I decided that the best course of action was simply to wing it and was just wondering how I should approach even this strategy when the elevator doors opened and I was confronted by myself, staring back at me from the corridor. The same jacket, the same hair, trousers, boots—everything except a black glove on her left hand, which covered the eraserhead wound, I imagined. Bradshaw was right—Thursday1–4 had divested herself of her own identity and taken mine—along with my standing, integrity and reputation—an awesome weapon for her to wield. Not only as the CofG’s LBOCS and as a trusted member of Jurisfiction, but everything. Jobsworth, in all his dreary ignorance, probably thought that this was me, having undergone a bizarre and—to him—entirely fortuitous change of mind about policy directives.

We stared at each other for a moment, she with a sort of numbed look of disbelief, and I—I hoped—with the expression that a wife rightly reserves for someone who has slept with her husband.

“Meddling fool!” she said at last, waving a copy of Pride and Prejudice that she’d been reading. “I can only think this is your doing. You may have won the first round, but it’s merely a postponement—we’ll have the reality book show back on track after the first three chapters have run their course!”

“I’m going to erase you,” I said in a quiet voice, “and, what’s more, enjoy it.”

She stared at me with a vague look of triumph. “Then I was wrong,” she replied. “We are alike.”

I didn’t have time to answer. She took to her heels and ran off down the corridor toward the debating chamber. I followed; if we were externally identical, then the first to plead her case to the CofG had a clear advantage.

Thinking about it later, the pair of us running hell for leather down the corridors must have been quite a sight, but probably not that unusual, given the somewhat curious nature of fiction. Annoyingly, we were evenly matched in speed and stamina, and her ten-foot head start was still there when we arrived at the main debating chamber’s door two minutes and many startled CofG employees later. She had to slow down at the door, and as she did so, I made a flying tackle and grabbed her around the waist. Toppled by the momentum, the pair of us went sprawling headlong on the carpet, much to the astonishment of three heavily armed Danverclones who were just inside the door.