Lexicon

helmet and was vomiting down his chest. The other was crawling weakly toward the front door.
    He raised the rifle. The helmet-less solder raised a hand. Harry shot him. He walked around to the other one, reloading the rifle. A man unexpectedly appeared outside the window, a young guy in a cheap suit and tie, stringing together nonsense words, and Harry shot him through the window. He looked back. The crawling soldier had stopped crawling.
    He reloaded the rifle. He could hear a chopper approaching. Soldiers would be coming from both sides, he guessed. They would be jogging slowly, like these two guys, since they were encased in forty-pound armored ovens. They had been lumbering around in the noonday sun for about an hour. He couldn’t really imagine what that was like. He had seen people drop dead out here, trying to do too much. They had the idea that the worst the sun could do was make them uncomfortable. They applied their sunscreen and their hats and headed out and just fell over.
    He went into the bathroom and slid open the window. There was a low fence offering cover to the adjoining building, and from there he thought he could make his way unseen to pretty much anywhere he wanted. He climbed out the window and began to crawl.
    • • •
    Yeats’s eyes widened across the table. She had never seen him look shocked before. She had never really seen him look anything.
    “Release me,” he said.
    “You release
me
,” she said, although that was just to fill time; there was only one way she could ever be free of Yeats, and she was going to have to make that happen herself. He pulled back, reaching inside his jacket for the thing that would take away her mind again. Which showed Emily that Yeats really did not get it. He thought the word had worn off, somehow; that she no longer felt compelled to obey him.
    She went after him but found herself gripped from behind by Plath, of all people. Plath was thin and wiry, not the kind of person who could hold Emily for long, but she hadn’t expected to be held at all, and it gave Yeats time to get out the word.
    “Sit down and stop moving,” he said.
    “No.” Disbelief spread across his face. Plath’s arms were already slackening, anticipating Emily’s compliance. But Yeats’s hand was coming out of his jacket, and she didn’t want to face what was in there, so she threw her head backward. There was a satisfying connection. She stepped forward, swiped a glass from the table, and tossed the water over Yeats’s shoes.
    Yeats made a frightened, high-pitched sound. This was very beautiful in Emily’s ears, but the point was Yeats was not making other sounds, sounds that commanded people to kill her, so in the moment he was occupied with the horror of his softening leather, she broke the glass against the edge of the table and sliced it across his throat.
    He tried to speak. Little red bubbles popped along his lips. She took the bareword from his fingers as gently as could be. He dropped to his knees, and she should have been turning to face Plath and Masters and whoever else was back there, but instead she just stood and watched him die.
    • • •
    Harry jogged toward the burger place. He thought there must be soldiers about, but couldn’t see them. The choppers had retreated; he didn’t know why. He circled around the block but saw no one so he came at it from the front. Emily was there. A few bodies lay on the ground. There was a black-suited soldier but his helmet was off and he was standing with his feet loosely apart, not holding a weapon, looking around the town like he was vacationing here.
    He kept the rifle ready and began to cross the street. Emily turned to him. She had something in her hand. Her expression was strange.
    “Hey,” he said. “Em, it’s me.”
    • • •
    He came toward her and for a moment she didn’t know who it was. She had just killed a bunch of people and compromised Masters and her head was full of bees.
    But she recognized his expression. It was like the last time she’d been surrounded by death and he’d come for her. He was going to save her again, she saw. Of course he was. He was going to forgive her everything, again.
    “Oh, Harry,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”
    He smiled. She’d thought she would never see that again, his smile, and it killed her, because she knew it couldn’t last. None of this could last.
    “I love you,” she said, “but I’m sorry, I need you to do