Lexicon

rooms that were once staffed by a woman named Helen who’d always had pink iced doughnuts, any time of day or night. Harry had never seen her eat one. She just had them. He’d visited this place often, for those doughnuts.
    He reached the corner and poked his head around. Eliot was nowhere to be seen. He had just fucking disappeared. Harry debated the merits of opening his mouth to make the kind of noise that might attract armed men, then there was a quick one-two of flat gunshots in the near distance, which decided him.
    He reached the stairwell and peered over the railing to see Eliot standing below him. At Eliot’s feet was a man in a black suit with no helmet. The man looked dazed. His gun, a semiautomatic, lay a few feet away.
    “Shoot them in the face,” Eliot said. “They’re armored, but it’s distracting.”
    “What did you do?” The man in the black suit began to grope for his gun. “He’s moving!” He raised the rifle.
    “Don’t!” said Eliot. “He’s on the side of the angels now.”
    The man retrieved his gun and got to this feet. He looked up at Harry questioningly.
    “He’s cool,” Eliot told the man. “Neither of you shoot the other.” He began to descend the steps.
    “How did you . . . ?” But Eliot had disappeared. Harry ran after him, jumping the steps three or four at a time. He caught Eliot at the top of the second floor, which was the surgical wing. “Will you fucking wait?” He went to seize Eliot by the shoulder but the black-suited man slapped his gun into his shoulder and looked down the barrel at him.
    “Don’t alarm my prole,” Eliot said. “He wants to protect me.”
    “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “Looking for Woolf.”
    “She could be anywhere.”
    “Yes. But it’s a better option than sitting in that room.” Eliot looked around. His pupils were dilated. “You used to work here. What’s a clever way out?”
    “I don’t know. Can you tell this guy to stop pointing his fucking gun at me?”
    “He’s finding you threatening. So am I, actually.”
    “You look like you’re on drugs.”
    “I’m releasing a lot of dopamine,” Eliot said. “It’s a natural high. Joel! Gun down.”
    The soldier lowered his gun. He stared at Harry with baleful eyes.
    “How about a laundry chute?”
    “What?”
    “A chute,” Eliot said, “that we slide down to a basement or some-such.”
    “No. They don’t work like that. This is a hospital—we’d lose children down them.”
    “What, then?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Think,” Eliot said. “You must have lost a few patients. People who snuck out somehow. It’s not Fort Knox.”
    “No one . . . okay, one time a guy broke into a storage room by climbing onto the roof of the building next door. We might be able to—”
    “Yes. That.” Eliot looked at the soldier. “Go cause a distraction. Shoot at nothing. Report false information. Things like that.” The man nodded and began to jog down the stairs. “This storage room, then.”
    “How did you compromise that guy?”
    “I know him. I used to work for the organization, you know. Storage room.”
    He led Eliot through double doors. He had never liked coming here. It was the surgeons. He’d never been completely sure they really gave a shit. They seemed to enjoy challenges more than people. “So you, what, shot him in the face, pulled off his helmet, and used words?”
    “Correct,” Eliot said.
    He reached the storage room and tried the handle. No one had been by in the past year or so to unlock it, apparently. But he knew where the key was kept. He jogged down the corridor, pulled open the second drawer in the nurse’s station, and found it among paper clips and rubber bands. When he returned, Eliot was tugging at the door. “Quick,” Eliot said.
    “I am being quick.”
    “Quicker.”
    He pulled open the door. He was finding the new Eliot unsettling. Somewhere in the distance was a staccato of gunfire. They waited but it wasn’t repeated.
    “Joel,” said Eliot, fondly.
    They entered the storeroom. The window had been fitted with new locks since the intruder but they wouldn’t be much of an impediment from this side. He peered through the glass. A short climb down to a secluded part of the roof, then a short run and leap to the roof of the pharmacy next door. He did not see any soldiers.
    “The real problem is finding Woolf,” Eliot murmured in his ear. Harry flinched. He hadn’t heard him approach. Eliot looked at him.