“Who would I be if not Goliath or the written one?”
He looked at me for a long time, an expression of concern on his face. I understood what he was trying to say.
“You think I might be Thursday, but suffering some sort of weird delusion?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“I’ve spent my entire life in books,” I explained. “I’m really only five years old. I can remember popping out of the character press as plain old D8-V-67987, and my first day at St. Tabularasa’s. I did well, so I was streamed into the First-Person fast-track program. Long story short, I look after the Thursday books one to five but also work for JAID—that’s the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department. I can tell you about Sprockett and Carmine, and how Lorina/Pickwick doesn’t approve of her bringing goblins home and likes to bore us stupid by quoting Latin mottos, and the new book that arrived in the neighborhood. And there’s Bradshaw, and the metaphor shortage, and Jobsworth wanting me to go up-country to help deal with Speedy Muffler in the peace talks on Friday. That’s me. I’m not Thursday. I’m nothing like her. Show me a frightening situation and I’ll run a mile. Square will vouch for me.”
And I called his name, but there was no answer.
“Right,” I said, wondering where he’d gone. “That makes me look stupid.”
We both fell silent, and Landen stared at me for a long time once more. I saw his eyes moisten, and mine spontaneously did the same.
“I so want to be her,” I sniffed as my eyes blurred with tears. “But I’m not.”
Before I knew it, I had discovered what crying actually means when you do it for real. He gave me his handkerchief and hugged me, and I responded by wrapping my arms around his neck. It felt wonderful. Natural—like two parts in a jigsaw. When I had calmed down, he gently took my hands from around him and held them in his, gazing into my eyes.
“Here’s the thing,” he said at last. “If you’re not the real Thursday, we must come clean to the kids and explain that you’re not. I can’t have them being disappointed again. But if you are the real Thursday, you must stay so we can look after you. It’s possible that you just think you’re not Thursday. All that stuff about the BookWorld—it could be Aornis up to her tricks again.”
“Aornis, sister of Acheron?”
He raised an eyebrow. “How many children do Thursday and I have?” he asked.
“Two.”
“That’s in your favor as the written Thursday. Aornis gave the real Thursday a mindworm so she thought she had a third child—another daughter—and Thursday was always worrying about her. We helped her by pretending there was, and occasionally, in lucid moments, she would realize what was going on. Then she’d forget and was worrying about her missing daughter again.”
I tried to imagine what it might be like having a child who was a figment but could not. If Aornis was
anything like the written Acheron, she was pretty unpleasant. Still, I was kind of glad I didn’t know about the extra daughter. I had an idea.
“T minus pumpkin in ten hours,” I said, consulting my watch. “If you see me vanish in front of your eyes will you believe I’m from the BookWorld?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll believe you. But if you don’t vanish, will you believe that you might be Thursday except . . . well, nuts?”
“I could be the missing Goliath synthetic Thursday,” I said, “with a well-researched cover story.”
Landen smiled. “Being married to you has never been boring.”
I was pondering over the consequences of being either mad or synthetic when Thursday’s mother arrived.
“Thursday!” she squealed, having let herself in. “You naughty girl! Where have you been?”
The real version of my mother was quite different from the written one. The real one was a lot older—at least seventy, by my guess, but didn’t seem to have lost any of her youthful vigor. She was a little gray, a little hunched and a little odd.
“Here for long?” she asked.
“Only until midnight,” I managed to mutter.
“Shame!” she said, then turned to Landen. “Is this one of the synthetics?”
“The jury’s still out.”
Mrs. Next walked up close and peered at me through her spectacles, as one might regard a stubborn stain on the carpet.
“It’s very lifelike. Does she have the scars?”