Lexicon

the roof, too,” Eliot said. “Rappelling down from the choppers, perhaps.”
    “What happened to Charlotte?”
    “What?”
    “When I met you, you had a buddy. A whole bunch of guys, on that ranch. Including Charlotte. How did they get there?”
    “Who gives a shit?” Eliot said. “Honestly, Harry. At this point, who cares? You think they’re going to take us alive?”
    Harry rubbed his chin, a gesture Eliot hadn’t seen before. “Under the mattress.”
    “What?”
    “I got you a pistol from the armory. It’s under the mattress.”
    Eliot stared at him.
    “You want to maybe get it out?”
    “I maybe want to shoot you with it, if it would make any difference.”
    “It’s going to be all right, Eliot.”
    “No,” said Eliot, “these guys are going to kill us while Woolf watches from a distance. Sometime later, an unimaginable number of people are going to devote their lives to shifting dirt, because Yeats has developed a hankering to dig a very deep hole in one place and pile it up in another. That’s how it’s going to be, you stupid asshole. Those guys on the ranch? They were the ones I could persuade to leave the organization. I thought Charlotte was one of them, but it has since become abundantly clear that she was compromised by Woolf, and feeding back information, such as your existence, what we were planning, and so on, the entire time, and then she turned Charlotte against me and I had to shoot her! I had to fucking shoot her, Wil!”
    “Just get out the gun.”
    “Why bother?” he shouted. “Since Woolf is coming only to shower us with chocolates and kisses?”
    Harry paced.
    “Oh,” Eliot said. “Oh, oh, are we having regrets?”
    “Shut up.”
    “Twenty years,” Eliot said. “My entire adult life, I’ve guarded every word that’s come out of my mouth. And you know what? I’m done. I am finally, completely fucking done. So hey-o! Fuck you, Wil Parke! Harry Wilson! Whoever you are! Fuck you very much! And fuck you, Yeats! And you, Emily Woolf! Fuck you the most of all!” He threw back the blanket. He slid a hand beneath the mattress and found metal. “Let’s go!” His body hurt everywhere but his mind was soaring. “Here we go, hey-o, diddle diddle!”
    • • •
    Emily came out of the chopper and jogged to the shelter of a falling-down building that had once sold wire, apparently. She had forgotten about stores like this. Shops, she meant. Shops that only sold one thing, which you could not conceive of wanting. You could live a lifetime in DC and never see a wire store. If you wanted wire, you would go to a warehouse-style hypermarket and it would be one shelf in aisle twelve. But here it was a whole shop. You went in and asked for some wire, because the roos had knocked down a section of your side paddock fence again, and you would have a conversation about it.
    She hadn’t wanted to come back to Broken Hill. She had been operating for a while now as a compartmentalized person, putting different pieces of herself in different places, and she didn’t know what Broken Hill would do to that. But she was here, because she didn’t get to make choices about that kind of thing anymore, and had to do the best she could. One part of her, one of the compartments, was glad. It thought she was coming home. The rest was pretty freaked out.
    “We’re deploying,” said Plath. Plath was running around with a headset that wouldn’t stay put, talking to security guys. Emily was not very happy with Plath. She had crossed paths with Plath a few times and each time Plath was more neurotic. There was something wild and jumpy in her eyes that Emily did not trust. Also, Plath had come on board shortly after the terrible failed attempt to corner Eliot and his outlier at the Portland airport, during which the poet Raine had died, and although Plath hadn’t said anything, Emily knew she viewed that incident as a shameful fuckup on Emily’s part. “It’s so hot.” Plath began to extract herself from her jacket. Emily was not wearing a jacket, because it had been obvious in advance that the desert would be hot. “Like an
oven
.”
    “Yes.” She watched Plath get her jacket tangled up in her headset.
    “I’ll call Yeats, tell him we landed.”
    “No.”
    “He asked to be kept up to—”
    “Don’t call Yeats,” Emily said. She was still in charge. She was still the best in the organization at hunt-and-kill.
    “We need a command center,” said a man. His voice was machine