Lexicon

The idea crept into her brain:
I’m lost
. She would never find her way out. She would spend the rest of her life crawling over the bodies of the people she’d let die, searching for an exit she was too afraid to open her eyes and look for. Her breaths came in hitching shrieks. She tripped twice and then her hands found the doors and she crawled through them.
    • • •
    She returned to the house. She could have sought out Harry’s but wasn’t up to facing more memories. With four walls around her, she felt safer. She scrubbed her hands in a toilet cistern. She sat on the seat and stared at nothing. She felt numb. The word should have been there.
    Yeats had probably wanted to put her in exactly this position. He had probably recovered the word months ago, in secret. She had been tracked all the way in, and right now they were moving through the streets, corralling her, whispering to each other guttural words.
    But this did not seem right. She did not understand Yeats well, but in her experience, people with power used it. She felt the word was there. She felt that strongly.
    After a while, a thought occurred to her. She rose from the seat.
    • • •
    She went back to the hospital and through the corridors to the emergency room doors. She put her pack against the wall and withdrew a digital camera, which she had found at the house. She had tested its batteries already but took a photo of a fire extinguisher, just to be sure. Then she closed her eyes and pushed through the doors.
    She shuffled inside a few steps and raised the camera. Her idea was that this thing really was a word. It was on petrified wood, but the wood wasn’t the important part. The important part was the mark. She pressed the shutter button and felt the flash on the inside of her eyelids. She shifted her aim and pressed again. She would accumulate photos. Most of the photos would contain unbearable things, but in one would be the word. People kept coming into this room and turning into killers, ergo the word was somewhere it could be seen. She adjusted her aim, pressed the shutter for another photo. She would keep taking them until the camera ran out of room. Then she would download the photos to a computer. She would magnify them a thousand times and inspect each picture a handful of pixels at a time. It would take forever. She would see awful things. But she would do it. Eventually, she would find the edges of something that looked like wood. She would know where in the image the bareword was located. She could magnify it a hundred times, until it was too big to see all at once. And she could copy it. The word was not a thing. It was information. It could be duplicated. She could copy it one piece at a time, carve it onto wood so it would be just the same. Maybe she’d get someone to help, so she’d never hold the whole thing in her brain. Then she’d have a hundred tiny pieces, numbered on the back, which she could reassemble. She would have to find a way to carry it safely. To keep it always close. She pressed the shutter again. She was thinking maybe a necklace.
    • • •
    She came out of the hospital. The air felt incredibly fresh and she gulped at it. She started walking, then running, her pack bouncing on her back. She was clutching the camera. She should stop and seal it in plastic, stash it away safely. But she couldn’t stop. She ran through dead streets and a crow cawed and she shrieked back at it, an insane yodel that wouldn’t stay quiet. She was supposed to be stealthy. They could be listening. She ran, hiccupping and gibbering, desperate to put distance between her and this place, to reach somewhere she could open her lungs and scream triumph like she wanted.
    • • •
    Yeats trotted up the mansion steps and was set upon by butlers. He’d thought he had lost them at the foot of the stairs, but there were more. One attempted to steer him through the great open double doors and another began gently inquiring if he required refreshment and a third wanted to take his coat. All this was conducted in a low-register butler octave, making Yeats feel as if he was moving through a burbling stream. He allowed himself to be de-coated. A fourth butler seized the opportunity to step forward and brazenly adjust his bow tie. The butler who wanted to infuse Yeats with refreshments positioned himself so that Yeats need only take a step forward for a champagne flute to slide effortlessly into his left hand, but Yeats didn’t know