I told him I’d go down there straightaway, and he thanked me, wished me good luck and departed. I had a few minutes to spare before Thursday5 got back, so I checked the card-index databases for anything about Superreaders, of which there was frustratingly little. Most Superreader legends had their base in the Text Sea, usually from word fishermen home on leave from scrawltrawlers. The issue was complicated by the fact that one Superread is technically identical to a large quantity of simultaneous reads, so only an examination of a book’s maintenance log would identify whether it had been a victim or not.

Thursday5 returned exactly on time, having spent the lunch hour in a mud bath, the details of which she felt compelled to tell me—at length. Mind you, she was a lot more relaxed than I was, so something was working. We stepped outside, and after I argued with TransGenre Taxis’ dispatch for five minutes, we read ourselves to the Great Library, then took the elevator and descended in silence to the subbasements, which had been known colloquially as the Well of Lost Plots for so long that no one could remember their proper name—if they’d ever had one. It was here that books were actually constructed. The “laying of the spine” was the first act in the process, and after that a continuous series of work gangs would toil tirelessly on the novel, embedding plot and subtext within the fabric of the narrative. They carefully lowered in the settings and atmosphere before the characters, fresh from dialogue training and in the presence of a skilled imaginator, would record the book onto an ImaginoTransferoRecordingDevice ready for reading in the Outland. It was slow, manpower-intensive and costly—any Supervising Book Engineer who could construct a complex novel in the minimum of time and on budget was much in demand.

“I was thinking,” said Thursday5 as the elevator plunged downward, “about being a bit more proactive. I would have been eaten by that tiger, and it was, I must confess, the seventh time you’ve rescued me over the past day and a half.”

“Eighth,” I pointed out. “Remember you were attacked by that adjectivore?”

“Oh, yes. It didn’t really take to my suggestion of a discussion group to reappraise the passive role of grammasites within the BookWorld, now, did it?”

“No. All it wanted was to tear the adjectives from your still-breathing body.”

“Well, my point is that I think I need to be more aggressive.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I replied. “If a situation arises, we’ll see how you do.”