Lexicon

sex and been abandoned and was afraid of invisible hammers. “He’s in the field.”
    “Where?”
    He continued to eye her. “The field.” He gestured nonspecifically.
    “Miles,” said a nurse, emerging from the corridor. “We’re still looking for that second defib unit.”
    The receptionist turned. Emily leaned across the counter and caught his shirt. “Excuse me,” she said. “It is extremely important that I locate Harry right this second.”
    He looked at her and she realized this was familiar to him: girls coming to the desk and saying,
Where’s Harry, I need to see him
. She was merely the latest. “Please let go of me, Emily.”
    “No,” she said. She could feel Yeats coming up behind her. “Tell me where he is.”
    “Security,” said the nurse.
    Emily reached inside her satchel and as her fingers touched the word’s cold wood she abruptly remembered where she’d seen Yeats drinking tea. It had been in her DC apartment. She had been back awhile, at least a few months, and he had come to her. That was why she’d never felt alone. Because he had been there. He’d sat opposite her and sipped tea and told her things. At the end, before he left, he’d said,
Remember none of this until you next leave Broken Hill
.
    A tall boy came and stood behind her. The security guard. He didn’t grab her right away because they knew each other pretty well. She used to chat with him while waiting for Harry. He played football. But she couldn’t concentrate on him because there were awful memories breaking free in her mind, surfacing in her consciousness like bloated corpses.
I wish to establish exactly what it is we have found
, Yeats had told her.
There are certain forms of testing that one can really only conduct, shall we say, live.
    The receptionist slid a pen and paper across the counter. “Leave him a note.” He did not look completely unsympathetic. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”
    “You have to get out,” she said. “You all have to get out.” She could use the word; they wouldn’t believe her otherwise. But she could do it: could herd this entire freaking town into the desert. The only question was whether she could save them before Yeats’s hammer fell.
    She picked up the pen. She was surprised, because she hadn’t meant to do that. It didn’t make any sense to leave a note now. But she started writing anyway.
You are going to perform this test for me, my dear
, Yeats had said, and the first letter was
K
and she suddenly realized what was coming. She tried to pull back her hand but decided no, it was okay, she would just write this instruction first. Yeats wasn’t coming. He was already here, inside her. She began to scrabble and claw for the part of her mind that wasn’t her but her hand wrote KILL EVERYONE anyway. She took the bareword from the satchel. She managed to close her eyes; she could do that. Her left hand found the bulge, the sharp protuberance that had cut her in DC, and her right impaled the paper upon it.
    There was grunting. A slap of skin. “Get him off—” a woman said, and it became a choke. Footsteps. She set the bareword on the counter, the paper dangling from it. She wanted to rip it away, knock it over, obscure it in some way, but her mind said that was a bad idea and she could not convince it otherwise.
    Someone hit her. She fell to the floor. She opened her eyes and saw a bright spot of her own blood. Her mouth was numb. Ahead, an older man with a cane rose from the waiting room seats, his eyes full of concern, but his gaze shifted to the thing above her head and everything about his face changed. He shuffled in a half circle to face the woman beside him, whom Emily knew as Maureen—she came into Tangled Threads sometimes to buy clothes for her niece—and he brought up his cane and swung it at her so hard he overbalanced.
    Emily got to her feet. The receptionist had his hands around the nurse’s neck. Emily took one step toward them and the security boy shot the receptionist and then the nurse, one after the other. Emily skidded and fell. She went on hands and knees for the seats, crawling for her life. Someone shouted, “Help in the ER, code black, code black,” and within about two minutes every red-blooded male in the building would be in this room, Emily knew; that was how it worked here. She wanted to scream at them to get out, let nobody in here, but she had no words.
    Finally she fled. She crawled beneath seats, and that as much as