Lexicon

they were powerful, and they were there, so she looked out for them. She was an opportunist.
    It was strange how many people left their words in obvious places. She understood that you couldn’t destroy them, because they were slippery in your mind; when she tried to recall one of hers, her brain would offer benign variants, like
fairtix
, which didn’t mean anything. You needed a permanent record somewhere. But Emily had ripped hers into pieces and numbered them on the back and hidden the code to reassemble them in the margins of different textbooks. Everyone else seemed to have just stuffed them into books and drawers, or under their mattress, or, in one guy’s case, in his pants pocket. She couldn’t understand leaving something lying around that could hurt you.
    • • •
    “I know everything,” she told Jeremy. “I figured it all out. So, good news, I don’t need to pester you with questions anymore.”
    He glanced at her. He was playing basketball. Or practicing basketball. The indoor court was empty but for them. Jeremy was shooting baskets from the free throw line, over and over. She was watching his shiny shorts.
    “Once upon a time, there were sorcerers,” she said. “Who were really just guys who knew a little about persuasion. And some of them did all right, ruled kingdoms and founded religions, et cetera, but they also occasionally got burned to death by angry mobs, or beheaded, or drowned while being tested for witchness. So sometime in the last few centuries, maybe even just the last fifty or so, actually, they got organized. To solve the whole being-burned problem. And . . .” She gestured. “Here we are. No more beheadings.”
    Jeremy released the ball. It passed through the net with a
swoosh
.
    “Also, the words are getting better,” she said. “I’m thinking that five hundred years ago, the keywords were things like
bless
. Tribal identifiers. Playing on how we trust people who think like us, believe the same things. Which is a start, but obviously not what
you
do. It’s not what Eliot and Brontë do. So the organization must have been making keywords. Building them, one on top of the other. Like you do with computer code. First you gain trust from a segment with weak keywords. Not a lot of trust. Just enough to teach them to believe in a stronger keyword. Rinse and repeat.” She sat back on her elbows. “Pretty simple. I actually don’t know why you thought you couldn’t tell me.”
    “Have they actually taught you this?” Jeremy said. “Or are you guessing?”
    “Ha,” she said. “You just confirmed it. Right there.”
    “Bah,” said Jeremy, throwing.
    “They taught me some of it.”
    He came back, bouncing the ball. “What’s a word?”
    “Huh?”
    “You’re feeling clever—tell me what a word is.”
    “It’s a unit of meaning.”
    “What’s meaning?”
    “Uh . . . meaning is an abstraction of characteristics common to the class of objects to which it applies. The meaning of
ball
is the set of characteristics common to balls, i.e. round and bouncy and often seen around guys in shorts.”
    Jeremy returned to the free throw line, saying nothing. She figured she must have that wrong, or at least not right enough.
    “You mean from a neurological perspective? Okay. A word is a recipe. A recipe for a particular neurochemical reaction. When I say
ball
, your brain converts the word into meaning, and that’s a physical action. You can see it happening on an EEG. What we’re doing, or, I should say, what
you’re
doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people’s brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And you do
that
by speaking a string of words crafted for the person’s psychographic segment. Probably words that were crafted decades ago and have been strengthened ever since. And it’s a
string
of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once.”
    Jeremy said, “How do you know this?”
    “Do you think I’m smart?”
    “I think you’re scary,” he said.
    • • •
    While he showered, she waited outside on a wooden bench. From here she had a vantage point across the soccer field to one of the parking lots, the one reserved for teachers, and she saw four black sedans roll up, one after the other. People in suits climbed out. She got off the bench and