Lexicon

problem. Emily could tell because at first Masters emitted updates at intervals of fifteen seconds—who was where, doing what, and for how long they were expected to do it; a nonstop cataloging of physical facts that he seemed to enjoy on a deep, sexual level—then, for no reason, a whole minute went by with no updates at all. This manifested in Plath as a series of increasingly dramatic hair corrections, and finally a question, and Masters turned his goggles toward her and said in his machine voice, “We’re trying to fix target location.”
    “I thought you
had
target location,” Plath said. Masters did not answer. “Did we not
start
with target location?”
    “Eliot is slippery,” Emily said.
    “We are
not
having another Portland.” Plath directed this at Masters, but what Masters thought of it was unknowable. Emily kind of hoped Masters would become so pissed off with Plath that he would unsnag one of what had to be five or six different weapons strapped to various parts of his body and do something unspeakable with it.
Yeats, Yeats
, she thought, as she did at times like this.
You jerk.
    She rose from the table. The front glass was very dirty but she could see through it. A chopper was hovering above the hospital, but aside from this, nothing seemed to be happening.
    “We’re regrouping,” said Masters. “We may have a new fix.”
    “You get a fix,” said Plath. “You get a fucking fix right this second or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” Her face was flushed. Globules of sweat formed a neat line all along her hairline. She was displaying an awful lot of emotion for a poet, which made Emily think that Plath had reason to believe the consequences for failure were particularly terrible. She kept watching the road. She needed to think like Eliot. She knew him better than most. She could imagine Eliot skulking around out there, sniffing her out. That’s what he’d be thinking about. Not escape. He would be coming for her.
    A black-suited soldier emerged from the crossroad and jogged toward the burger place. “Who is this guy?” she said. Nobody answered, so she tried again. “Who the fuck is this fucking guy?”
    Plath came up beside her. “Speaking for myself, I don’t mind adding a little manpower to this location.”
    Masters said, “We’re redrawing our zones.”
    This sounded like bullshit to Emily, because if her current location had become part of Masters’s operational zone, that would have been something he would have mentioned. Soldiers moving locations: That was all he talked about. She eyed the approaching guy. “Oh,” she said. “That’s Eliot.”
    “That’s . . . that’s impossible,” said Plath. But there was uncertainty in her voice. Plath was beginning to realize what Emily had known for a while: that you could not underestimate Eliot. Every time you thought you had him figured out, you didn’t. “Let’s . . . let’s get some security here, huh?” Plath reached across Emily to Masters, who may have been barking orders over his internal radio or may have been just standing there; it was impossible to tell. “Masters. Masters.”
    “Unit is not responding.” Masters drew a fat pistol. “May be hostile. I advise retreat.”
    Plath vanished. Emily hesitated. She really did want to face Eliot and end him. But this was not the way to do it: with Eliot in heavy body armor, filtered against compromise. There was taking a risk, and there was suicide. She turned to follow Plath, then had another thought. There was always the possibility that this was another layer of sneakiness. Eliot could have deliberately sent someone who would be spotted—the outlier, perhaps, or just a soldier he’d managed to overcome—toward the burger place from the front in order to flush her out the back. That was just the kind of thing that Eliot might do. She considered. There was a side door, leading to the dumpster. She decided to be prudent.
    She pushed her way outside. The brick wall of the adjoining store faced her. This was the kind of thing Emily liked: a closeted escape route. This, right here, was her element. Then she stopped, because it occurred to her that maybe this was a problem. Maybe the last thing she wanted to do in this situation was follow her instincts, since those might be predictable to someone who knew her very well. Eliot stepped around the corner.
    “Shit,” she said.
    Little yellow plugs poked out of Eliot’s ears. He was holding a