“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure—do you think I don’t know my own book? I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got to run through some lines with the replacement Hades.”
“Wait,” I said, and grabbed her arm. I pulled her around to face…someone else entirely. It wasn’t Thursday1–4. It was a woman with the same coloring and build, clothes and general appearance, but it wasn’t her.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
She sighed heavily and shrugged. “I’m…I’m…a character understudy.”
“I can see that. Do you have a name?”
“Alice-PON-24330,” she replied resignedly.
“This series isn’t up for maintenance for years. What are you doing here?”
She bit her lip, looked away and shifted her weight uneasily. “If she finds I’ve talked…well, she has a temper.”
“And I don’t?”
She said nothing. I turned to Crowden Babel. “Where is she?”
He rubbed his face but said nothing. It seemed I was the only person not frightened by Thursday1–4.
“Listen,” I said to Babel, pointing at Alice-PON-24330, “she’s just an understudy and is like a phone number—replaceable. You’re in every book and have a lot more to lose. Now, either you talk to me right this minute and it goes no further or we turn you over to Jurisfiction and thirty tons of prime-quality shit is going to descend on you from a very great height.”
Babel scratched the back of his head. “She does this every now and then. She thinks the series is too small for her.”
Babel and the ersatz Thursday glanced nervously at each other. There was something else going on. This wasn’t just a simple substitution so Thursday1–4 could have a break.
“Somebody better start talking, or you’ll discover where she gets her temper from. Now, where has she gone?”
Babel looked nervously around. “She came back furious. Said you’d fired her on false pretenses and she wanted to get some…serious payback.”
“What sort of payback?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’re lying to me!”
“I swear on the life of the Great Panjan—”
“I know where she is,” said the ersatz Thursday in a quiet voice. “What the hell. When she discovers I’ve talked to you, I’ll be dead anyway. She’s out…in the real world!”
This was serious. Substitution and illegal pagerunning were one thing, but crossing over to the real world was quite another. I could legally erase her on sight, and the way I felt right now, I—
My thoughts were interrupted because both Crowden and the understudy had looked anxiously toward the burned-out shell of the house. I suddenly had a very nasty thought, and my insides changed to lead. I could barely say the word, but I did:
“Landen?”
“Yes,” said the understudy in a soft voice. “She wanted to know what it was…to love.”
I felt anger well up inside me. I pulled out my TravelBook and read as I walked toward the house. As I did so, the evening light brightened, the emergency vehicles faded back into fiction, and the house, which burned to a husk in The Eyre Affair, was suddenly perfe
ct again as I moved back into the real world. My mouth felt dry after the jump, and I could feel a headache coming on. I broke into a panicky sweat and dumped my jacket and bag in the front garden but kept my pistol and slipped a spare eraserhead into my back pocket. I very quietly stepped up to the front door and silently slipped the key into the lock.
The house was silent aside from the thumping of my heart, which in my heightened state of anxiety was almost deafening. I had planned to lie in wait for her, but a glance down at the hall table made me reappraise the situation. My house keys and distinctive grammasite key ring were already lying where I left them—but I still had mine in my hand. I felt powerfully thirsty, too, and was badly dehydrated—the most annoying side effect of my return to the Outland. I looked through to the kitchen and could see a pitcher of half-finished juice on the kitchen drainer. If I didn’t drink something soon, I’d pass out. On the other hand, Thursday1–4 was somewhere in the house, waiting for Landen or rummaging in our sock drawer or something. I silently crept along the downstairs hallway, checked the front room, then went through to the dining room beyond and from there to the kitchen. The only thing I noticed out of place was a book of family holiday snapshots open on the coffee table. I moved into the kitchen and was about to take a swig of juice straight from the pitcher when I heard a noise that turned my blood to ice. I dropped the pitcher, which shattered on the kitchen floor with a concussion that echoed around the house.
Pickwick woke up in her basket and started plocking at everything in sight until she saw who it was and went back to sleep. I heard voices upstairs and the sound of footsteps padding across the bedroom floor. I held my pistol at arm’s length and walked slowly down the hall to the stairs. The sound that had made me drop the pitcher was Landen, but it was the sort of sound that only I ever heard him make—something that was for me and me alone.