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There was a burst of gunfire from next door, some shouting and then more shots. I positioned myself behind the door as Felix8 came running through the way he usually did, escaping from Bowden and myself once Acheron leaped into the pages of Jane Eyre. As soon as he was inside, he relaxed, since he was officially “out of the story.” I saw him grin to himself and click on the safety of his machine pistol.
“Hello, Felix8.”
He turned and stared at me. “Well, well,” he said after a pause. “Will the real Thursday Next please stand up?”
“Just drop the gun.”
“I’m not really violent,” he said. “It’s just the part I play. The real Felix8—now, that’s someone you should keep an eye on.”
“Drop the gun, Felix. I won’t ask you again.”
His eyes darted around the room, and I saw his hand tighten on the grip of his gun.
“Don’t even think about it,” I told him, pointing my pistol in his general direction. “This is loaded with eraserhead. Put the gun on the floor—but really slowly.”
Felix8, fully aware of the destructive power of an eraserhead, gently laid his weapon on the ground, and I told him to kick it to one side.
“How did you get into the real world?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were in the real Swindon five weeks ago. Do you know the penalty for pagerunning?”
He said nothing.
“I’ll remind you. It’s erasure. And if you read the papers, you know that I’ll erase a whole book if required.”
“I’ve never been out of The Eyre Affair,” he replied. “I’m just a C-3 generic trying to do my best in a lousy book.”
“You’re lying.”
“That it’s a lousy book?”
“You know what I mean. Keep your hands in the air.”
I walked behind him and, jamming my pistol firmly against his back, searched his pockets. Given the obsession that members of the BookWorld held for the Outland, I reckoned it was impossible that he’d been all the way to Swindon and not returned with a few Outlandish mementos to sell or barter. And so it proved. In one pocket I found a joke rubber chicken and a digital watch, in the other a packet of Cup-a-Soup and a Mars bar. I chucked them on the floor in front of him.
“Where did you get these, then?”
He was silent, and I backed off a few yards before telling him to turn slowly around and face me.
“Now,” I said, “let’s have some answers: You’re too mediocre to have hatched this yourself, so you’re working for someone. Who is it?”
Felix8 gave no answer, and the airship banked slightly as it made a trifling correction to its course. The aluminum-framed door to the exterior promenade walkway swung open and then clattered shut again. It was dusk, and two miles below, the small orange jewels that were the streetlights had begun to wink on.
“Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal: You tell me what you know and I’ll let you go. Play the hard man and it’s a one-way trip to the Text Sea. Understand?”
“I’ve only eighteen words and one scene,” he said at last. “One lousy scene! Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“It’s the hand you were dealt,” I told him, “the job you do. You can’t change that. Again: Who sent you into the Outland to kill me?”
He stared at me without emotion. “And I would have done it, too, if it wasn’t for that idiot stalker. Mind you, Johnson blew it as well, so I’m in good company.”
This was more worrying. “Mr. Johnson” was the pseudonym used by the Minotaur—and he’d referred to my murder as “a job,” so this looked to be better organized than I’d thought.
“Who ordered my death? And why me?”
Felix8 smiled. “You do flatter yourself, Ms. Next. You’re not the only one they want, you’re not the only one they’ll get. And now I shall take my leave of you.”
