’t stay.

You leave the house and climb into your car. You put the satchel with the word on the passenger seat. You put your hands on the wheel. You feel stunned in some important part of your brain, stunned as in estoner, the French root that also means astonished, a word used to describe sorcery. As if you are acting outside of yourself.

You turn the key, put the car into gear. You don’t look in the rear mirror so you won’t have to see the house disappear. When you reach the place where the road splits, the town in one direction, everything else in the other, you turn the car on Broken Hill and drive away. A green sign goes by that says ADELAIDE 508 and you can’t stop shaking. You slow down to be sure of staying on the road. You can taste loss in the back of your throat so badly that you could vomit. You can’t believe you're driving away.

You glance in the rearview mirror and see Thoreau. You shriek and brake. The car slews off the road and is enveloped in dust. There is no one. You just imagined Thoreau for a second. You begin to drive again, shaken, but keep glancing in the mirror and the feeling grows that you're forgetting something. Or remembering, rather. You think you're leaving Broken Hill in terrible danger, and Danny, too, because of Thoreau. Because Thoreau had planned something.

You swing the car around. The tires slide in loose gravel but then you're pointed back at the town and you feel steadier. The closer you draw, the surer you feel that you're doing the right thing. You can feel the presence of Thoreau. He is coalescing. You can almost smell him in the car. Around you are moving parts in a terrible machine, coming to smash Broken Hill flat. You push the needle and the car flies along the dirt road.

You aren't too late. You could find Danny and warn him. Persuade him. You don’t know how but you know it can be done. The first buildings crawl around the mullock wall and you perceive a hammer above them, a great and unspeakable force that is falling, falling. Thoreau drinking tea. The image flashes into your mind from nowhere. Thoreau with a teacup, looking at you. Fear spikes in your heart. You don’t know where that came from.

You blow through the town and leave the car halfway up a curb and run to the emergency room. Danny’s paramedic van isn’t there but you burst in anyway. The room is familiar and you feel safer. You touch your satchel for reassurance. You go to the reception desk, which is staffed by an older man with thinning hair and glasses. He's worked there forever, although you don’t know why; he's permanently irritable. He always makes you feel as if you're bothering him. You say, “I need to find Danny.”

He looks down his nose. You're coming off as a little crazy. You look like a woman who has spent months on a container ship and slept in the desert and left a man catatonic by the side of the road and and been abandoned and is afraid of invisible hammers. “He’s in the field.”

“Where?”

He continues to eye you. “The field.” He gestures nonspecifically.

“Archie,” says a nurse, emerging from the corridor. “We’re still looking for that second defib unit.”

The receptionist turns. You lean across the counter and catch his shirt. “Excuse me,” you say. “It is extremely important that I locate Danny right this second.”

He looks at you and you realize this is familiar to him: girls coming to the desk and saying, Where’s Danny, I need to see him. You're merely the latest. “Please let go of me, Elise.”

“No,” you say. You can feel Thoreau coming up behind you. “Tell me where he is.”

“Security,” says the nurse.

You reach inside your satchel and as your fingers touch the word’s cold wood you abruptly remember where you saw Thoreau drinking tea. It was in your DC apartment. You had been back awhile, at least a few months, and he had come to you. That was why you’d never felt alone. Because he was there. He sat opposite you and sipped tea and told you things. At the end, before he left, he said, Remember none of this until you next leave Broken Hill.

A tall boy comes and stands behind you. The security guard. He doesn’t grab you right away because you know each other pretty well. You used to chat with him while waiting for Danny. He plays football. But you can’t concentrate on him because there are awful memories breaking free in your mind, surfacing in your consciousness like bloated corpses.

I wish to establish exactly what it is we have found, Thoreau had told you.

The receptionist slides a pen and paper across the counter.

There are certain forms of testing that one can really only conduct... shall we say...

“Leave him a note.” He doesn't look completely unsympathetic. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

...live.

Promise yourself, whatever happens next, you'll make Thoreau pay for it

Well that's that I guess! Better pack it in then.
Sike.
Make them tell you where Danny is at and march yourself there.

You could use the word; they won’t listen to you otherwise. But you could do it: could make them tell you where Danny is, then herd this entire freaking town into the desert. The only question is whether you can save them before Thoreau’s hammer falls. “You have to get out,” you say. “You all have to get out.”

Promise yourself, whatever happens next, you'll make Thoreau pay for it

He'll pay for this. He'll pay dearly. You promise yourself that and stash that promise deep inside yourself.

You pick up the pen. You're surprised, because you didn't mean to do that. It doesn’t make any sense to leave a note for Danny now. But you start writing anyway. You are going to perform this test for me, my dear, Thoreau had said, and the first letter is K and you suddenly realize what's coming. You try to pull back your hand but decide no, it's okay, you'll just write this instruction first. Thoreau isn’t coming. He's already here, inside you. You begin to scrabble and claw for the part of your mind that isn’t you but your hand writes KILL EVERYONE anyway. You take the bareword from the satchel. You manage to close your eyes; you can do that. Your left hand finds the bulge, the sharp protuberance that cut you in DC, and your right impales the paper upon it.

There is grunting. A slap of skin. “Get him off-” a woman says, and it becomes a choke. Footsteps. You set the bareword on the counter, the paper dangling from it. You want to rip it away, knock it over, obscure it in some way, but your mind says that is a bad idea and you can't convince it otherwise.

Someone hits you. You fall to the floor. You open your eyes and see a bright spot of your own blood. Your mouth is numb. Ahead, an older man with a cane rises from the waiting room seats, his eyes full of concern, but his gaze shifts to the thing above your head and everything about his face changes. He shuffles in a half circle to face the woman beside him, who you know as Maureen - she came into Tangled Threads sometimes to buy clothes for her niece - and he brings up his cane and swings it at her so hard he overbalances.

You get to your feet. The receptionist has his hands around the nurse’s neck. You take one step toward them and the security boy shoots the receptionist and then the nurse, one after the other. You skid and fall. You go on hands and knees for the seats, crawling for your life. Someone shouts, “Help in the ER, code black, code black,” and within about two minutes every red-blooded male in the building will be in this room, you realize; that's how it works here. You want to scream at them to get out, let nobody in here, but you have no words.

Finally you flee. You crawl beneath seats, and that as much as anything feels like murder. By the time you reach the doors, the room is full of howls. Like wolves.

~

Then the thing. Which at first seems insignificant compared to what is happening, but later, you come to understand it isn't. As you escape the emergency room, Danny’s white paramedic van jumps the curb. Danny stares at you through the windshield. Then his eyes shift to the room behind you. His expression tightens, filling with purpose, and he throws open the van door. You get to your feet and back away, your hands up, thinking he's coming to kill you, that somehow despite what happened earlier he has succumbed to the word. But he runs right by you, and you realize the purpose in his eyes is his own. He's going to help.

You leave. You make it two blocks before your gut clenches so badly you have to bend over. You gag but nothing comes out. A police car blows by, lights and sirens, heading for the ER. They will all go there: the cops, anyone trying to help, the injured. It will be endless. You break into a shuffling run.

Your eye is burning. It feels like a hard prick of light in there. The thing is, when the van’s door bounced open, the glass reflected the ER for a moment. It was only a flash. But you have the terrible feeling that you got something in your eye.

~

The helicopter moves through darkness and you peer through the plexiglass at what lies below. Broken Hill is a small cluster of sulfurous lights, like a ship on an ocean of black glass. Occasionally you catch a tiny spark or glimmer, but those are the only signs that something is happening.

“Can’t raise any of them, Thoreau,” says a voice in your ear. You are wearing a headset; the voice belongs to Plath, sitting opposite you. “Eliot, the ground team, no one, sir.” She swaps headsets and begins to bark into that one and you return your attention to the landscape. A circular pinprick of lights come into view, surrounding a depthless black hole, which you recognize as the main quarry. You've never seen it in person before; it's larger than you expected. When you’d first taken an interest, some decades before, following hints of something ancient and significant buried there, you could still make out remnants of the hill that had loaned the town its name. Now that is gone - not just erased but inverted, to become this great pit. You find this notable for the demonstration of force it represents. Civilizations rise and fall; what causes them to be remembered is not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape. This is what survives them. A hundred billion lives have passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally. You admire that. This hole in Broken Hill is nothing, of course, but it will outlast every person on the planet.

“Okay,” says Plath. “We’ve got buildings on fire now.”

You look. There is indeed a flickering.

“I have to say, I think we’re operating at a high degree of probability that Woolf has deployed the word.” Plath looks at you as if she expects a reaction here: if not an Oh god no then at least an Are you sure; some kind of response to validate her feeling that this is a shocking development, possibly the worst thing she can imagine.

What do you say?

Whatever the fuck you like, it's not like Plath's going to remember it if you don't want her to

Reprimand her for showing levity in a situation like this, there are people dying down there and she is at least partly responsible for it.

Whatever the fuck you like, it's not like Plath's going to remember it if you don't want her to

“Horrible,” you say.

“I mean, we’re seeing bodies in the streets. Around the hospital, especially.” She gazes out hopefully. “Maybe it’ll burn down.”

You consider this. It is rather important that the bareword not be lost to fire. That would be a serious inconvenience. But you are also interested in letting this scenario play out to its fullest, in order to gain maximum information from it. “Please don’t let the hospital burn down.”

“I’ll monitor it. You know, we could send people in now. Stop this before it gets worse.”

“No.”

“It’s just... there are eighteen thousand people down there.”

“If Eliot couldn’t stop it, it can’t be stopped.”

Plath nods, unconvinced.

Reprimand her for showing levity in a situation like this, there are people dying down there and she is at least partly responsible for it.

“It is a great tragedy,” you make yourself say. You overlook this sometimes: the need to display empathy.

You circle the town. You watch toy vehicles run down tiny figures, plow into matchbox buildings. Sometimes there is a lull and the little shapes head for the hospital, and then it begins again.

“I think we’ve found Eliot,” Plath says. She mutters into her other headset for a few moments. “On a road a couple miles out of town. He’s not moving. What do you want to do?”

“Take me there, please,” you say.

“I can send a team.”

Plath has been doing this lately: implying that you might not know what you want. It concerns you a little, because it means she doesn’t think you are acting rationally, and you need her to think you rational for at least a while longer. “Thank you, but no.”

The chopper tilts. You watch a dozen small tragedies play out below before they are obscured by the towering wall of soil and rock that marks the quarry’s boundary. Dust blows around you. Plath unstraps and pulls open the door. You hesitate, because you're wearing your Ferragamos, winged patent leather that will never be the same after contact with this land. But you have no other shoes. You step out.

Plath points, mouthing words you can’t hear over the thundering of the blades, clawing at her hair. You begin to walk, placing your feet carefully on the treacherous sandy earth. You are tempted to abandon the whole idea now. You are upset with yourself for forgetting about your shoes. But you are committed: You can’t change your mind now without risking revealing something about yourself.

Plath catches up with you. She's wearing a perfectly charming pair of Louboutins but clomping along as if they are galoshes. Plath doesn’t mind ruining shoes, apparently. You didn’t know that about her. It changes a great deal.

You reach the road. The chopper has risen into the air and its spotlight helpfully swings right, so you begin to trudge in that direction. Plath fiddles with an earpiece. “Still no sign of Woolf,” she says. “I assume she’s still kill-on-sight?”

“Oh, yes,” you say. “And I expect this to be quite a lot easier to accomplish, now that she no longer has the word.”

“If she no longer has it. She could be in the hospital still, for all we know.” Plath bends to one knee. You keep walking. When Plath catches you again, her strappy heels dangle from one hand. “I should not have worn these shoes.”

“No,” you say.

“I bet she’s in there,” Plath says. “Compromising people as they come in.”

“Please don’t assume that,” you say, because that is all you need, Woolf slipping away while everyone watches the hospital. You are quite certain Elise is nowhere near, because you instructed her not to be. She deployed the word and left, so that once this is all over, you can recover it.

“Is that...?” Plath says, trailing off as the spotlight shifts and makes speculation unnecessary. Across the road lies a car; before that is Eliot. You can’t tell whether he is alive or dead. “Jesus, she’s killed him. Woolf killed Eliot.”

You approach to within a few feet. Eliot’s coat flaps in the chopper’s downdraft. You study his face. After a moment, Eliot blinks. “No,” you say. “Compromised, I believe.” You feel your skin crawl. An emotional reaction. Odd. But it is unnerving to behold: Eliot, disabled. Of all the poets, if you were to select the most difficult to compromise in the field, you would choose Eliot. You did choose Eliot.

“We need some people down here right away,” Plath tells her radio. “Eliot’s catatonic.”

In the distance, a siren wails. It feels like a song, like the word calling to you. It is waiting. You need only collect it. You stand very still, studying your own reaction, because there is no mistaking that you want it.

“Thoreau?” says Plath.

Your mouth feels dry. A slight tingling in your palms. You had considered many outcomes for this day, but not the possibility that you would be moved.

“We’re going to want to move. We’ve got emergency services inbound from two directions.”

“A moment,” you say. You close your eyes. You can perceive the danger now, the crevice that swallowed those who came before you. And you can see what needs to be done. You open your eyes and turn to Plath. To your surprise, she is in the process of snapping a heel from her shoe.

You aren’t yourself; she sees something on your face. “It broke,” she explains. She tosses the heel into the night. You hear it land. Plath begins to wedge her feet back into her butchered Louboutins. “Ridiculous things.”

When you are away from here, you decide, and safely back at the hotel, you will visit Plath. You will enter her room and wake her gently and make her fuck her shoes. These Louboutins. It will serve a dual purpose, testing your ability to remain unaroused and teaching Plath proper respect for good footwear.

“I can’t understand what motivated Woolf to do all this,” Plath says. Men in black jog out of the darkness and begin to heft Eliot.

“We may never know,” you say.

~

You run down the main street, leaving the hospital, the emergency room, and many, many people who need medical attention. You had tried to help. You had stayed long enough to bandage the jugular of Maureen Stamper, who tried to scratch your eyes out as you worked. You had seen Ian Cho from Surgery cut three more jugulars with a scalpel, moving methodically from one person to the next, his eyes carefully judging each attack. You had seen Kevin Fowler, a twenty-year cop, bring in a kid with a bleeding head and draw his revolver and execute that kid right there on the floor.

That was when you decided to leave. What you were doing, stabilizing these people, that wasn’t helping them. That was only delaying. You stood and Fowler turned to you. The only reason you had not died then, under Fowler’s calm, unsmiling eyes, was that Cho chose that moment to step behind the cop and delicately draw the scalpel from left to right. Fowler gurgled and Cho plucked the revolver from him with his long surgeon’s fingers and turned it over, testing its weight.

Then you left. You're running, because all you can think is Elise. There is chaos outside but you run through it. You find her vomiting over the rail of a traffic bridge. You catch her by the arm and haul her around. Her face is ashen, her pupils dilated, like a junkie’s; for a moment, you barely recognize her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I did it. I did it.” She wraps her arms around her head and moans.

“We have to get out of here.” You're trying to think of vehicles. Something off-road. If you can get back to the house, you could take the bikes. “People are going crazy.”

“It’s the word!” she screams. She gets to her feet and takes two steps back toward the hospital, then veers around, clutching her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“El,” you say. But you know what she's talking about. That ridiculous piece of wood, with the black symbol, that she waved at you back at the house like it was a magical talisman. Like it could command you to obey her. You saw it in the ER with a piece of paper tacked to it that said KILL EVERYONE. At the time, it wasn't the strangest thing in the room. “Your word? It works?”

“I can’t stop it,” she says. “He won’t let me.”

You leave her and run back toward the hospital. You are still a hundred yards away when you see the two police cruisers parked outside. People claw and reach, spilling over the cars, filling the air with cries. You had intended to go in there and get that piece of wood, hack it into a million pieces, but that is clearly going to be very dangerous. You hesitate at the intersection. A car purrs behind you and your brain finally registers this as a danger and you throw yourself out of its way. It blows by close enough to tug at your clothes and hit one person, then another, and crashes into one of the police cruisers. Its engine revs. You can see the driver tugging at the shifter, trying to get the car into gear. A cop comes out of the ER and jogs up to the driver and shoots him through the window.

You notice a figure approaching you from the side of the hospital, carrying a cleaver. You recognize the someone as an orderly. And the cleaver is not actually a cleaver; it just looks like it. It's a bone saw. “Jack?” You say, wondering how, exactly, you're supposed to tell the difference between a person carrying a bone saw for self-defense and one who wants to saw you open with it.

What do you do?

Not die, hopefully