Lexicon

logic gates close, phosphorous glow and metal magnetize, all by typing words.
    • • •
    She finished her silicon monster and went to fetch Brecht. He looked at the HELLO hanging on-screen and nodded once and began to pull her machine apart. She felt a little sad. She was learning that people were just machines and it was working the other way a little, too.
    Over the next week, she had to be careful when approaching other students, in case they were wearing a white ribbon. Some students disappeared for days at a time, and some didn’t come back at all, which Emily guessed meant they had failed. She hadn’t really noticed before, because the classes weren’t based on age, but there were more lower-years than seniors. A lot more.
    After exams there were two weeks of vacation, during which most other students went off to their homes. This left Emily with the school to herself, practically. She felt bored and restless and began to hatch plots to break into people’s rooms, so she could learn something. She spent time with one of the few other students to stay over vacation, a doe-eyed girl with dark bangs and a permanent air of disdain. Earlier, Emily had disliked this girl quite a lot, because she was older and spent a lot of time around Jeremy. But now she was basically the only person here who could teach her anything. Emily cut her hair the same and adopted the girl’s walk, which was a kind of drifting, as if she was being blown through corridors on the pages of a million mournful poems. This was not as successful as Emily had hoped, since the doe-eyed girl didn’t open up at all, so Emily was stuck with a dumb haircut for nothing. But she did discover that the girl swam for an hour every day. So Emily snuck into the locker room and stole her key.
    The doe-eyed girl’s room was like her own: a single bed, a wooden desk, a chair, and a window looking over the grounds. But her books were completely different. The girl had
Persuasion in Middle Europe
and
Modern Psychographics
and a small yellow book Emily had seen seniors carry around and always been intrigued by, titled
Gutturals
. That one, disappointingly, turned out to be full of word fragments with no explanation or context. But she pulled down a tome with an alluring title,
The Linguistics of Magic
, and that was better. It was a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn’t tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. This was where words like
charmed
came from, and
spellbound
and
fascinated
and
bewitched
and
enraptured
and
compelled
.
    This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type—their true name, basically—and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got
fascinated
and
charmed
,
spellbound
and
amazed
, they
forgot themselves
and were
carried away
. They just didn’t think there was anything magical about that anymore.
    • • •
    When classes resumed, they began to teach her words. No one said what these were for. Charlotte simply handed out envelopes. “Study these in private,” Charlotte told them. “They are not to be shared, ever, with anybody. Repeat them to yourself in front of a mirror, five times per word, every night.”
    “Until when?” asked Sashona, but Charlotte just put on her fake smile, like this was an amusing question.
    She took the envelope marked EMILY RUFF and carried it to her room. Inside were three pieces of paper. JUSTITRACT. MEGRANCE. VARTIX. They were difficult to read; her brain kept slipping in the wrong direction. They were too similar to real words, maybe. She studied them. She stood in front of the mirror and watched herself. “
Varrrrrtttt
,” she said, which was supposed to be
Vartix
, but for some reason it took a long time to come out, time stretching and getting