The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

“I’m fine,” I told him, “with a stick to lean on and four Dizuperadol patches.”

“Four?” said Landen. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“It’s the only thing that seems to have any lasting effect. Slow and constant release—double thickness, too.”

I’d recently moved to the more effective stick-on patches rather than Dizuperadol taken orally. The patches seemed to work for longer, and I’d been prescribed the double-strength ones. Sometimes it felt like I had a waffle stuck to my bum. They were effective, but there were side effects.

“How’s the vision?” asked Landen.

“In focus more often than it’s not. And that’s good, right?”

“A Zen dog dreams of a medium-size bone.”

“Actually, there is one thing you could do. Can you put my all phone in my right pocket so I can get it out?”

Landen did as I asked. I’d been working on the grip of my left hand, but it was slow going. The damage to my hand had been caused by the taxi’s indicator stalk as it passed through my forearm during the vehicle’s sudden stop in the swamp, and it had caused all sorts of mayhem on the way. The stalk broke off when it hit my jaw. These days I used it as a tea stirrer. The stalk, that is, not my jaw.

“I’ll meet you in TJ-Maxx around two,” said Landen, giving me an affectionate nuzzle. “And don’t be too mean with the shrink, will you? They’ve got feelings, too.”

“I’ll play nice. What’s the password this time?”

For a few years now, Goliath had been sending Synthetic Thursdays out into the world to try to get information from people who would speak only to me—Landen being an obvious example. They had also tried to gain access to my house, to the SpecOps records department, and they’d even tried to scam a free membership at a health farm. The copies were initially crude but had made steady and sustained advances in sophistication since first appearing a eighteen months before. The Mark IVs and Vs wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but the Mark VIs were impressive and had been able to crack single code words, which was why we used the more cloak-and-daggerish sentences and responses.

“What about if I say, ‘No cookies at the hunt, sir!’ and then you reply with, ‘It’s not a cookie, it’s a Newton’?”

“Sounds random enough.”

So with the passwords committed to memory, we limped off in opposite directions. I turned once to take a look at him, and he turned as well, and we smiled a simple smile of understanding. Parting for us was generally sweet sorrow, as past experience had taught us there was a fair possibility we might not see each other for a while, if at all—a state of affairs for which I took full responsibility. Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback.

I hobbled across the pedestrian walkway and passed beneath the shadow of Swindon’s centrally located anti-smite tower, the primary defense against God’s planned cleansings of the sinful. I stopped to stare for a moment at the sixty-foot tower. It looked like an electricity pylon topped with a domed metallic mushroom. The burnished copper sheathing glowed in the sun, and even though the many towers dotted about the country were mechanically complete, there were still several hurdles to overcome. The software regulating the 8.2 million independently controlled lasers inside the dome had yet to be fine-tuned, and until it was, the defense shield remained nonoperational.

Perhaps the members of the city council wasn’t so bothered about Swindon’s smiting because they’d convinced themselves the tower would be running in good time to deflect the wrath of the Almighty four days from now. I didn’t think it would, and with good reason: I knew the genius behind the technology, and despite much midnight oil, the Anti-Smite Defense Shield remained firmly on the theoretical side of reality.

I hurried on, past the Thistle Hotel to my right, and presently found myself outside the front entrance of the Wessex Special Operations headquarters.

2.

Monday: Phoebe Smalls

The SpecOps division most associated with Thursday Next was SO-27, the Literary Detectives. It was their job to protect the citizenry against literary fraud, overenthusiastic interpretations of protected plays and the illegal trade in bogus Shakespeareana. Miss Next joined in the Swindon branch in 1985, not long before the adventure that came to be known as the Eyre Affair. She worked there on and off in various capacities until disbandment in 1991 and was always suspected of continuing her job under the radar in the years since.

Millon de Floss, The Thursday Next Chronicles

The offices had survived almost completely unchanged since most of the Special Operations Network was disbanded thirteen years before. The building was of a sensible design from the forties, and the worn wood and eroded stonework contained more memories than any other place in my life, with the possible exception of the Jurisfiction offices at Norland Park. I pushed open the heavy doors and walked into the lobby. High above me a glazed ceiling let in a directionless gray light and, by the look of it, some rainwater. The paint was peeling, and there was the ever-present smell of damp carpets and boiled cabbage—or, if you prefer, boiled carpets and damp cabbage.

The lobby had a few officers milling about, which reflected the fact that the Special Operations Network had not been completely disbanded. There were six SpecOps divisions remaining out of the thirty or so that once worked here. SO-6 and SO-9 had been merged and looked after national security and diplomatic protection. SO-1 policed the network itself, and SO-5 was a superjudiciary search-and-destroy unit—I’d worked for them myself when we’d hunted down Acheron Hades. The tax office was SO-28, and the Cheese Enforcement Agency was SO-31.

This left only SO-3, which we had called the “Odd Squad.” They looked after dimensional travel issues, which were so disagreeably complex and mind-bogglingly strange that we were all glad to have nothing to do with them. Suffice it to say there were a shade over six thousand entirely separate dimensions within the League of Alternative Realities—a tiny fraction of the total, but you didn’t get to join the league until you’d figured out how to move across, something that now seemed so blindingly obvious it’s astonishing we couldn’t see it before. Our own dimension was coded ID-11 and was the only league member with diphtheria, David Hasselhoff, and the French, which amused the rest of the multiverse no end. It wasn’t all bad news, as we were also the only one with bicycles, dogs and music, which put us in a robust trading position. SO-3 mostly dealt with trade issues like this; early trades were Brompton folding bicycles to HC-110 in return for escalators and Dalmatians to X-TOL for fax machines. A more recent deal was the complete works of Bartok in exchange for a chain of grocery stores peculiar to D-76, which featured cheaper groceries. The chain was called Aldi, which explained the low cost and why you can’t ever recognize the brands.

As I stood there for a moment, lost in thought, three operatives in civvies walked past. I could tell they were Odd Squad because they all wore their thumb on the wrong side of their left hand. No one knew quite why, but we suspected that it was similar to a hazing or a rite of passage, like my bout with Basher Dwight. The story goes that newbies at SO-3 are sent to mirror dimension E-6 to get partially reversed, but they had to be careful—stay a second too long and you’d have your ears on backward or genitals in the small of your back. Mind you, it was less permanent than a tattoo—stay for just the right length of time in E-6 and you’d go all the way round and revert to normal. None ever did. You carried two right hands for life as a badge of honor and solidarity.

By way of comparison, hazing in the now-defunct time-traveling elite known as the ChronoGuard was just as frightening but a lot more spectacular: a 65-million-year backjump to ground zero during the K-T extinction event. The losers jumped out as the meteor struck, but the bold and proud waited for the shock wave. If you returned with grit in your hair and the smell of terrified hadrosaur about you . . . well, you’d not be buying the first round for a while.

I made my way across the lobby to the main desk. A woman had her back to me as I approached, but she turned as soon as I limped up to the desk.

“Detective Next?” she said, giving me a broad smile and holding out her hand. “It’s a huge honor.”

She was taller than me by a few inches, slender and attractive. Her long dark hair was unflecked by gray and tied in a loose ponytail. She had fine features and smiled with easy confidence. She was also young—barely thirty—and I’d heard that she spoke three languages and had graduated with a double first in English literature from Oxford. I also knew that she’d been a cop since graduation, made detective in only three years and been awarded Swindon’s highest award for bravery, the Dorcan Star. It was well deserved: She took a bullet through the ear defending the mayor against Elgin separatists. This was Phoebe Smalls.