Chapter 3: The Journey To MidWeek

At twenty-three, Wednesday left for the upper city. Not for university, though she'd been accepted to three. And not for a job, though she'd been offered two. She left for the city the way people leave for cities when they are the kind of person who belongs in a city, pulled by something that cannot be named but can be pointed at, the way you can point at a horizon with being able to explain exactly what you expect to find there. The city was called MidWeek. This was, in fact, either the most obvious thing that could have happened to her, or the most suspicious, and Wednesday had spent enough time with the possibilities to have concluded that the distinction didn't matter. The city existed; it was where she needed to be. The fact that it was named for her, or she was named for it, or they had named each other across distance of years. This was the kind of ouroboros that was better not to unravel.

Midweek was not on most maps. This was not because it was hidden or secret or operated by some shadowy organization with a predilection for acronyms. It was simply that the city existed in a geographical location that maps found slightly embarrassing; a fold in the landscape, a crease in the world where two valleys met and something had decided to put a city rather than a river. If you looked at the map of the region, there was a gap. A space that wasn't blank so much as deliberately unaddressed, the way a sentence can have a word missing and still make sense if you already know what goes there. If you already knew about Midweek, you could find it. Wednesday had known about it for years. She'd found references to it in three separate obscure books, two of which had been discontinued by their publishers for reasons described as editorial but that Wednesday suspected were something else. She had found a hand-drawn map in the back of her mother's closet, tucked inside a shoebox full of letters, all addressed to a name she didn't recognize, all written in handwriting that was almost but not quite her mother's. She had held the map for a long time, feeling it hum against her fingers the way charged things do, and then she'd put it back and closed the shoebox and decided she would come back to that particular information when she was ready for what it meant. She had taken a photograph of it first, though. She wasn't ready, but she wasn't stupid.

She arrived in Midweek on a Wednesday… The first Wednesday of September, which had a particular quality of light that she would later come to understand was specific to the city, a light that seemed to know more than it should, that fell on things and illuminated not just their surfaces but something underneath, something the things themselves hadn't realized was visible. The city hit her like a key hitting a lock. That sound. That feeling. The specific click of a mechanism recognizing that the thing it was built to admit has finally arrived. She stood on the platform of the small, strange train station, which had no name on the signs, only a symbol that looked like two lines crossing, and she looked at the city and the city looked back at her, and neither of them blinked.

"First time?" said a voice beside her.

She turned. A man in a station uniform was looking at her with the expression of someone who already knew the answer to his own question.

"Is it obvious?" Wednesday asked.

"Only to people who've been here longer than a day." He nodded toward the city. "She always reacts like that to new ones. Like she's checking you against a list." He paused. "Usually people look a little scared. You just look…"

"Satisfied," Wednesday supplied in a firm tone.

The man considered this. "Yeah," he said, and it sounded like he meant something more complicated than agreement. "Yeah, that's the word." He picked up her bag before she could stop him and started walking. "Come on then. I know where you're going."

"Do you?" Wednesday picked up her other bag and followed, because he clearly did.

"Everyone who arrives on the first Wednesday in September is going to the same place," he said. "Have been for as long as I've been working on this platform. Have been, I'd bet, for longer than that."

"Where?"

He stopped in front of an iron gate that opened onto a street that went slightly uphill and curved out of sight in a way that felt like a question.

"The House Without a Thursday," he said. "It's where you live now."

Wednesday looked at the gate. The gate looked back. There was, she noticed, a shadow on the pavement just inside it, her exact shape, her exact proportions, though she was standing in full sunlight and the gate was in shade.

The shadow had been waiting for her.

"Right," said Wednesday. She picked up her bags. She walked through the gate.

Behind her, the man at the station smiled. It was the smile of someone who has held a door open for a very long time and is very glad to finally close it.

There were four mirrors in the House Without a Thursday, and Wednesday checked each of them on her first night. Old habit that she had spent years cataloguing the mirrors in every space she occupied, not out of vanity but out of the persistent awareness that her reflection was occasionally worth monitoring. As a child she had attributed this to general caution. As an adult she understood it was information-gathering. Mirrors in Midweek, she would learn, were not passive. But on that first night they were still cooperative, still reflective in the conventional sense, and all four of them showed her only herself, which was complicated enough. She unpacked with the methodical efficiency she applied to everything domestic not quickly, but without hesitation, each item going to the place that made most logical sense. Books on the shelves by subject, then author. Clothes in the wardrobe by use rather than color, because she had long since stopped organizing her life around aesthetics and had reorganized it around function. Her notebook… the current one, number seventeen in a series that went back to age ten on the desk. Her pencil case, which she had maintained since secondary school and which contained more pencils than anyone needed and exactly the pens she required. Her two photographs, framed, on the windowsill: one of her mother, Isolde, in the garden of the house she'd grown up in, caught in the act of turning toward the camera and not quite making it, her face three-quarters to the lens, her expression the one she wore when she wasn't performing it. And one of the women Wednesday had never met but whose face she recognized anyway; dark eyes, dark hair, the particular set of the jaw that Wednesday saw in the mirror. A woman who was not her mother. A woman whose photograph had been tucked behind the map in the shoebox, labeled in the same almost-but-not-quite handwriting: For W…, when she arrives. She put the photograph on the windowsill. She looked at it. The woman in the photograph looked back with the serene confidence of someone who had known she'd end up on this particular windowsill in this particular city and had dressed accordingly.

"I'm here," Wednesday said in the photograph. "For whatever that's worth."

The city of Midweek made a sound. Not a sound exactly, more like a frequency, a vibration at the edge of hearing, the kind that you feel in the sternum before you consciously register it in the ears. Wednesday had heard it when she stepped off the train and had attributed it to the train itself. Now, unpacked, settled, standing at the window of her room in the House Without a Thursday with the September city spread below her and the photograph of the woman she didn't know yet propped on the sill, she heard it again and understood it was not the train. The city hummed when she was in it. She would not know until later whether this was the city's nature or her effect on it, whether she vibrated at a frequency that the city matched or whether the city had been waiting to resonate with something and she was that something. She would spend a considerable amount of time in Midweek not knowing which way the causality ran. She would eventually conclude that in a city like Midweek, causality was less a direction than a texture — it ran through things rather than toward them, and the question of origin was less useful than the fact of the vibration itself. She went to bed. She lay in the dark of a new room in a city that hummed. On the wall beside her, her shadow, visible only as the particular absence of certain light, the shadow of someone who does not shadow, held its position. Waiting. She was home. She did not know yet what that would cost.

The House Without a Thursday was exactly what it sounded like, which is to say it was a house that had six days of the week and a gap where the seventh should have been. Not literally… it had all its rooms, all its floors, all its walls and windows and staircases. What it was missing was subtler than architecture. If you woke up on a Thursday morning in that house, you woke up with the persistent and irrefutable feeling that a day had gone missing. That the week had skipped. That you had been somewhere else and returned without the memory of having gone. Thursday residents of the house learned to keep journals and not of their Thursdays, but of their Wednesdays and Fridays, the days on either side, because those were the only days that could be verified. Thursday itself remained a rumor. Wednesday found this delightful.

The house had four other tenants when she arrived. She met them that evening, in the kitchen that smelled of woodsmoke and something sweet and slightly overripe, gathered around a table that was slightly too big for the room in the way that tables sometimes are when they have been in a space longer than the room has. There was a man named Ptolemy who was approximately seventy, spoke six languages badly and one with the kind of precision that suggested it was not one any language school offered. He wore a coat indoors. Not because he was cold, he explained, but because the coat had opinions about weather that he found it easier to defer to.

There was a woman named Sable who was somewhere between twenty-five and fifty and declined to be more specific. She worked nights, doing something she described as municipal acoustics, recording the sounds that cities make when they think no one is listening, and slept during the day with heavy curtains drawn and a series of locks on her door that she had installed herself. There was a boy, perhaps sixteen, who had no name that anyone had been told and who had been referred to for so long as the Tenant in Six that this had become effectively his name. He ate cereal at all hours. He had not said a word since Wednesday arrived, but had looked at her with an expression of recognition so acute that she had looked behind herself to check whether someone else had walked in.

And there was Erasmus. Erasmus was forty, or thereabouts, with the kind of face that had given up trying to be handsome and was doing something more interesting instead… weathered and precise, all angles and attention, the face of a man who spent a great deal of time looking at things carefully. He had ink on three of his fingers and a notebook in his breast pocket so worn that it had conformed to the shape of his chest, which Wednesday found, for a reason she was not prepared to examine, quietly devastating. He looked up when she came in, and she saw it, the Oh. But it was a different Oh than she was used to. Not the Oh of someone encountering something they weren't prepared for. It was the Oh of someone recognizing something they had been afraid didn't exist. She filed it. In a new cabinet. With a new label.

"Wednesday," Ptolemy announced, apparently having been briefed on her name by some mechanism Wednesday didn't yet understand. "Sit down. There are rules."

"I love rules," Wednesday said, and sat. "I love knowing exactly what I'm supposed to do so I can make an informed decision about whether to do it."

Ptolemy looked at her for a moment. Then, to her surprise, he laughed, a real laugh, not the polite exhalation she usually received. Sable smiled from behind her mug. The Tenant in Six paused his cereal consumption and looked at her with something approaching approval. Erasmus, across the table, said nothing, but he turned his pen over in his fingers three times, which she would later learn was the thing he did when something had surprised him pleasantly.

"The rules," Ptolemy said, composing himself, "are as follows. One: do not discuss Thursdays. Not because they are forbidden, but because discussing them tends to make them worse. Two: the kitchen is shared. The third shelf in the refrigerator is mine and is not to be touched under any circumstances, including emergencies. Three: there is a room on the fourth floor that is locked. It is always locked. It will always be locked. This is not a mystery to be solved. It is simply a fact to be accepted."

"What's in it?" Wednesday asked.

"A Thursday," Ptolemy said. "Obviously."

Wednesday looked at the ceiling, considering the floor above. The floor above the floor above. A locked room containing the missing day.

"Okay," she said.

"You're not going to try to open it?" Sable asked, and there was something in the question that suggested this was a test that previous tenants had failed.

"Eventually you realize that you're talking to a gargantuan persona that has attained the state of honorificabillitudinitatibus.”

And all eyes turned at her.

"Not tonight. Tonight I'm going to unpack,” Wednesday said pleasantly.

She went upstairs. She found her room, it had been prepared, though she had told no one she was coming, which she noted and filed. She stood at the window and looked out at the city of Midweek spreading below her, lit by the particular light of a September evening, all its crooked streets and misaligned rooftops and the way it breathed, and she was certain she could see it breathing, a slow expansion and contraction that might have been the wind in the trees but was not. And there, on the wall beside the window, cast by nothing she could identify, was a shadow. Her shadow. It raised one hand. She raised one hand back.

"I know," she said. "I'm here now."

The shadow settled, the way things settle when they have been waiting and are finally permitted to rest. Outside, the city of Midweek drew a long breath. In a room that had not yet been built, a man who would eventually love Wednesday looked up from his notebook of clouds and felt, for no reason he could name, that he had forgotten to write something down. He picked up his pen and waited. The thought did not return. Outside his window, a cloud the shape of a girl with no shadow drifted slowly across the moon, and Lionel Vale, age thirty-one, future archivist of the sky, did not look up.

Not yet.