Lexicon

said Eliot. “Time. Is it.” He began to extract himself from the sheets.
    “You’re going to want to stay in that bed.”
    “No. Definitely. Not.” He got his legs over the side. This caused some flaring of his vision and a looseness in his head, and he took a few moments to sit quietly, eyes closed. When he opened them, Wil was pointing the rifle at something outside. Eliot remembered the noise he’d heard before:
crack.
“What are you doing?”
    Wil didn’t answer. He was holding that rifle very naturally, Eliot noticed. The barrel followed whatever Wil was tracking in a smooth line, like an extension of his body. Then it jerked. Wil stepped 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.”
    Eliot felt disbelief. If that were true, Woolf would be here already. The town would be flooded with proles, or EIPs, or poets, or all three. It couldn’t be morning because they were still alive. “We have to leave.”
    “We’re not going anywhere, Eliot.”
    “We—” he began, but Wil raised the rifle very quickly, and Eliot fell silent. Wil’s body became completely still. The rifle jerked. Eliot said, “Please tell me what you think you’re doing.”
    “Shooting guys.”
    “What guys?”
    “Proles, I guess.”
    “You’re shooting proles,” Eliot said. “I see. When it’s a guy in a chopper and I ask you to shoot him, you won’t. But now you’re shooting proles.”
    Wil moved from one window to the other.
    “There isn’t a limited supply,” Eliot said. “If you haven’t figured that out. She’ll send as many as it takes.”
    “Who? Emily?”
    Oh, yes
, Eliot thought. Wil had remembered. That was why he was handling a rifle like he’d used it all his life: because he had. “What do you think you’re doing, Wil?”
    “Harry.”
    “What?”
    “My name is Harry Wilson.”
    “Right,” Eliot said. “Of course, my mistake—what the fuck are you doing, Harry?”
    “Waiting.”
    “Waiting for . . .” His mind reeled. “For
her
?” Wil, or Harry, or whoever he was, didn’t answer. But clearly yes. Clearly he had a terrible, ill-informed notion of the situation, which was going to get them both killed. It was Eliot’s fault, of course. Like everything else. “She isn’t who you think.”
    “Is she Emily Ruff?”
    “Yes,” Eliot said, “Woolf is Emily Ruff. 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,” Eliot said, “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?”
    “Charlotte.”
    He searched for the words. “You think that’s why I hate Woolf? Because of Montana?”
    Harry shrugged.
    “Well, fuck!” Eliot said. “You got me! Since she made me shoot the woman I loved, I’ve been carrying a grudge! Jesus fucking Christ!” He dragged a hand across his brow. Harry regarded him expressionlessly, and this absurdity, the stillness of the man he knew as Wil Parke while Eliot raged, was not lost on him. He’d been 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 outlier! I didn’t have the option of finding one who hadn’t slept with her. Wil, I get that you’re pissed. I do. But look at yourself. The instant you found out she used to be Emily, 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.”
    Eliot sank into the bed. It was pointless. Every technique he knew, useless, because Harry could not be persuaded.
    “What happened to her?”
    “When?”
    “After Broken Hill.”
    He looked at the ceiling. “She disappeared. I searched for months.”
    “Then?”
    “Then,” said Eliot, “she came back.”

STUDY PROBES BILINGUAL PUZZLE
    From: The City