Struggling to Remember
123
You’ll remember this meeting last. So here’s my offer. Take
your pistol and turn it upon yourself—and I’ll spare the planet
. . . I know you’ll do it. Despite the baby. Despite everything.
You’re a good person, Next. A fine human being. It will be
your downfall. I’m counting on it. (381)
Thursday of course is prepared to make the sacrifice, saved only by her renegade
ChronoGuard father’s timely entrance and usurpation of the grand gesture.
Realizing that Aomis is a formidable opponent and that she vAll need
time to have her baby and recuperate without being pursued by her foe,
Thursday’s dad offers her a solution: slip into a sideways world, one in which
Landen doesn’t drown at age two and her brother doesn’t die in the Crimea. The
price, however, is too high. Her father tells her that if she wants to go sideways
to see Landen, she’ll have to have a new past and a new present. To be able to
see him, she cannot have any recollection of him—^nor him of her. Thursday
instead chooses to find another alternative, one which allows her to keep her
memories of Landen and their love alive. She gets lost in a good book. Yet even
hiding out in an unpublished novel does not keep Thursday safe from Aomis,
who still exists in her memory. In The Well o f Lost Plots, the final battle for
Thursday’s life and her loved ones takes place in her own mind. With Granny
Next’s help, Thursday is able to confront her worst fears and overcome them,
defeating Aomis and moving on with her life.
In the beginning of the third book, Thursday is still keeping Landen
alive in her memory:
[At] night, I went to the Crimea again. Not, you might think,
the most obvious port of call in my sleep. The peninsula had
been a constant source of anguish in my waking hours: a time
of stress, of pain, and violent death. But the Crimea was where
I’d met Landen, and ^\ilere we’d fallen in love. The memories
were more dear to me now because they had never happened,
and for this reason the Crimea’s sometimes painful
recollections came back to me. {WLP 35)
During this memory/dream, Thursday remembers the events before they unfold.
Thursday relives the battle that haunts her and becomes confused as events play
out differently than she expects them to. As she is driving a carrier through
heavy fire, a soldier shouts at her to keep driving as he reloads his clip and
returns fire:
“That wasn’t how it happened—!” I muttered aloud, the
soldier having gone way over his allotted time and word count