Lexicon

Around the hospital, especially.” She gazed out hopefully. “Maybe it’ll burn down.”
    He considered this. It was rather important that the bareword not be lost to fire. That would be a serious inconvenience. But he was 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 three thousand people down there.”
    “If Eliot couldn’t stop it, it can’t be stopped.”
    Plath nodded, unconvinced.
    “It is a great tragedy,” he said. He overlooked this sometimes: the need to display empathy.
    They circled the town. He watched toy vehicles run down tiny figures, plow into matchbox buildings. Sometimes there was a lull and the little shapes would head for the hospital, and it would begin again.
    “I think we’ve found Eliot,” Plath said. She muttered 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,” he said.
    “I can send a team.”
    Plath had been doing this lately: implying that Yeats might not know what he wanted. It concerned him a little, because it meant she didn’t think he was acting rationally, and he needed her to think him rational for at least a while longer. “Thank you, but no.”
    The chopper tilted. He watched a dozen small tragedies play out below before they were obscured by the towering wall of soil and rock that marked the quarry’s boundary. Dust blew around them. Plath unstrapped and pulled open the door. He hesitated, because he was wearing his Ferragamos, winged patent leather that would never be the same after contact with this land. But he had no other shoes. He stepped out.
    Plath pointed, mouthing words he couldn’t hear over the thundering of the blades, clawing at her hair. He began to walk, placing his feet carefully on the treacherous sandy earth. He was tempted to abandon the whole idea now. He was upset with himself for forgetting about his shoes. But he was committed: He couldn’t change his mind now without risking revealing something about himself.
    Plath caught up with him. She was wearing a perfectly charming pair of Louboutins but clomping along as if they were galoshes. Plath didn’t mind ruining shoes, apparently. He hadn’t known that about her. It changed a great deal.
    They reached the road. The chopper had risen into the air and its spotlight helpfully swung right, so he began to trudge in that direction. Plath fiddled with an earpiece. “Still no sign of Woolf,” she said. “I assume she’s still kill-on-sight?”
    “Oh, yes,” he said. “And I expect this to be quite a lot easier to accomplish, now she no longer has the word.”
    “
If
she no longer has it. She could be in the hospital still, for all we know.” Plath bent to one knee. Yeats kept walking. When Plath caught him again, her strappy heels dangled from one hand. “I should not have worn these shoes.”
    “No,” he said.
    “I bet she’s in there,” Plath said. “Compromising people as they come in.”
    “Please don’t assume that,” he said, because that was all he needed, Woolf slipping away while everyone watched the hospital. He was quite certain Emily was nowhere near, because he had instructed her not to be. She had deployed the word and left, so that once this was all over, he could recover it.
    “Is that . . . ?” Plath said, trailing off as the spotlight shifted and made speculation unnecessary. Across the road lay a car; before that was Eliot. Yeats couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead. “Jesus, she’s killed him. Woolf killed Eliot.”
    He approached to within a few feet. Eliot’s coat flapped in the chopper’s downdraft. Yeats studied his face. After a moment, Eliot blinked. “No,” Yeats said. “Compromised, I believe.” He felt his skin crawl. An emotional reaction. Odd. But it was unnerving to behold: Eliot, disabled. Of all the poets, if he were to select the most difficult to compromise in the field, he would choose Eliot. He
had
chosen Eliot.
    “We need some people down here right away,” Plath told her radio. “Eliot’s catatonic.”
    In the distance, a siren wailed. It felt like a song, like the word calling to him. It was waiting. He need only collect it. He stood very still, studying