If you can read this, you have realized that something is seriously squiffy in the BookWorld. Plans had been afoot for weeks, and none of us had seen them. Thursday1–4 (yes, it’s true) has taken your place as the CofG’s LBOCS and is rubber-stamping all of Jobsworth’s idiotic schemes. The interactivity idea is going ahead full speed, and even now Danverclones are massing on the borders of Racy Novel, ready to invade. Evil Thursday has loaded Text Grand Central with her toadies in order to keep a careful watch for any textual anomalies that might give them—and her—a clue as to whether you have returned. For it is this that Evil Thursday fears more than anything: that you will return, unmask her as an impostor and retake your place. She has suspended Jurisfiction and had all agents confined to their books, and she now commands a legion of Danverclones, who are waiting to capture you should you appear in the BookWorld. We stole back your TravelBook and have left it for you with Captain Carver inside It Was a Dark and Stormy Night if you can somehow find a way in. This dedication will self-erase in two readings. Good luck, old girl—and Melanie sends her love.

Bradshaw.

I read the dedication again and watched as the words slowly dissolved from the page. Good old Bradshaw. I had been to It Was a Dark and Stormy Night a couple of times, mostly for training. It was a maritime adventure set aboard a tramp steamer on the Tasman Sea in 1924. It was a good choice, because it came under the deregulated area of the library known as Vanity Publishing. Text Grand Central wouldn’t even know I was there. I replaced Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser on the shelf, then unlocked the bottom drawer and took out my pistol and eraserhead cartridges. I stuffed them in my bag, noted that it was almost ten and knocked on Friday’s door.

“Darling?”

He looked up from the copy of Strontmania he was reading.

“Yuh?”

“I’m sorry, Sweetpea, but I have to go back to the BookWorld. It may put the unscrambled-eggs recipe in jeopardy.”

He sighed and stared at me. “I knew you would.”

“How?”

He beckoned me to the window and pointed to three figures sitting on a wall opposite the house. “The one in the middle is the other me. It shows there is still a chance they’ll get hold of the recipe. If we’d won, they’d be long gone.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, laying a hand on his. “I know how important the length of the Now is to all of us. I won’t go anywhere near ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”

“Mum,” he said in a quiet voice, “if you get back home and I’m polite, well-mannered and with short hair, don’t be too hard on me, eh?”

He was worried about being replaced.