Fiona Pipette, A Brief History of Toast

I returned my visitor’s pass, then walked the short distance to the Brunel Centre and the nearest Yo! Toast outlet. Braxton hadn’t yet arrived, so I took a seat at the counter and ordered a mocha and a marmalade on white from a very intense waitress who had clearly been thoroughly indoctrinated by the hyperefficient Yo! Toast training.

“Butter or margarine?” she demanded.

“Butter.”

“Thin or thick cut?”

“Thick.”

“Orange or lime?”

“Orange.”

“Right,” she said, and hurried off.

I sat for a moment in silence, contemplating the morning’s events. I wanted the SO-27 headship badly. It wasn’t for the prestige, and it certainly wasn’t for the cash, and it probably wasn’t totally because I didn’t want Phoebe Smalls to get it. Landen had suggested that it was so I would have something to positively define myself, and although family was great and good and wonderful, I needed something more. He was probably right. For many years Jurisfiction had been life’s marker, but since I’d discovered that due to my injuries I could no longer make the transfictional jump, my career in the BookWorld was at least temporarily curtailed.

Landen had suggested some sort of retirement, but I wasn’t ready for that. Pruning and gardening and stamp collecting and taking dodos for long rambling walks weren’t really my thing. Dealing with bad guys—now, that was my thing.

My toast arrived, and I took a bite. It was excellent. Perfectly toasted, a hint of al dente about the crust and a tangy blast of marmalade on an aftertaste of melted butter. It wasn’t difficult to see why toast had become the faddy buzz food of the noughties, with TV chefs falling over themselves to write entire books dripping with pretentious toast recipes—and a legion of critics who claimed that food chains like Yo! Toast were paying their staff too much and criticized the lack of unsaturated fat and salt on the menu.

“Next?”

I looked up. It was Regional Commander Braxton Hicks, long-serving head of the SpecOps departments in Wessex and also on the board of at least five other Swindon-based organizations. He had a nonexecutive post on the City Council, had been involved in the awarding of contracts to build St. Zvlkx’s new cathedral, was a director of the Wessex All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drinks Not Included Library Service and held posts at Cheesaholics Anonymous and the Campaign for Less Ludicrously Dressed Teenagers.

I knew him best regarding SpecOps. He’d been working there years before the service was partially disbanded and had been my boss during the whole Eyre Affair gig almost nineteen years before. The fact that he had survived so long was a mixture of affability, the ability to delegate and efficiency—mostly the last. He loved his budgets. It was why he was so much in demand. Despite his penny-pinching ways and often odd ideas, I had grown to like him enormously, and he tended to look upon me as the daughter he’d wished he had and not the one he did have, who was a bit of a tramp. In fact, Braxton wasn’t having much luck with his son, Herbert, either—he was currently in prison for armed robbery.