“I think so,” replied Thursday, staring at the meter again. “No, wait—yes.”

  “A positive echo means the reader is ahead of us, a negative means…?”

  “Bother,” she muttered. “Paragraphs behind and coming this way—Ma’am, I think we’re about to be read.”

  “Is it a fast reader?”

  She consulted the meter once more. If the reader was fast—a fan on a reread or a bored student—then we’d be fine. A slow reader searching every word for hidden meaning and subtle nuance and we might have to jump out until whoever it was had passed.

  “Looks like a 41.3.”

  This was faster than the maximum throughput of the book, which was pegged at about sixteen words per second. It was a speed-reader, as likely as not reading every fifth word and skimming over the top of the prose like a stone skipping on water.

  “They’ll never see us. Press yourself against the wall until the reading moves through.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Thursday5, who had done her basic training with the old Jurisfiction adage “Better dead than read” ringing in her ears.

  “You should know what a reading looks like if you’re to be an asset to Jurisfiction. Besides,” I added, “overcaution is for losers.”

  I was being unnecessarily strict. We could quite easily have jumped out or even hopped back a few pages and followed the narrative behind the reading, but cadets need to sail close to the wind a few times. Both the crickets were in something of a tizzy at the prospect of their first-ever reading and tried to run in several directions at once before vanishing off to their places.

  “Stand still,” I said as we pressed ourselves against the least-well-described part of the wall and looked again at the NPD. The needle was rising rapidly and counting off the words to what we termed “Read Zero”—the actual time and place, the comprehension singularity, where the story was actually being read.

  There was a distant hum and a rumble as the reading approached. Then came a light buzz in the air like static and an increased heightening of the senses as the reader took up the descriptive power of the book and translated it into his or her own unique interpretation of the events—channeled from here through the massive imaginotransference Storycode Engines back at Text Grand Central and into the reader’s imagination. It was a technology of almost incalculable complexity, which I had yet to fully understand. But the beauty of the whole process was that the reader in the Outland never suspected there was any sort of process at all—the act of reading was to most people, myself included, as natural as breathing.

  Geppetto’s woodworking tools started to jiggle on the workbench, and a few of the wood shavings started to drift across the floor, gaining more detail as they moved. I frowned. Something wasn’t right. I had expected the room to gain a small amount of increased reality as the reader’s imagination bathed it in the power of his or her own past experiences and interpretations, but as the trembling and warmth increased, I noticed that this small section of Collodi’s eighteenth-century allegorical tale was being raised into an unprecedented level of descriptive power. The walls, which up until then had been a blank wash of color, suddenly gained texture, a myriad of subtle hues and even areas of damp. The window frames peeled and dusted up, the floor moved and undulated until it was covered in flagstones that even I, as an Outlander, would not be able to distinguish from real ones. As Pinocchio slept on, the reading suddenly swelled like a breaking ocean roller and crossed the room in front of us, a crest of heightened reality that moved through us and imparted a warm feeling of well-being. But more than that, a rare thing in fiction, a delicate potpourri of smells. Freshly cut wood, cooking, spice, damp—and Pinocchio’s scorched legs, which I recognized were carved from cherry. There was more, too—a strange jumble of faces, a young girl laughing and a derelict castle in the moonlight. The smells grew stronger, to the point where I could taste them in my mouth, the dust and grime in the room seemingly accentuated until there was a faint hiss and a ploof sound and the enhanced feelings dropped away in an instant. Everything once more returned to the limited reality we had experienced when we arrived—the bare description necessary for the room to be Geppetto’s workshop. I nudged Thursday5, who opened her eyes and looked around with relief.

  “What was that?” she asked, staring at me in alarm.

  “We were read,” I said, a little rattled myself. Whoever it was could not have failed to see us.

  “I’ve been read many times,” murmured Thursday5, “from perfunctory skim to critical analysis, and nothing ever felt like that.”

  She was right. I’d stood in for GSD knows how many characters over the years, but even I’d never felt such an in-depth reading.

  “Look,” she said, holding up the Narrative Proximity Device. The read-through rate had peaked at an unheard-of 68.5.

  “That’s not possible,” I muttered. “The imaginotransference bandwidth doesn’t support readings of that depth at such a speed.”

  The reading suddenly swelled like a breaking ocean roller

  and crossed the room in front of us.

  “Do you think they saw us?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I replied, my ears still singing and a strange woody taste still in my mouth. I consulted the NPD again. The reader was now well ahead of us and tearing through the prose toward the end of the book.

  “Goodness!” exclaimed the cricket, who looked a little flushed and spacey when he reappeared along with his stunt double a few minutes later. “That was every bit as exhilarating as I thought it would be—and I didn’t dry. I was excellent, wasn’t I?”

  “You were just wonderful, darling,” said his stunt double. “The whole of Allegorical Juvenilia will be talking about you—one for the envelope, I think.”

  “And you, sir,” returned the cricket, “that fall from the wall—simply divine.”

  But self-congratulatory crickets didn’t really concern me right now, and even the Goliath probe was momentarily forgotten.

  “A Superreader,” I breathed. “I’ve heard the legends but thought they were nothing more than that, tall tales from burned-out text jockeys who’d been mainlining on irregular verbs.”

  “Superreader?” echoed Thursday5 inquisitively, and even the crickets stopped congratulating each other on a perfect performance and leaned closer to listen.

  “It’s a reader with an unprecedented power of comprehension, someone who can pick up every subtle nuance, all the inferred narrative and deeply embedded subtext in one-tenth the time of normal readers.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Not really. A dozen or so Superreads could strip all the meaning out of a book, leaving the volume a tattered husk with little characterization and only the thinnest of plots.”

  “So…most Daphne Farquitt novels have been subjected to a Superreader?”

  “No, they’re just bad.”

  I thought for a moment, made a few notes in the pad I kept in my pocket and then picked up the Outlander probe. I tried to call Bradshaw to tell him but got only his answering machine. I placed the probe in my bag, recalled that I was also here to tell Thursday5 something about the imaginotransference technology and turned to the crickets.

  “Where’s the core-containment chamber?”

  “Cri-cri-cri,” muttered the cricket, thinking hard. “I think it’s one of the doors off the kitchen.”

  “Right.”

  I bade farewell to the crickets, who had begun to bicker when the one with the pillbox hat suggested it was high time he did his own stunts.

  “I say, do you mind?” inquired Pinocchio indolently, neither opening his eyes nor removing his feet from the brazier. “Some of us are trying to get some shut-eye.”

  8.

  Julian Sparkle

  Standard-issue equipment to all Jurisfiction agents, the dimensionally ambivalent TravelBook contains information, tips, maps, recipes and extracts from popular or troublesome novels to enable speedier intrafiction travel. It also contains numerous JurisTech gadgets for more specialized tasks, such as an MV Mask, TextMarker and Eject-O-Hat. The TravelBook’s cover is read-locked to each individual operative and contains a standard emergency alert and autodestruct mechanism.

  We entered the kitchen of Geppetto’s small house. It had a sort of worthy austerity about it but was clean and functional. A cat was asleep next to a log basket, and a kettle sang merrily to itself on the range. But we weren’t the only people in the kitchen. There were two other doors leading off, and in front of each was a bored-looking individual sitting on a three-legged stool. In the center of the room was what appeared to be a quiz-show host dressed in a gold lamé suit. He had a fake tan that was almost orange, was weighed down with heavy gold jewelry, and had a perfectly sculpted hairstyle that looked as though it had been imported from the fifties.

  “Ah!” he said as soon as he saw us. “Contestants!”

  He picked up his microphone.

  “Welcome,” he said with faux bonhomie, showing acres of perfect white teeth, “to Puzzlemania, the popular brain game. I’m your host, Julian Sparkle.”

  He smiled at us and an imaginary audience and beckoned Thursday5 closer, but I indicated for her to stay where she was.

  “I can do this!” she exclaimed.

  “No,” I whispered. “Sparkle might seem like an innocuous game-show host, but he’s a potential killer.”

  “I thought you said overcaution was for losers?” she returned, attempting to make up for the bacon-roll debacle. “Besides, I can look after myself.”

  “Then be my guest,” I said with a smile. “Or, rather, you can be his guest.”

  My namesake turned to Sparkle and walked up to a mark on the floor that he had indicated. As she did so, the lights in the room dimmed, apart from a spotlight on the two of them. There was a short blast of applause, seemingly from nowhere.

  “So, Contestant Number One, what’s your name, why are you in Geppetto’s kitchen, and where do you come from?”

  “My name’s Thursday Next–5, I want to visit the core-containment chamber as part of a training mission, and I’m from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco.”

  “Well, then, if you can contain your excitement, you could have a prize visited upon you—fail and it might well be a fiasco.”

  Thursday5 blinked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Contain your excitement…prize visited…not a fiasco?” repeated Sparkle, trying to get her to understand his appalling attempts at humor.

  She continued to stare at him blankly.

  “Never mind. All righty, then. Ms. Next who wants to visit core containment, today we’re going to play…Liars and Tigers.”

  He indicated the two doors leading off the kitchen, each with a bored-looking individual staring vacantly into space in front of it.

  “The rules are very simple: You have two identical doors. Behind one is the core-containment chamber you seek, and behind the other…is a tiger.”

  The confident expression dropped from Thursday5’s face, and I hid a smile.

  “A what?” she asked.

  “A tiger.”

  “A real one or a written one?”

  “It’s the same thing. Guarding each door is an individual, one who always tells the truth and another who always lies. You can’t know which is which, nor which door is guarded by whom—and you have one question, to one guard, to discover the correct door. Ms. Next, are you ready to play Liars and Tigers?”

  “A tiger? A real tiger?”

  “All eight feet of it.” Julian smiled, enjoying himself again. “Teeth one end, tail the other, claws at all four corners. Are you ready?”

  “If it’s just the same to you,” she said politely, “I’ll be getting on my way.”

  In a flash, Sparkle had pulled out a shiny automatic and pressed it hard into her cheek.

  “You’re going to play the game, Next,” he growled. “Get it right and you win today’s super-duper prize. Get it wrong and you’re tiger poo. Refuse and I play the Spread the Dopey Cow All Over the Kitchen game.”

  “Can’t we form a circle of trust, have a cup of herbal tea and then discuss our issues?”

  “That,” said Sparkle softly, a maniacal glint in his eyes, “was the incorrect answer.”

  His finger tightened on the trigger, and the two guards both covered their heads. This had gone far enough.

  “Wait!” I shouted.

  Sparkle stopped and looked at me. “What?”

  “I’ll take her place.”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  “Not if we play the Double-Death Tiger-Snack game.”

  Sparkle looked at Thursday5, then at me. “I’m not fully conversant with that one,” he said slowly, eyes narrowed.

  “It’s easy,” I replied. “I take her place, and if I lose, then you get to feed us both to the tiger. If I win, we both go free.”

  “Okay,” said Sparkle, and he released Thursday5, who ran and hid behind me.

  “Shoot him,” she said in hoarse whisper.

  “What about the herbal tea?”

  “Shoot him.”

  “That’s not how we do things,” I said in a quiet voice. “Now, just watch and listen and learn.”

  The two guards donned steel helmets, and Sparkle himself retreated to the other side of the room, where he could escape if the tiger was released. I walked up to the two individuals, who looked at me with a quizzical air and started to rub some tiger repellent on themselves from a large tube. The doors were identical, and so were the guards. I scratched my head and thought hard, considering my question. Two doors, two guards. One guard always told the truth, one always lied—and one question to one guard to find the correct door. I’d heard of this puzzle as a kid but never thought my life might depend upon it. But hey, this was fiction. Strange, unpredictable—and fun.

  9.

  Core Containment

  For thousands of years, OralTrad was the only Story Operating System and indeed is still in use today. The recordable Story Operating Systems began with ClayTablet V2.1 and went through several competing systems (WaxTablet, Papyrus, VellumPro) before merging into the award-winning SCROLL, which was upgraded eight times before being swept aside by the all new and clearly superior BOOK V1. Stable, easy to store and transport, compact and with a workable index, BOOK has led the way for nearly eighteen hundred years.

  I turned to the guard on the left.

  “If I asked the other guard,” I said with some trepidation, “which was the door to the core-containment chamber, which one would he say?”

  The guard thought for a moment and pointed to one of the doors, and I turned back to look at Sparkle and the somewhat concerned face of Thursday5, who was rapidly coming to terms with the idea that there was a lot of weird shit in the BookWorld that she’d no idea how to handle—such as potential tiger attacks inside Pinocchio.

  “Have you chosen your door, Ms. Next?” asked Julian Sparkle. “Remember, if you win, you get through to core containment—and if you lose, there is a high probability of being eaten. Choose your door…wisely.”

  I gave a smile and grasped the handle—not on the door that had been indicated by the guard but the other one. I pulled it open to reveal…a flight of steps leading downward.

  Sparkle’s eyebrow twitched, and he grimaced momentarily before breaking once more into an insincere grin. The two guards breathed a sigh of relief and removed their helmets to mop their brows—it was clear that dealing with tigers wasn’t something they much liked to do—and the tiger, itself a bit miffed, growled from behind the other door.

  “Congratulations,” muttered Sparkle. “You have chosen…correctly.”

  I nodded to Thursday5, who joined me at the doorway, leaving Sparkle and the two guards arguing over what my super-duper prize should be.

  “How did you know which guard was which?” she asked in a respectful tone.

  “I didn’t,” I replied, “and still don’t. But I assumed that the guards would know who told the truth and who didn’t. Since my question would always show me the wrong door irrespective of whom I asked, I just took the opposite of the one indicated.”

  “Oh!” she said, trying to figure it out. “What were they doing there anyway?”

  “Sparkle and the others are what we call ‘anecdotals.’ Brain teasers, puzzles, jokes, anecdotes and urban legends that are in the oral tradition but not big enough to exist on their own. Since they need to be instantly retrieved, they have to be flexible and available at a moment’s notice—so we billet them unseen around the various works of fiction.”

  “I get it,” replied Thursday. “We had the joke about the centipede playing rugby with us at Fiasco for a while. Out of sight of the readers, of course. Total pest—we kept on tripping over his boots.”

  We stopped at the foot of the stairs. The room was about the size of a double garage and seemed to be constructed of riveted brass that was green with oxidization. The walls were gently curved, giving the impression that we were inside a huge barrel, and there was a hollow, cathedral-like quality to our voices. In the center of the room was a circular, waist-high bronze plinth about the size and shape of a ship’s capstan, upon which two electrodes sprouted upward and then bent gently outward until they were about six inches apart. At the end of each electrode was a carbon sphere no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, and between the two of them a languid blue arc of electricity crackled quietly to itself.

  “What’s that?” asked Thursday5 in a deferential whisper.

  “It’s the spark, the notion, the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.”

  We watched for a few moments as the arc of energy moved in a lazy wave between the poles. Every now and then, it would fizzle as though somehow disturbed by something.

  “It moves as the crickets talk to each other upstairs,” I explained. “If the book were being read, you’d really see the spark flicker and dance. I’ve been in the core of Anna Karenina when it was going full bore with fifty thousand simultaneous readings, and the effect was better than any fireworks display—a multi-stranded spark in a thousand different hues that snaked and arced out into the room and twisted around one another. A book’s reason for being is to be read; the spark reflects this in a shimmering light show of dynamic proportions.”