“I don’t know,” he said, touching a purple area above his eye. “I’ve got some cuts on my knuckles, too. Did you drop into the tattooist’s?”

“Forgot again.”

“Damn,” he said. “We need to find out why you’ve got the tattoo on your hand when it should be on Tuesday’s.”

Suddenly I stopped what I was doing. “What did you just say?”

He repeated himself, and I felt a sense of rising panic. But then there was a thump outside the door, and when I investigated, a vase was lying on the carpet. I didn’t believe in poltergeists, but just recently we’d been having all the hallmarks of one—things moving around, doors swinging open, that sort of thing. When I got back to Landen, he asked me if anything was up, as I had looked alarmed when he told me about Tuesday’s mindworm.

“Nothing of any importance,” I said quietly, while having the oddest feeling that I was missing something very important, that there was something I hadn’t seen, something vital just out of reach.

“But you’re right,” I added, “I did forget. And I passed the tattooist’s three times today.”

We sat there for a while in silence, mildly annoyed.

“You’re back,” said the Wingco, who had popped his head around the door. “I made some progress into my Dark Reading Matter project. Do you want to hear about it?”

“Are you distracting Tuesday from calculating the Unentanglement Constant? I’ve got a brother in line to be barbecued, which I’m really not happy about.”

The Wingco had to admit that he might have—but that Tuesday often said that going away from a problem often made her fresher on her return, so it wasn’t as much of a distraction as we thought.

“Go on, then,” I said, getting to my feet and walking with him down the hall to Tuesday’s laboratory. “Did the dodo idea work?”

“Quite well, actually—and don’t worry, we didn’t use Pickwick. We obtained a V3.2 called Beaky that was at a knockdown price at Pete and Dave’s Dodo Emporium. The V10s are just in, so they’re getting a few preowned in for part exchange.”

“I’m not sure I like the idea of preowned classic dodos being used for experimentation.”

“There are risks in everything,” said the Wingco with a shrug, “and the Dark Reading Matter is important.”

We walked into Tuesday’s laboratory to find her dozing in her armchair. She’d been working hard, and it was late. We were going to sneak back out, but she jumped awake.

“Mum,” she said, “it worked!”

I sat down in front of the screen as the Wingco told me what they’d done.