Weather inside fiction is much like weather at home, only usually more extreme. Book rain generally comes down in stair rods, and book snow always has flakes the size of farthings. But these all exist within books for narrative purposes. The BookWorld itself has less easily recognized weather patterns but has them, just the same—a particularly bad storm in ’34 swept through Horror and rained detritus on Drama for weeks, the most notable result being the grisly spontaneous-combustion sequence in Dickens’s Bleak House.

I pulled on my trousers and shoes and walked out of the door, leaving Pickwick and her chick asleep in an untidy snoring mass on the rug. The Cat was waiting for me and together we jumped to Text Grand Central.

TGC was the technical nerve center of the BookWorld. Modified from an unpublished Gothic horror novel, the one hundred floors of TGC were lit by flickering gas mantles that only faintly illuminated the vaulted ceilings high above the polished marble floors. We entered near the corner of floor sixty-nine and I followed the Cat as we walked past the humming storycode engines, each one a colossi of cast iron, shiny brass and polished mahogany. Just one of five hundred on this floor alone, the bus-sized machine could cope with up to fifty thousand simultaneous readings of the same book—or one reading apiece of fifty thousand different books, as demand saw fit. I had only visited TGC once before as part of my induction to the Bellman’s job and was amazed not only on how impossible the concept was to my flat Outlander mind, but the supreme scale of it all. The technicians scurried like tireless ants over the clanking machinery, checking dials, oiling moving parts and venting steam while keeping a close lookout for any narrative anomalies to report to the collators upstairs. It was from these collators that reports of Fiction Infractions, PageRunners and all the other BookWorld misdemeanors filtered through to us at the Jurisfiction offices. The whole system was hopelessly antiquated and manpower intensive—but it worked.

We left the engine floor and walked into a large anteroom where the BookWorld Meteorological Department worked. It was here the ten-strong team spent their days busily searching for patterns in the seemingly random textual anomalies that occur throughout fiction. The department was run by Dr. Howard. I had met him briefly once before and knew that a century or two ago he had been real, like me. TGC had commissioned a biography of the original Luke Howard solely so a Generic could be trained and then employed part-time in this office.

“Ah!” he said as we walked in. “Glad you’re here, Bellman. Heavy weather moving in from the Western genre. This is Senator Jobsworth from the Council of Genres, here as part of the C of G committee for observation of anomalies.”