“Sprockett?”
He started out of standby mode with a buzz.
“A cocktail, ma’am?”
“No thank you. It’s just that I’ve decided to . . .” I sighed and rubbed my temples.
“Decided to what, ma’am?”
“Nothing.”
And I slumped down into my seat, cursing the Thursday in me.
The train slowed to a halt at the border between Fantasy and Comedy and the off-duty clown started fidgeting.
“Identification, please.” One of the border guards was standing at the doorway, and we all rummaged for our identification papers.
“I’ll deal with this,” said a familiar voice, and Commander Bradshaw appeared in the corridor. He flashed his own ID at the border guard, who saluted smartly and moved on.
Sprockett and I both stood up politely, as did the clown, who didn’t want to be left out.
“Please,” said Bradshaw, “sit down. What’s this, a joke?” he asked, indicating the clown once we had all sat and Sprockett had offered Bradshaw a cocktail.
“A lance corporal in the Sixth Clown,” I said, “Supply and Gigglistics.”
“Oh, yes?” said Bradshaw with a smile. “And what would you be smuggling across the border?”
The clown sighed resignedly and opened his duffel bag to reveal boxes of military-grade custard pies. He wasn’t a very good smuggler. Few were.
“It’s jail for you, my lad,” said Bradshaw sternly. “CPs are banned in every genre outside Comedy. I’d turn you in, but I’m busy. If you can dispose of them all before we get to Gaiman Junction, I’ll overlook it.”
“How would I do that?”
“Do you have a spoon in your bag?”
So while the off-duty clown began to eat his way through four dozen custard pies, Bradshaw explained what he was there for.
“Please don’t ask Lorina to contact me,” he said. “That was just for Jobsworth to hear.”
“I figured.”
“Is she still a colossal pain in the butt, by the way?”
“Getting worse, if anything.”
Bradshaw looked at Sprockett, who took the cue and shimmered from the compartment with the clown, who was already on his ninth custard pie and groaning quietly to himself. Sprockett returned momentarily with the Chicago Fizz he had mixed for Bradshaw, then departed again.
Bradshaw leaned forward, looked left and right and whispered, “Are you her? The real one, I mean?”
“No.”
He stared at me for a while. “Are you sure? You’re not doing some sort of deep-cover double bluff or something?”
“Yes, quite sure. I think I know who I am.”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t. You’ll have to take my word for it. Believe me, I wish I were.”
Bradshaw seemed satisfied with this and stared at me some more for quite some time. He wasn’t here on a social visit.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“The thing is,” he began, taking a sip from his Chicago Fizz,
“We’re in a bit of a pickle here in the BookWorld, what with Speedy Muffler and the whole Racy Novel debacle. Add to that the dwindling metaphor issue, the e-book accelerators using a disproportionate amount of Text Grand Central’s throughput capacity and all the other day-to-day whatnot we have to handle, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we need the real Thursday now more than ever. Do we agree?”
“We do.”
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “She was due to be the Jurisfiction delegate at the Racy Novel peace talks on Friday. I’ll have to send Emperor Zhark instead, and his negotiating skills are more along the lines of annihilate first, ask questions later, but without the ‘ask questions later’ part.”
“She may turn up.”
He shook his head. “I knew she was going undercover, but she said she’d check in two days ago without fail. She didn’t. That’s not like her. She might be stuck in a book somewhere, lost in a book somewhere—even held against her will. The possibilities are endless.”
“If she was lost, wouldn’t she have a TextMarker™ homing beacon on her?”
“True—but Textual Sieve coverage is patchy even in Fiction, and absent entirely across at least two-thirds of the BookWorld. We’ve sent unmanned probes into the most impenetrable tomes at Antiquarian and dispatched agents into almost every genre there is—nothing. The BookWorld is a big place. We’ve even considered that she might be in the DRM.”
I raised an eyebrow. If they were considering this, they really were desperate. The DRM was the Dark Reading Matter—the unseeable part of the BookWorld.
“It’s been almost two weeks,” continued Bradshaw, “and I fear that something dreadful might have happened.”
“Dead?”
“Worse—retired back to the RealWorld.”
He stopped and stared at me. It wasn’t just Thursday’s absence from Jurisfiction that he was worried about; he had lost a good friend, too. Thursday trusted Commander Bradshaw implicitly. I thought I should do likewise.
“I sneak-peeked the Outland yesterday,” I said. “I realize it was wrong. But it seemed to me that Landen was missing her, too.”
Bradshaw raised an eyebrow. “Truthfully?”
“Yes, sir.”
He took a sip of the cocktail, set it down and strode about the compartment for some minutes.
“Look here,” he said, “desperate situations call for desperate measures. I want you to talk to Landen and see if you can find out anything. Perhaps locate her in time for the peace talks.”
“Talk to Landen? How can I do that?”
“By traveling to the RealWorld.”
My heart nearly missed a beat.
“You’re joking.”
“No joke, Miss Next. In fact, I’ll tell you a joke so you’ll know the difference. How many Sigmund Freuds does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“I’ve heard it.”
“You have? Blast. In any event, you look exactly like Thursday—the best cover in the world. And what could possibly go wrong?”
There was actually quite a lot, but before I could itemize the first sixteen, Bradshaw had moved on.
“Splendid. All transfictional travel has been strictly banned this past eighteen months, so you’ll be doing this covertly. If anyone finds out, I’ll deny everything. Most of all, you can’t tell anyone from the Council of Genres. If Jobsworth or Red Herring finds I’ve been breaking the transfictional travel embargo, they’ll want to send their own. And I can’t have that. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then that’s all agreed,” said Bradshaw, rising from his seat and handing me a signed authorization. “This will give you access to Norland Park to see Professor Plum on the pretext of adding e-book accelerators to your series. He’ll know why you’re there. I’ll also contact my deep-cover agents to offer you every assistance in the Outland. Any questions?”
I had several hundred, but didn’t know where to start. Bradshaw took my silence to mean I didn’t have any, and he shook me by the hand.
“Good to have you on board. Twelve hours in the RealWorld isn’t long, but enough to at least get an idea of what’s happened to her. I could send you out for longer, but Thursday has many enemies in the RealWorld, and they’ll be onto you pretty quick. If you die in the RealWorld, you die for real, and I’m not having that on my conscience. Shall we say tomorrow morning? Oh, and officially speaking, I was never here.”
“You were never here.”
“Good show. Appreciate a girl who knows she wasn’t somewhere. Oh, and thank your man for the Chicago Fizz, will you? But next time a little less gherkin. Cheerio.”
And without another word, he opened the outside door, a motorcycle drew alongside the train, Bradshaw hopped onto the pillion and was gone.
“Might I inquire of madam what that was all about?” asked Sprockett, who returned with a very ill-looking clown.