“I actually swore,” she muttered unhappily, holding one of the automatics with a disdainful finger and thumb. “And these clothes! Made from animal skins…”

My mouth may have dropped open at this. “Thursday5?” I mumbled. “That’s you?”

She nodded shyly and shrugged. Underneath the leathers, I noticed, was her usual attire of naturally dyed cotton, crocheted sweater and Birkenstocks. She had taken her failure over the Minotaur to heart and made good. Perhaps I’d been too hasty over her assessment.

“We knew you were in the BookWorld, but then you disappeared off the radar,” said Bradshaw. “Where have you been the past ten hours?”

“I was trapped in a moral dilemma. Any news from the Outland? I mean, are people buying into this whole reality book thing?”

“And how!” exclaimed Bradshaw. “The news from the CofG is that a half million people are waiting to see how The Bennets will turn out, as the idea of being able to change a major classic has huge appeal—it’s the latest fad in the Outland, and you know how the Outlanders like fads.”

“Sometimes I think they like little else.”

Bradshaw looked at his watch. “There’s only six minutes before Pride and Prejudice as we know it is going to be rewritten and lost forever, and we don’t have a seriously good plan of action. In fact,” he added, “we don’t have any plan of action.”

Everyone stared at me. Twenty seconds ago I thought I was almost certainly dead; now I was expected at short notice to fashion a plan of infinite subtlety to save one of our greatest novels from being reduced to a mind-numbing morass of transient popular entertainment.

“Right,” I said as I attempted to gather my thoughts. “Lizzie?”

“Here, ma’am,” said the second-eldest Bennet sister, bobbing respectfully.

“Fill me in. How does this reality-book thing work? Have you been given any instructions?”

“We’ve not been told much, ma’am. We are expected to collect ourselves in the house, but instead of looking for husbands and happiness, we are to undertake a preset task of an altogether curious nature. And as we do so,” she added sorrowfully, “our new actions and words are indelibly burned into the new edition of our book.”

I looked around the room. They were still all staring at me expectantly.

“Let me see the task.”

She handed me a sheet of paper. It was on Interactive Book Council letterhead and read:

TASK ONE

Chapters 1 to 3 (one hour’s reading time) All House mates Must Participate