by Max Barry
“Really?” said Yeats. “It’s a children’s charity.”
Eliot backed out of the way of a man carrying carpet. The walls were lightly spattered. Fine dark droplets like mist. “I’m asking you,” he said, “what the fuck?”
“Woolf came back.”
He said nothing, because surely this was a joke.
“Look,” Yeats said, indicating a dark patch on the carpet. “That’s Frost.”
“I told you she wasn’t dead.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I asked for more time. Christ, she killed Frost?”
“Essentially,” said Yeats. “A few others, too.”
“How did she do that?” Yeats continued patting his neck with the cloth. There was something odd in his manner, a kind of satisfaction, which Eliot didn’t understand. Maintenance workers came forward, wanting to get at the carpet on which he was standing. “Get out,” Eliot said. “All of you.”
The men looked questioningly at Yeats, who didn’t respond. The men slunk away, leaving the aroma of cigarettes and carpet glue.
“Did she have it?”
“Yes.”
“She had the word.”
“Just as you predicted,” Yeats said. “I should have listened to you.”
“Where is she?”
Yeats said nothing.
“Did you kill her?”
“Fascinating, your priorities,” said Yeats. “I tell you that the bareword has returned to us and your first question is about her.”
“I have a lot of questions. They’re not necessarily ordered.”
“Ah, Eliot. As I have grown, you have shrunk. I offered to help you after Broken Hill. I gave you a chance to go away and find the man you are supposed to be. But no. You chose to stay. You wanted to pursue her. You actually said those words: you wanted. To make amends for failing to stop her, to beg forgiveness for failing to protect her, I honestly don’t know. I doubt that you do. But what is plain is that she broke you. A sixteen-year-old girl and you let yourself care for her. It was clear from the beginning, but what was a weakness became nothing less than a psychological disintegration. Look at you. You are an echo of who you were.”
“Well,” he said. “How refreshing to have an honest opinion.”
“I have faced the word and won. This is what I have done while you were falling into yourself. The day I realized the bareword could corrupt me, I began to prepare myself to face it. That is why I left the word in Broken Hill, for her to recover.”
“You what?”
“I have no intention of triggering another Babel event. I have worked rather too hard for that. It was only by proving myself worthy of the word that I could trust myself to resist its temptations. And I wish to wield it for such a long time. The thing that I find disappointing about empires, Eliot, is they are so transient. On reflection, it seems that real power would be not to merely rule the world but to mark it.” He shrugged. “Perhaps that’s just me.”
“You’ve become fucking incomprehensible. Woolf could have killed us all.”
He shrugged. “She didn’t.”
“She could have.”
“She set it into a necklace. In order to keep it close, I suppose.” Yeats reached into his jacket pocket. Eliot shifted his gaze away. “I have it wrapped, Eliot.”
He looked. Whatever it was lay beneath a white cloth.
“That you think I need a bareword to compromise you is adorable,” Yeats said. “Eliot, in your present state, I would barely need words.”
“Where is Woolf?”
“Downstairs. Confined. Sleeping.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“You know that. Eliot. It is time to let go of Woolf. Let me help you.”
He said nothing.
“She is a murderer. She killed three thousand people. In the process of which, incidentally, she managed to inflict the word on herself. Caught a reflection in Broken Hill. An accident, I believe. But she is now under instruction to, and I quote, ‘kill everyone.’ How far below the surface that lurks, we can only guess. She has been attempting to resist it by channeling her thoughts toward me. But it is a part of her. It will never go away. She is irredeemable, Eliot. She always was. Accept this. And please do it quickly, because I have a job for you in Syria.”
“I am not going to help you rule the world.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think.”
“Eliot,” said Yeats, “if that were true, you wouldn’t need to say it.”
• • •
She woke and felt for the necklace and it was gone. The world was yellowish. It was six feet by eight. It had a padded bench seat, which she guessed doubled as a bed, and carpet she recognized. A thick gray door with a small window in it, obscured by something on the other side. She was in her underwear. Her head felt bruised. No, not her head. Something deeper than that. She sat up. She put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes a moment, because things were very, very bad.
Time passed. She stood. She paced. She grew thirsty. She discovered a plastic bucket under the bed-seat, which she guessed was for pee. She spent some time breaking off a long, triangular shard, and tucked this into the rear waistband of her underpants. When she positioned the bucket right, you couldn’t tell. It seemed to Emily that this room wasn’t monitored. Maybe it was unnecessary, when you had a person in a six-by-eight cell with nothing but a bucket. But if she got out of here because the organization wasn’t monitoring her, that was going to be really hilarious.
These were positive thoughts. She was not actually getting out. She was just keeping busy until Yeats turned up.
• • •
Someone did come, but not Yeats. At first, Emily didn’t recognize him. He had cut his hair. It had been eight or nine years. But his eyes were the same, and she hadn’t forgotten the way they had bulged in that fast food restaurant bathroom, when he’d tried to coerce her into a blow job.
She threw out some words, just in case. “Please,” said Lee. The door closed. Emily caught a glimpse of people out there, who would provide obstacles to any attempted flight. She considered it anyway, but decided to save the bucket-knife. It would be a shame to waste that on Lee if she might get a chance at Yeats.
Lee went down on his haunches. It was kind of an odd pose, but it brought his eyes level with Emily’s as she sat on the bench seat. Her skin puckered. She felt the urge to fold her arms, but didn’t, because she didn’t want to give him anything.
“We write reports, you know,” Lee said. He looked odd, sickly, but that was probably the yellow lights. “When we recruit someone, we send along a little write-up, saying what we think. Yours . . . well, yours was negative, Emily. I won’t lie. It was extremely negative. I know what you’re thinking: I gave you a bad report because you punched me in the balls. No. I put that aside, like the professional I am. I gave you a bad report, Emily, because you were actually going to suck my cock. It was a simple test. I used weak words. Starter words. And still you were going to do it. You’re fragile. You have no defense. And people like that don’t last in the organization.” He spread his hands. “Imagine my surprise when the Academy accepted you. It makes sense now. Now I know you cheated your way in. Eliot taking pity on you. Now, I understand. But at the time, I was amazed. And then they made you Woolf. . . . I took it personally. I don’t mind admitting it. It felt like an insult. I mean, my report was very clear. Candidate shows no aptitude for mental discipline nor the inclination to develop it. Those were my words. Well, look at you now. Just like I predicted. And you know what? How it’s turned out is actually pretty good for me. Now I look like a genius. It took awhile but I finally made it to DC.”
He paused, as if for a response, but she didn’t give him one because she hadn’t figured out why he was here. He sighed and straightened, plucking at his pant creases. She wasn’t thrilled with the new eyeline.
“So,” Lee said, “as you might have guessed, you�
�re going to die soon. In fact, as I understand it, the only reason you’re still here is Yeats has become too busy with a new project to get around to debriefing you yet. When I say debriefing, I mean compromising you and getting you to dump out the contents of your brain, in case there’s anything in there that might be useful to us. Now, this is going to happen. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. But my idea, Emily, was to spare Yeats some trouble. You see, my being here is a very big opportunity for me. A test, you might say. And if I’m able to go back to Yeats with the information he wants, well, that would be good.”
He removed his jacket and began to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Why am I telling you this, since clearly you have no interest in doing what I want? I’ll tell you. It’s because, Emily, I want you to understand how extremely, intensely motivated I am right now.”
She said, “Uh, Lee? The idea that you can compromise me is laughable.”
“Oh, I realize you’re not sixteen anymore. I’m not expecting it to be that easy again. In fact, I hear you’ve been working on your defense pretty hard.” He began to unbuckle his belt. “The thing is, Em, I think, deep down, you’re just the same. I think you’re fragile. You subscribed to the idea that the best defense is a good offense, and it’s served you well, sure, but . . . here we are.” He pulled his belt free and began to wind the strap around one hand. “I think once we test that defense, I mean, really put some pressure on it . . . we might see some cracks. I’m pretty confident about that. Because once a person is under severe physical stress, a lot of the higher brain function falls away. The critical thinking. The learned behaviors.” He tapped his forehead. “What am I saying? You know all this. You were in school more recently than me. You know what I’m talking about. And you know I’m not leaving this room without getting what I want. The only question is how hard you’re going to make it.” He let the belt buckle dangle from his fist. “So,” he said, “how are we doing this?”
• • •
Two large men came in, wearing white uniforms that Emily recognized from Labs. They approached her with their hands out like claws. By this time, she was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat. She swiped at one of the orderlies, shrieking semi-random words, but he caught her wrist and wrapped his arms around her. It felt oddly comforting. They twisted her hands and forced the bucket-knife from her fingers and held her down for what felt like hours. Some other people took Lee away. That was the last time anyone visited her who wasn’t Yeats.
• • •
She picked Lee’s blood off her flake by flake. It had dried hard, so this way she was able to clean herself one piece at a time. Maybe clean was the wrong word. It was pretty disgusting, but she kept at it, because the alternative was worse. Every flake of Lee that she removed made her feel better.
Days passed. It felt like days. She became extremely thirsty. After enough of that, she developed a tremble that wouldn’t go away. Her bowels and bladder shut down. She could feel them inside her like stones. She was being tortured, she assumed. Her physical needs were being deliberately left unmet.
She thought about Eliot. About whether he knew she was here. She figured no, because if he did, he would have shown up. She just had that feeling. Of course, she had left him facedown in a ditch in Broken Hill, and it would have made complete sense if Eliot hated her with a fiery passion. But she had the idea that the kind of relationship she had with him allowed for mistakes, even big ones. And that when this door next opened, it wouldn’t be Yeats but Eliot, and his eyes would be full of reproach but there would also be forgiveness and hope.
She considered removing her underwear, which were spattered with dark brown Lee spots and made her feel permanently stained. It might even be intimidating to Yeats. Nothing here but Emily, pal. But she didn’t do it. She wasn’t that badass. She made herself climb off the bed every now and again and jump on the spot, or at least bounce up and down. So she wasn’t just lying there. The light never went off. She couldn’t tell how much time was passing. Her thoughts went around and around. Sometimes she caught herself singing.
• • •
Eliot swung the car into the school driveway and crawled up to the house. It was late, most of the windows dark, but not Brontë’s. He sat in the car for a few moments. Then he climbed out and went inside.
The corridors were empty. It had been a while since he was last here and the place felt unfamiliar, although nothing was different. He entered the East Wing and passed a boy with a white ribbon tied around his wrist and dark bruises beneath his eyes, reciting something in Latin. The boy saw Eliot and broke off, then looked pained. Eliot did not stop.
He knocked on Brontë’s door. She called for him to enter in the imperious voice she adopted for students and he stepped inside. She was behind her desk, surrounded by papers, her hair pinned up but threatening escape. She set down a pen and leaned back in her chair. “What fortuitous timing. I was about to start grading papers.” She gestured. “Will you sit?”
“I’m going to Syria.”
“Oh,” she said. “When?”
“Now. Tonight.”
She nodded. “You should try to visit the museum in Damascus. They have a tablet with the world’s oldest recorded linear alphabet. It’s quite humbling.”
“I want you to come with me.”
She became very still. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
He looked around the room. “Do you remember the watch I had? The digital one, to wake me so that I could get back to my room before dawn. I was terrified of it failing. Or sleeping through it.”
“Eliot. Please.”
“Atwood knew,” he said. “She told me as much, many years later.”
“Please,” said Brontë.
“We thought we were being clever. Carrying on under their noses. And when . . . when we had to stop, we thought we did that in secret, too. We did it because we were terrified of being discovered. But they knew.”
Her eyes glimmered. “Why are you saying these things? Are you here to compromise me?”
“No,” he said. “God, no.”
“Then stop talking.”
“They persuaded us. Without saying a word.”
“There was no alternative, Eliot.”
“I don’t believe that anymore. I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s the truth.”
“I have this idea that it would have been a girl,” he said. “I don’t know why. But I’ve thought that for a while. I find it hard to shake.”
Brontë put her face in her hands. “Stop talking.”
“She’d be grown now. A young woman.”
“Stop!”
“I’m sorry.” He caught himself. “I’m sorry.”
“I want you to leave.”
He nodded. He hesitated, almost apologized again, then moved to the door. Before he closed it, he glanced back, in case she’d looked up from her hands. But she hadn’t.
• • •
He landed in Damascus. Heat enveloped him the instant he stepped over the threshold of the airplane, a taste of Australia with a different scent. He made his way across the tarmac to the airport proper and submitted himself to the impatient eyes of various mustachioed officials. His papers were impeccable and so he was soon released into the main hall, which was large, framed with high, latticed keyhole-shaped windows, and even vaguely air-conditioned. A short man in a tight suit stood gripping a sign that read:
“I’m Eliot,” he said. “You are Hossein?”
The man nodded, extending his hand in the Western manner.
“,” said Eliot. The man’s hand dropped. His face relaxed. “My plane is delayed,” Eliot said. “It is due in ten hours. You will wait here for it and that is what you will believe.” He could see the exit. There was no shortage of drivers on the pavement outside. “And when Yeats asks you what happened,” he said, “tel
l him I retired.”
• • •
Someone entered the room. She squeezed shut her eyes as soon as she realized, so was left with only the briefest impression: a square man in a dark suit, silver hair.
“Hello, Emily,” Yeats said.
She sat up. Her brain felt soft. Lee had been right: It was harder to marshal mental defenses while under physiological stress. She needed to think clearly but all she wanted was a sandwich.
“Lee is dead. You assumed, perhaps. But in case you were wondering about the possibility of last-minute medical heroics . . . no. He died. Another for your collection.”
“I’ll stop at one more.”
“No,” Yeats said. “You won’t. I think we both understand this. You are infected with a murderous impulse. You’ve managed to ameliorate this so far by plotting my demise. If you actually succeeded . . . well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Since you would inevitably begin to, well, kill everyone. I think you must realize this. You must plan to kill me. But you must not do it. Quite the conundrum.”
She wondered how quickly she could get off the bed and get her hands around Yeats’s throat. Probably not very fast. Probably to no great effect, even if she did. She needed to be smarter. This was her chance; she would not get him alone again. She needed her head to stop pounding.
“Was this a suicide mission? I don’t think so. It goes against your character. I think you came here with a plan to kill me and the vaguest hope that you would somehow be redeemed. For you are such an immediate girl. You live from opportunity to opportunity. Does that sound right?”
Maybe, she thought. She didn’t know. She was hungry. She wondered where Eliot was.
“I’m founding a religion,” said Yeats. “I use the term religion loosely. But then, so does everyone. It’s rather a lot of work, even with the bareword, and once it’s done, that’s only the first step. So I won’t waste any further time. Here’s what’s going to happen. You will open your eyes. You will look at the bareword. I will say, Forever serve my interests.” He loomed closer, a shape she couldn’t quite bring into focus. “I see from your expression that this is unexpected. You thought you would be killed. A natural assumption. But what I realized, Emily, is that you have made yourself useful. You are skilled, resourceful, adaptable, and you have a kill order in your head that will be triggered in the event of my death. You are, in fact, the perfect bodyguard.”