Pete is desperately aware of his lack of contact with the pastoral concerns of his people, like a nagging awareness that he’s not getting enough vitamins in his diet; but the Laundry is more than capable of pandering to his guilty pleasure, offering glimpses deep into the fascinating patch of applied linguistics that he has tried to build an academic career in. (This Enochian metagrammar thing they’ve been working with demands to be contextualized with the variant proto-Aramaic dialects from which it strikes disturbing echoes.) But instead, they’ve given him this training-wheels web design assignment . . . it’s a learning experience and it’ll probably come in handy when he goes back to the parish newsletter, but it’s not work.

“Pete? Hi, I’d like you to meet one of our newest recruits.” Andy smiles warmly as he oozes into the office and somehow migrates into the ratty visitor’s chair without disrupting the pile of yellowing government posters stacked precariously in front of it. “Alex, this is Dr. Peter Wilson, also a recent recruit. Pete, this is Alex Schwartz. Um. Alex is also a doctor, although his PhD is in theoretical mathematics, not Aramaic lexicography. Alex, Pete is a vicar by trade.”

Alex, standing beside the door, attempts to fade into the wallpaper. He looks barely old enough to be out of school, much less to have earned a PhD. There is something, Pete realizes, that is not quite right about this picture. The body language is remarkably stand-offish. Maybe he’s an atheist or something? Pete composes his face: “Right now I’m learning to be a web designer,” he says as disarmingly as possible. “What brings you here?”

Andy clears his throat. “Alex is a member of a quantitative analysis research group who inadvertently stubbed their collective toe on something significant, so we’re taking them through the usual in-processing and orientation while we work out what to do with them—basically, health and safety training. Then we and they can decide whether to release them back to what they were doing before, on inactive status, or find a more permanent role for them within the agency if they’re so inclined. Bob told me you were working on MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY, which is a rather low-hazard task, and I was thinking you might want to take on an assistant, for mentoring—”