“I might have known you’d stick your girlfriend in a position of power,” she said sweetly. “You always were a soppy romantic, Eddie. You must know she can’t be allowed authority over the family. She just can’t. I mean, she’s an outsider.”

“She’s with me,” I said flatly. “Accept it, and move on. Or there’ll be tears before bedtime.”

The Armourer made his usual impatient harrumphing sound, meaning he had something important to say, and he was going to say it whatever anybody else felt. He was wearing his usual chemical-stained and lightly charred lab coat; a stick-thin middle-aged man with far too much nervous energy, and not nearly enough self-preservation instincts. He designed and built weapons and gadgets for agents in the field, aided by a fiercely questing intellect and a complete lack of scruples. He wore a grubby T-shirt under his coat bearing the legend Weapons of Mass Destruction; Ask Here. He once created a nuclear grenade, but couldn’t find anyone who could throw it far enough. Two great tufts of white hair jutted out over his ears, the only hair on his head apart from bushy white eyebrows. He had calm gray eyes, a brief but engaging smile, and a somewhat jumpy manner. Plus a pronounced stoop, from far too many years spent hunching over the designing board, working on really dangerous things.

He was my uncle Jack, and I would have died rather than disappoint him.

“I can’t stay long,” he said abruptly, scowling fiercely about him in his usual manner. “I’ve had to leave my interns alone and unsupervised in the Armoury, and that’s always dangerous. To them, as well as their surroundings. And of course they’re so much more vulnerable these days, without torcs to protect them. Though it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down any. I had to take a superstring away from one of them the other day. How did the Overdrive work on the Bentley, Eddie? I’m rather proud of that . . . I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the bugs out now.”

“Only pretty sure?” said Molly. “Now he tells us . . .”

“It worked fine,” I said. “I’ve put the Bentley into the Armoury for some minor repairs.”

“What? What?” said the Armourer, bristling. “What do you mean, minor repairs? What have you done, Eddie? What have you done to my lovely old Bentley? You crashed it, didn’t you? You crashed the Bentley after I told you I was only loaning it to you!”

“No, I didn’t crash it,” I said calmly. You learn to keep your calm in conversations with the Armourer, on the grounds that he’ll be emotional enough for both of you, and one of you has to be calm and it certainly isn’t going to be him. “I just picked up a few very minor dents and scratches, during a trip through the side dimensions.”

“I’m going back to the Armoury.”

“No, you’re not!” I said quickly. “We have important matters to discuss.”