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would dissuade them from holding him down. He could work around that. He could convince them to release him once their duty was done. Because between the seething bodies, he saw a prone figure, sprawled on the carpet, her white coat gently rising and falling. His heart sang, because it was over, and he had won.

4 QUESTIONS TO QUICKLY KNOW SOMEONE WELL
    From: http://whuffy.com/relationships/articles/8we4y93457wer.html

    1. What do you do in your spare time?
    2. What would you do if you had a year to live?
    3. What are you most proud of?
    4. What do you want?

[THREE]
    Eliot went to the eighth floor, where burly men in gray uniforms were pulling up the carpet. “What the fuck?”
    “Ah, Eliot,” said Yeats. He had a white cloth and was mopping sweat from the back of his neck. His shirt was wet beneath the armpits. Eliot had never seen Yeats so much as breathing quickly, so this was disconcerting. “We had a little disturbance.”
    “The delegates have scattered. They thought you were about to bomb the place.”
    “Really?” said Yeats. “It’s a children’s charity.”
    Eliot backed out of the way of a man carrying carpet. The walls were lightly spattered. Fine dark droplets like mist. “I’m asking you,” he said, “what the fuck?”
    “Woolf came back.”
    He said nothing, because surely this was a joke.
    “Look,” Yeats said, indicating a dark patch on the carpet. “That’s Frost.”
    “I told you she wasn’t dead.”
    “Yes, you did.”
    “I asked for more time. Christ, she killed Frost?”
    “Essentially,” said Yeats. “A few others, too.”
    “How did she do that?” Yeats continued patting his neck with the cloth. There was something odd in his manner, a kind of satisfaction, which Eliot didn’t understand. Maintenance workers came forward, wanting to get at the carpet on which he was standing. “Get out,” Eliot said. “All of you.”
    The men looked questioningly at Yeats, who didn’t respond. The men slunk away, leaving the aroma of cigarettes and carpet glue.
    “Did she have it?”
    “Yes.”
    “She had the word.”
    “Just as you predicted,” Yeats said. “I should have listened to you.”
    “Where is she?”
    Yeats said nothing.
    “Did you kill her?”
    “Fascinating, your priorities,” said Yeats. “I tell you that the bareword has returned to us and your first question is about her.”
    “I have a lot of questions. They’re not necessarily ordered.”
    “Ah, Eliot. As I have grown, you have shrunk. I offered to help you after Broken Hill. I gave you a chance to go away and find the man you are supposed to be. But no. You chose to stay. You wanted to pursue her. You actually said those words: you
wanted
. To make amends for failing to stop her, to beg forgiveness for failing to protect her, I honestly don’t know. I doubt that you do. But what is plain is that she broke you. A sixteen-year-old girl and you let yourself care for her. It was clear from the beginning, but what was a weakness became nothing less than a psychological disintegration. Look at you. You are an echo of who you were.”
    “Well,” he said. “How refreshing to have an honest opinion.”
    “I have faced the word and won. This is what I have done while you were falling into yourself. The day I realized the bareword could corrupt me, I began to prepare myself to face it. That is why I left the word in Broken Hill, for her to recover.”
    “You what?”
    “I have no intention of triggering another Babel event. I have worked rather too hard for that. It was only by proving myself worthy of the word that I could trust myself to resist its temptations. And I wish to wield it for such a long time. The thing that I find disappointing about empires, Eliot, is they are so transient. On reflection, it seems that real power would be not to merely rule the world but to mark it.” He shrugged. “Perhaps that’s just me.”
    “You’ve become fucking incomprehensible. Woolf could have killed us all.”
    He shrugged. “She didn’t.”
    “She
could have
.”
    “She set it into a necklace. In order to keep it close, I suppose.” Yeats reached into his jacket pocket. Eliot shifted his gaze away. “I have it wrapped, Eliot.”
    He looked. Whatever it was lay beneath a white cloth.
    “That you think I need a bareword to compromise you is adorable,” Yeats said. “Eliot, in your present state, I would barely need
words
.”
    “Where is Woolf?”
    “Downstairs. Confined.