Lexicon

was the best she could do. If she released her grip on the door frame, she could possibly grab this thing and pull it out of the ceiling as she fell. There was a very slim chance of that happening. She heard footsteps. Boots on concrete. The rasping punctuated the air at regular intervals, like breathing but not. She should have learned words. She should not have waited for someone to teach her. She should have found them somehow. She leaped at the skylight and her fingers skidded uselessly over the plastic and she fell to the concrete and banged her knee. “
Suck
,” she said. A man came up the stairs. A kind of man. He was wearing black from head to toe and his eyes were black, bulky goggles, like night vision gear, set into a fighter pilot’s helmet, with bulging plastic hemispheres over the ears. He looked like he could walk through fire. The rasping was his air regulator.
    “
Shakaf veeha mannigh danoe!
” she said. This was a mess of attention words for random segments. The chances of it having any effect were about a thousand to one. “Lie down!”
    He extended a gloved hand. “Come with me.” These words came out flat and computer-modulated. She didn’t move. If he came closer, she could jump him. She didn’t see a gun. She would go for those goggles. If she could even dislodge them, it would make it hard for him to chase her.
    “Hurry.” The man gestured to the stairs. “There’s a fire.”
    “There isn’t,” she said. “Is there.” He didn’t answer. She’d figured out by now that he couldn’t hear her. She began to walk down the steps.
    • • •
    The lobby had been converted to a makeshift hospital, full of white cloth screens. The windows were blacked out with plastic sheeting. Black-suited spacemen moved between them, respirators hissing. She saw no one’s face she didn’t know from level five. She glimpsed Sashona on a trolley bed but then lost her behind a screen. She was told to stay where she was. Nobody spoke to her. Or to each other, at least that she could hear. An hour later, a spaceman drew back her curtain. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and she was surprised at his youth. He had a mustache, thin and fluffy. She wondered if this was the guy who had fetched her from the top of the stairs. If so, she should have gone with
narratak
.
    “You can go.” He began to disassemble screens.
    “What was all that about?” But she wasn’t really expecting an answer. Outside, she found the others huddled on the street. It was dusk, the tail end of rush hour.
    “A drill,” said Sashona. “But for what?”
    “No point wondering,” said Raine. “We’ll never know.”
    “True, that,” said Sashona. She was wondering why Emily hadn’t come downstairs with them. And, by extension, what Emily knew that she didn’t.
    Emily couldn’t hang around any longer. She started walking and by the time she reached the subway, she was shaking. She would not do anything rash. She would come to work in the morning, go to her desk, and do her job, like always. But this had been a lesson. A reminder. The next time something like this happened, she told herself, she would have a way out.
    • • •
    She kept a notepad and wrote down syllables she noticed were used more frequently by one psychographic than another. On the train, she listened for deviations from the average. She picked apart the words she knew, looking for patterns. She was surprised at how obvious they were. Liberals overused -
ay
and
-ee
, the front vowel sounds. Authoritarians were thick with fricatives. She developed hunches from newspapers and TV and websites, tracked down a suitable representative, at a bar or church meeting or the grocery store, and tried trotting them out. Like a safecracker listening for tumblers.
Sut. Stut. Stuh.
She slid guesses into sentences and usually people didn’t even seem to register them. They didn’t make it past the perceptual filter, ignored as verbal static. At worst, they thought she was stuttering. Her hunches were usually wrong. But sometimes she saw a flinch. A tiny flare across the muscles of the face. And that was a tumbler.
    It was a hard way to learn words. She could do this for a year and still know less than Sashona. But it was very thorough. It forced her to understand the underlying principles. She deduced a preference for alliteration in a segment from what she knew of the segments around it, leaping from there to
lallito
, a command word, and this thrilled her more