Morning in the Village. Wash face, check scars, shower and shave and sanity check. Village Foods Low-Fat Spread. Pace. Caged tiger with muffin. Circle territory. Turn the model cannon on the bookshelf so it's pointing the correct way round. Flick through papers on desk.

Stop. Stare at desk calendar: Thursday the 9th. Turn to leftover copy of the Tally Ho on the side of the desk.

Pace harder.

He ting-a-lings his way through the shop door. The shopkeeper, soft and pudgy, looks up from polishing a display case.

'Morning, sir. Lovely day.'

'Did you say that yesterday?' asks Number 6.

A frown flits past the shopkeeper's sun. 'Don't see why not. It was a lovely day...'

'Yesterday? Thursday? The 8th?'

The questions are coming in from such an odd angle, the shopkeeper can't figure out how to react. 'Well, yes, it was, wasn't it?'

'I'd like today's Tally Ho, please...'

An abrupt shift back onto familiar rails. 'Certainly, that'll be two units...'

He gathers the early edition, its single sheet neatly folded on the rack, and lays it on the counter. A burst of drumming fingers draws the shopkeeper's attention to the masthead: Number 6's index finger pointing to the date.

'Thursday,' he says. 'The 9th.'

Something in Number 6's eyes makes the shopkeeper desperate for something to busy himself with.

'Oh, sorry, I'm always getting that wrong. It was Wednesday yesterday, of course it was. I'd forget my own head if...'

'If they took it from you?'

When the shopkeeper turns back, there's a second paper on the counter, slightly faded. Number 6's fingers settle beside the date: Thursday the 8th.

A pause. The shopkeeper finds himself laughing. 'Well. It makes you wonder what else they get wrong...'

Number 6 slides the paper aside, revealing a postcard inviting whom it may concern to attend the opening of a neo-retro-classical display at the Exhibition Hall. Postmarked Thursday the 8th.

The shopkeeper's laugh trickles onwards. 'Oh, very good trick, that...'

'Not mine,' says Number 6.

A pause, as the shopkeeper looks at the papers from a long way away.

'Well, I don't see as it's any of my concern,' he says, heading for the small fruit-display and looking for something to polish. 'And it certainly doesn't hurt for them to give us another Thursday. Could always use the extra time to catch up. It's not like they were giving us Tuesday again, now that was a shocking day. Wouldn't have it again if you paid me...'

He looks up again at the sound of the bell on the door, and sees that he's alone.

'What are you making such a fuss about?' asks 184-the-postman -- a grey-topped ex-cipher-clerk who Number 6 always suspected of steaming open his letters. Not on orders from the Village, but simply out of his own nosiness. Now 184 is finding himself thinking about it, and the more he does the firmer and more thought-resistant his words become. 'They do all this to take care of us, keep us protected and all, if they want to give themselves an extra Thursday I say good on 'em.'

'You some kind of a troublemaker?' demands the burly fireplug of a man with his pint of lemonade. 'You got something against Thursdays, then? What's your game? You come on over all high and mighty, looking for something to pick at --well what you doing that for? What's in it for you, eh? You tell me that.'

Number 6 can't help but admire his resourcefulness in avoiding the issue. After all, it's easier to question his angle than their own.

'Oh, it's just typical isn't it?' clucks the grey-haired matron on the park-bench, as her two friends make vague sympathetic noises. 'They can't even keep the days in the right order, can they? They're really falling to pieces these days. Not at all like it used to be...'

On and on they go, passing shared opinions around like biscuits from a tin. Their voices all reveal the remains of accents, different shades of Eastern Europe, but they've been smoothed away since they came here over an uncountable number of days. The blame is an unthreatening part of their contented, nostalgic ritual -- invoking a they as inanimate and uncontrollable as the it in it's raining.

It's unseasonably mild outside, but then it's always unseasonably mild. There's spring in the air and autumn on the ground, the flowers forever at a summery peak. Down a laneway, it looks like October; come out to the village green, and it could be the height of July. He's been here through a mild winter, and a mild summer, and at the moment he's not entirely sure which was which.

As he paces the streets, daily papers in hand, he's tempted to note down what day it is in different bits of the landscape. But to do that he'd need a map. The ones they supply are carefully designed so that no matter how closely you follow them, there comes a point where you look at your surroundings and realise the map is upside down.

Number 18 finds him back in his house, where he doesn't answer the door till the second time she knocks. He opens the door -- it won't open automatically for her -- without breaking his endless pacing around the front room, another half-chewed muffin in his hand.

'It's all psychological,' he says by way of greeting. 'A way of dislocating their experimental subjects from the present moment of the outside world.'

'Pfffh. They don't need to go to all that trouble,' she says, 'It happens anyway once you turn thirty.' She perches on the arm of his sofa. ' I started looking up and finding that whole months had gone by with barely a whisper. That wasn't a cunning plot as well, was it?'

He smiles, cagily. 'If they were responsible, you wouldn't know the time had passed.' Pacing again. 'Their nights can be a month long if they want them to. They can put us all to sleep and wake us up when they're ready to use us again, once they've changed things around. It's happened.'

Yes, it's happened, she thinks. It was bound to happen. Any remaining sense of perspective has gone out the window. With the attack on Juliet waiting till their carefully random start date, and with him forced to leave the matter of getting the electropass up to her, the holding pattern has finally got to him. He's had one too many samey days, fighting a futile battle, without even the benefit of a routine to distract him. Not that her own day job was all that great in the meaning stakes, but it has to be better than being left completely at a loose end. Hasn't it?

'And precisely what bit of their diabolical masterplan is changing the day of the week supposed to benefit?' she asks. 'I mean, aside from making you go all twitchy over the principle of the thing.'

But he's undeterred. 'They don't do anything without a reason, and they don't do anything with only one reason.' He reverses direction and zigs up the steps towards the kitchen-an engine running smoothly at full speed that's completely lost its grip on the rails. 'Have you noticed that none of the calendars here has a year on them? Because the year is a part of the environment they're creating.' He crosses now to the writing-desk, festooned with scraps of paper with arrays of numbers. 'I've calculated the calendar based on the day of the week and the month, and I've narrowed their current preferred year down to 1916 or 1944. Possibly 1972, but I don't think the fashions are right for that...'

'Think you might be taking this just a bit seriously?' she asks.

That stops him. She has a moment to brace for an explosion. Then he's closing in on her, his voice low, unshaken. 'How long have you been here?'

She shrugs. 'A few months?'

'A few months,' he repeats back, with an extra edge. 'How many?'

She starts to figure, but a blankness begins to spread over her face as she loses count. He moves in, quietly drilling his words into her. 'The last thing any prisoner has, when they've taken everything else from you, is the ability to know that time is passing. Even if only by making marks on the wall of your cell. Without that, your sentence becomes infinitely long in your mind. They don't want you to have a past, except for the one you're in now.'

It's not amusing any more. 'I tried keeping a diary once,' she murmurs. 'One morning I woke up to find that they'd left me the book, but replaced every page with gibberish.'

'They don't just take things from you,' says 6. 'They give them back to you broken.' His hand flicks out and turns the clock around. 'They've taken the past, they're making their future, this is all they want to leave you with. Not even a now. A single, eternal then.'