First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“But this will erase you, too!” I shouted.

“Maybe not—it depends on you.”

She beckoned me back into the house as the garden gate turned to smoke and was carried away into the dust cloud. As soon as we were in the kitchen, she turned to me.

“You won’t need that,” she said, pointing at my gun. I fumbled the reholstering clumsily, and it fell to the floor with a clatter. I didn’t stoop to pick it up. I looked out the window into the back garden. The shed and the apple tree had both gone, and the erasure was slowly eating its way across the lawn. The ceiling was starting to look blotchy, and as I watched, the front door turned to dust and was blown away in the wind.

“Ballocks!” I said, as realization suddenly dawned. Not that I was going to be erased, no. It was the cold and sobering revelation that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was. I’d met a foe immeasurably superior to me, and I would suffer the consequences of my own arrogance. The question was, would I give her the pleasure of knowing it? But on reflection she didn’t want or need that sort of pleasure, and everything suddenly seemed that much more peaceful.

I said instead, “I’m truly flattered.”

“Flattered?” she inquired. “About what?”

The ceiling departed in a cloud of swirling dust, and the walls started to erode downward with the pictures, mantel and furniture rapidly crumbling away to a fine debris that was sucked up into the whirlwind directly above us.

“I’m flattered,” I repeated, “because you’d erase a whole book and give your own life just to be rid of me. I must have been a worthy adversary, right?”

She sensed my change of heart and gave me a faint smile.

“You almost defeated me,” said Thursday, “and you still might. But if I do survive this,” she added, “it is my gift to you.”

The walls had almost gone, and the seagrass flooring was crumbling under my feet. Thursday opened a door in the kitchen, beyond which a concrete flight of steps led downward. She beckoned me to follow, and we trotted down into a spacious subterranean vault shaped like the inside of a barrel. Upon a large plinth, there were two prongs across which a weak spark occasionally fired. The noise of the wind had subdued, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the erasure reached us.

“This is the core-containment room,” explained Thursday. “You’d know about that if you’d listened in class.”

“How,” I asked, “is your survival a gift to me?”

“That’s easily explained,” replied Thursday, removing some pieces of packing case from the wall to reveal a riveted iron hatch. “Behind there is the only method of escape—across the emptiness of the Nothing.”

The inference wasn’t lost on me. The Nothing didn’t support textual life—I’d be stripped away to letters in an instant if I tried to escape across it. But Thursday wasn’t text: She was flesh and blood and could survive.

“I can’t get out of here on my own,” she added, “so I need your help.”

I didn’t understand to begin with. I frowned, and then it hit me. She wasn’t offering me forgiveness, a second chance or rescue—I was far too bitter and twisted for that. No, she was offering me the one thing that I would never, could never have. She was offering me redemption. After all I’d done to her, all the things I’d planned to do, she was willing to risk her life to give me one small chance to atone. And what’s more, she knew I would take it. She was right. We were more alike than I thought.

The roof fell away in patches as the erasure started to pull the containment room apart.

“What do I do?”

She indicated the twin latching mechanisms that were positioned eight feet apart. I held the handle and pulled it down on the count of three. The hatch sprung open, revealing an empty, black void.

“Thank you,” she said as the erasure crept inexorably across the room. The sum total of the book was now a disk less than eight feet across, and we were in the middle of what looked like a swirling cloud of dirt and detritus, while all about us the wind nibbled away at the remaining fabric of the book, reducing it to undescriptive textdust.

“What will it be like?” I asked as Thursday peered out into the inky blackness.

“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “No one knows what happens after erasure.”

I offered her my hand to shake. “If you ever turn this into one of your adventures,” I asked, “will you make me at least vaguely sympathetic? I’d like to think there was a small amount of your humanity in me.”

She took my hand and shook it. It was warmer than I’d imagined.

“I’m sorry about sleeping with your husband,” I added as I felt the floor grow soft beneath my feet. “And I think this is yours.”

And I gave her the locket that had come off when we fought.

As soon as Thursday1–4 returned my locket, I knew that she had finally learned something about me and, by reflection, her. She was lost and she knew it, so helping me open the hatch and handing over the locket could only be altruism—the first time she had acted thus and the last time she acted at all. I climbed partially out of the hatch into the Nothing. There was barely anything left of the book at all, just the vaguest crackle of its spark growing weaker and weaker. I was still holding Thursday1–4’s hand as I saw her body start to break up, like sandstone eroded by wind. Her hair was being whipped by the currents of air, but she looked peaceful.

She smiled and said, “I just got it.”