“It won’t be them. Leave it with me,” I said after a moment’s pause, “and I’ll see what I can do. Just keep your eyes and ears open, yes?”

Dr. Brennan smiled and thanked me, shook my hand again, said good-bye to Zhark and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and was gone, muttering that she had to relieve the substandard and decidedly bone-idle understudy who was standing in for her.

“What was that all about?” asked Zhark.

“No idea,” I replied. “It’s kind of flattering that people bring their problems to me. I just wish there were another Thursday to deal with it.”

“I thought there was.”

“Don’t even joke about it, Emperor.”

There was a crackle in the air, and Commander Bradshaw suddenly appeared just next to us. Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle looked guilty all of a sudden, and the hedgepig washerwoman made a vain attempt to hide the ironing she was doing.

“I thought I would find you here,” he said, mustache all atwitch, as it was when he was a bit peeved. “That wouldn’t be moonlighting, would it, Agent Tiggy-Winkle?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “I spend so much time at Jurisfiction I can hardly get through the ironing I need to do for my own book!”

“Very well,” said Bradshaw slowly, turning to me. “I thought I’d find you here, too. I have a job that only you can handle.”

“I thought I was suspended?”

He passed me my badge. “The suspension was purely for the CofG’s benefit. The disciplinary paperwork was accidentally eaten by snails. Most perplexing.”

I smiled. “What’s up?”

“A matter of great delicacy. There were a few minor textual irregularities in…the Thursday books.”

“Which ones?” I asked, suddenly worried that Thursday5 might have taken her failure to heart.

“The first four. Since you know them quite well and no one else wants to touch them or her with a barge pole, I thought you might want to check it out.”

“What sorts of irregularities?”

“Small ones,” said Bradshaw, handing me a sheet of paper. “Nothing you’d notice from the Outland unless you were a committed fan. I’m thinking it might be the early stage of a breakdown.”

He didn’t mean a breakdown in the Outlander sense. In the BookWorld a breakdown meant an internal collapse of the character’s pattern of reason—the rules that made one predictable and understandable. Some, like Lucy Deane, collapsed spontaneously and with an annoying regularity; others just crumbled slowly from within, usually as a result of irreconcilable conflicts within their character. In either case, replacement by a fully trained-up generic was the only option. Of course, it might be nothing and very possible that Thursday1–4 was just angry about being fired and venting her spleen on the co-characters in the series.

“I’ll check her out.”