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By Root 2366 0

vacated picnic blanket with a teeth-jarring thump that shook the ground and knocked us to our knees. We were showered with soil, pebbles, and a grassy sod or two as the vast phaeton-bodied automobile sank itself into the soft earth, the fine bespoke body bursting at the seams as the massive chassis twisted with the impact. One of the spoked wheels broke free and whistled past my head as the heavy engine, torn from its rubber mounting blocks, ripped through the polished bonnet and landed at our feet with a heavy thud. There was silence for a moment as we all stood up, brushed ourselves off and checked for any damage. Landen had cut his hand on a piece of twisted wing mirror, but apart from that— miraculously, it seemed—no one had been hurt. The huge motorcar had landed so perfectly on the picnic that the blanket, thermos, basket, food—everything, in fact—had disappeared from sight. In the deathly hush that followed, everyone in the small group was staring—not at the twisted wreck of the car, but at me, their mouths open. I stared back, then looked slowly upwards to where a large airship freighter was still flying, minus a couple of tons of freight, on to the north and—one presumes—a lengthy stop for an accident inquiry. I shook the entroposcope and the random clumping pattern returned.

“Danger’s passed,” I announced.

“You haven’t changed, Thursday Next!” said Sue angrily. “Whenever you’re about, something dangerously other walks with you. There’s a reason I didn’t keep in contact after school, you know—weirdbird! Tony, we’re leaving.”

Landen and I stood and watched them go. He put his arm round me.

“Weirdbird?” he asked.

“They used to call me that at school,” I told him. “It’s the price for being different.”

“You got a bargain. I would have paid double that to be different. Come on, let’s skedaddle.”

We slipped quietly away as a crowd gathered around the twisted automobile, the incident generating all manner of “ instant experts” who all had theories on why an airship should jettison a car. So to a background chorus of “needed more lift” and “golly, that was close” we crept away and sat in my car.

“That’s not something you see very often,” murmured Landen after a pause. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Land. There are a few too many coincidences around at present—I think someone’s trying to kill me.”

“I love it when you’re being weird, darling, but don’t you think you are taking this a little too far? Even if you could drop a car from a freighter, no one could hope to hit a picnic blanket from five thousand feet. Think about it, Thurs—it makes no sense at all. Who would do something like this anyway?”

“Hades,” I whispered.

“Hades is dead, Thursday. You killed him yourself. It was a coincidence, pure and simple. They mean nothing—you might as well rail against your dreams or bark at shadows on the wall.”

We drove in silence to the SpecOps building and my disciplinary hearing. I switched off the engine and Landen held my hand tightly.

“You’ll be fine,” he assured me. “They’d be nuts to take any action against you. If things get bad, just remember what Flanker rhymes with.”

I smiled at the thought. He said he’d wait for me in the café across the road, kissed me again and limped off.

8.

Mr. Stiggins and SO-1

Contrary to popular belief, neanderthals are not stupid. Poor reading and writing skills are due to fundamental differences in visual acuity—in humans it is called dyslexia. Facial acuity in neanderthals, however, is highly developed—the same silence might have thirty or more different meanings depending on how you looked. “Neanderthal English” has a richness and meaning that is lost on the relatively facially blind human. Because of this highly developed facial grammar, neanderthals instinctively know when someone is lying—hence their total disinterest in plays, films or politicians. They like stories read out loud and speak of the weather a great deal—another area in which they are expert. They never throw anything away and love tools, especially power tools. Of the three cable channels allocated