“Don’t underestimate atmosphere,” I said slowly, helping myself to a Jaffa cake. “The four opposing forces in any novel are atmosphere, plot, character and pace. But they don’t have to be in equilibrium. You can have a book without any plot or pace at all, but it has to make up for it in character and a bit of atmosphere—like The Old Man and the Sea. Most thrillers are plot and pace and nothing else, such as Where Eagles Dare. But it doesn’t matter; each to a reader’s own—”

  I stopped talking, because a warning light was flashing on the console in front of us.

  “Hmm,” I murmured as I leaned closer, “they’re overrunning in The Dubliners, and Ulysses needs an upright piano for Mr. Dedalus to comment upon at the Ormond Hotel in less than a minute’s time.”

  “Isn’t there a spare piano at Norland Park?” asked Thursday5.

  “No—Marianne took it with her to Devon, and it’s currently one of those being overhauled.”

  I scanned the knobs and switches of the console, looking for a spare piano that could be redirected. I eventually found one in Peter Pan. It was only referred to in a line of dialogue, so I redirected it to Ulysses as quickly as I could. Too quickly, to be honest, and I fumbled the interchange.

  “Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I replied, knowing full well that no one would notice. I’d placed it in the wrong part of the Ormond Hotel. I didn’t have time to worry about this, however, as another warning light was flashing. This was to alert us that the first manual piano movement that Roger and Charles had left us with was approaching. I picked up the handwritten note and read it.

  “We’ve got the Goetzmann grand returning from Villette, and it has to be sent with piano stool 87B into Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors. Who can see a piano stool anywhere?”

  Neither of the Thursdays moved an inch. Thursday5 eventually tapped Thursday1–4 on the arm and said, “Your turn. I did the coffee.”

  “In that case,” replied Thursday1–4 with impeccable twisted logic, “it must have been my turn to do the Jaffa cakes.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then, since you very kindly undertook that task on my be-half, it’s your turn to do something again—so find the sodding piano stool and stop bothering me with your bleating.”

  I laid a hand on Thursday1–4’s arm and said, “Find the piano stool, Thursday.”

  She tutted haughtily in a manner that Friday would have approved of but got up and had a look around the room, eventually finding it near a heap of sheet music, a few music stands and a dusty bassoon.

  “Here,” she said in a bored tone, lifting the lid to look inside. Just at that moment, there was a buzzing noise, and the Goetzmann grand appeared in the brightly lit aperture in the wall.

  “Right on time.”

  I twiddled a few knobs to set its onward journey, told Thursday1–4 to put the piano stool with it, which she did, and then, with yet another buzz, I sent it on to the great hall of Stonygates inside Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors.

  “Good,” I muttered, crossing that first task off the list. “We’ve got nothing else for a half hour.”

  But my troubles weren’t nearly over, as Thursday5 had sat in the chair recently vacated by Thursday1–4.

  “You’re in my seat.”

  “It’s not your seat.”

  “I sat in it first, so it’s mine.”

  “You can’t do dibs on seats, and besides, you don’t own it.”

  “Listen,” growled Thursday1–4, “do you like doing crochet?”

  “Yes, so…?”

  “Then perhaps you can imagine how tricky that might be…with broken fingers.”

  Thursday5’s lip trembled for a moment. “I’m…I’m…sure we can discuss this like rational adults before resorting to anything so crude as violence.”

  “Perhaps we could,” returned Thursday1–4, “but it’s far easier with me telling you how it’s going to be. Now, get your tie-dyed butt out of my seat.”

  “Thursday?” I said.

  “I can deal with this,” snapped Thursday5 in a rare show of annoyance. “I don’t need to be rescued like a child every single time Miss Slagfest here opens her trap!”

  “I’m not meddling,” I replied. “All I want to know is where Thursday1–4 got that pistol.”

  “This?” she said, holding up the small black automatic that I’d suddenly noticed she was holding. “It’s really cool, isn’t it? A Browning twenty-six-caliber standard single-action automatic with slide and grip safety.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I found it,” she retorted defensively, “so I’m keeping it.”

  I didn’t have time for this.

  “Tell me where you found it, or you’ll be its next victim.”

  She paused, then said, “It was…in that piano stool.”

  “Idiot!” I yelled, getting up and demanding she hand it over, which she did. “That’s an essential plot point in They Do It with Mirrors! Why can’t you just leave things alone?”

  “I thought—”

  “That’s the problem. You don’t. Stay here while we sort this out, and don’t touch anything. I repeat: Touch nothing. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I understand—what do you think I am, a child?”

  I didn’t have time to argue, so after telling Thursday5 to follow me closely, I jumped out of the Piano Squad to the Great Library, and from there we made our way into Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors.

  We arrived at Stonygates in the short length of dimly lit corridor that connected the square lobby with the great hall. We pressed ourselves into the shadows, and I looked inside the hall. It was a large room that oozed Victorian Gothic gloominess, with dark wood and minimal lighting. There were a half dozen or so people chattering, but more important, directly ahead of us was the Goetzmann grand that we had dispatched not two minutes before. And in front of this, the piano stool to which the weapon had to be returned. I was about to chance my luck and sneak in but had not gotten two paces when a young man came and sat on the piano stool and began to play. I retreated into the shadows and felt Thursday5 grip my arm nervous ly as the lights flickered and went out, leaving the house in semidarkness. We backed farther into the shadows as a large man with a sulky expression came out of the door and vanished into the gloom, muttering about the fuses. A few minutes later, an elderly woman tottered to the dining room and back to retrieve something, and almost immediately the front door was pushed violently open and a young man strode into the hall in an overdramatic manner. This was followed by an argument, the sound of the study door opening and closing, more muffled shouting and eventually two shots. With the characters in the room thus distracted, I padded softly to the man seated at the piano and tapped him lightly on his shoulder. He looked up with some surprise, and I showed him my Jurisfiction badge. I raised my eyebrows, placed a finger to my lips and gestured him to join the people on the other side of the room. He did as I asked, and once his back was turned, I slipped the small automatic into the piano stool, between a copy of Handel’s Largo and Chopin’s Preludes.

  I quickly and noiselessly retraced my steps to where Thursday5 was waiting for me, and within a few minutes we had returned to the Piano Squad’s headquarters.

  As we reentered, the squad room was in chaos. Warning lights were flashing, klaxons were going off, and the control console was a mass of flickering indicator lights. I was relieved to see—if such a word could be used in such uproar—that Roger and Charles had both returned and were trying to bring some sort of semblance of order back to the piano-distribution network.

  “I need the Thürmer back from Agnes Grey!” yelled Roger. “And I’ll swap it for a nonworking Streicher—”

  “What the hell’s going on, Thursday?”

  It was Commander Bradshaw, and he didn’t look very happy.

  “I don’t know. When I left everything was fine.”

  “You left?” he echoed incredulously. “You left the piano room unattended?”

  “I left—”

  But I stopped myself. I was responsible for any cadet’s actions or inactions, irrespective of what they were and where they happened. I’d made a mistake. I should have called Bradshaw to cover for me or to get someone to go into Mirrors.

  I took a deep breath. “No excuses, sir—I screwed up. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” repeated Bradshaw, “That’s it? You’re sorry? I’ve got a dead Holmes on my hands, one of the Outland’s most favorite series is about to unravel, and I really don’t need one of your idiot cadets suddenly thinking that she’s god of all the pianos.”

  “What did she do?”

  “If you’d been supervising properly, you’d know!”

  “Okay, okay,” I retorted, seriously beginning to get pissed off, “this one’s down to me, and I’ll face the music, but I’d like to know what she’s done before I wipe the smirk off her face for good.”

  “She decided,” he said slowly and with great restraint, “to do her own thing with piano supply in your absence. Every single piano reference has been deleted from Melville, Scott and Defoe.”

  “What?” I said, looking around the room and finally catching sight of Thursday1–4 on the other side of the room, where she was standing arms folded and apparently without a care in the world.

  “As I said. And we don’t have the time or the pianos to replace them. But that’s not the worst bit.”

  “It gets worse?”

  “Certainly. For some reason known only to herself, she dropped an upright Broadwood straight into Miss Bates’s drawing room inside Austen’s Emma.”

  “Have they noticed?”

  “Pianos aren’t generally the sort of thing one can miss. As soon as it arrived, speculation began on where it might have come from. Miss Bates agrees with Mrs. Cole that it’s from Colonel Campbell, but Emma thinks it’s from Mrs. Dixon. Mrs. Weston is more inclined to think it was from Mr. Knightley, but Mr. Knightley believes it’s from Frank Churchill. Quite a mess, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Can we get it out?”

  “It’s embedded itself now. I’m going to get Churchill to take the rap, and it shouldn’t inflict too much damage. But this is down to you, Thursday, and I’ve got no choice but to suspend you from Jurisfiction duties pending a disciplinary inquiry.”

  “Let’s keep a sense of perspective on this, Bradshaw. I know I’m responsible, but it’s not my fault—besides, you told me to do this, and I said I couldn’t.”

  “It’s my fault, is it?”

  “Partly.”

  “Humph,” replied Bradshaw, bristling his mustache in anger. “I’ll take it under advisement—but you’re still suspended.”

  I jerked a thumb in the direction of Thursday1–4. “What about her?”

  “She’s your cadet, Thursday. you deal with it.”

  He took a deep breath, shook his head, softened for a moment to tell me to look after myself and departed. I told Thursday5 to meet me up at the CofG and beckoned Thursday1–4 into the corridor.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Oh, c’mon,” she said, “don’t be such a hard-ass. There’s no seriously lasting damage. So I dropped a piano into Emma—it’s not like it landed on anyone.”

  I stared at her for a moment. Even allowing for Thursday1–4’s supreme arrogance, it still didn’t make any sense.

  “You’re not stupid. You knew it would get you fired once and for all, so why do it?”

  She stared at me with a look of cold hatred. “You were going to fire me anyway. There wasn’t a ghost’s chance I’d have made it.”

  “The chance was slim,” I admitted, “but it was there.”

  “I don’t agree. You hate me. Always have. From the moment I was first published. We could have been friends, but you never even visited. Not once in four entire books. Not a postcard, a footnote, nothing. I’m closer to you than family, Thursday, and you treated me like crap.”

  And then I understood.

  “You put the piano into Emma to stitch me up, didn’t you?”

  “After what you’ve done to me, you deserve far worse. You had it in for me the moment I arrived at Jurisfiction. You all did.”

  I shook my head sadly. She was consumed by hate. But instead of trying to deal with it, she just projected it onto everyone around her. I sighed.

  “You did this for revenge over some perceived slight?”

  “That wasn’t revenge,” said Thursday1–4 in a quiet voice. “You’ll know revenge when you see it.”

  “Give me your badge.”

  She dug it from her pocket and then tossed it onto the floor rather than hand it over.

  “I quit,” she spat. “I wouldn’t join Jurisfiction now if you begged me.”

  It was all I could do not to laugh at her preposterous line of reasoning. She couldn’t help herself. She was written this way.

  “Go on,” I said in an even tone, “go home.”

  She seemed surprised that I was no longer angry.

  “Aren’t you going to yell at me or hit me or try to kill me or something? Face it: This isn’t much of a resolution.”

  “It’s all you’re going to get. You really don’t understand me at all, do you?”

  She glared at me for a moment, then bookjumped out.

  I stood in the corridor for a few minutes, wondering if there was anything else I might have done. Aside from not trusting her an inch, not really. I shrugged, tried and failed to get TransGenre Taxis to even answer the footnoterphone and then, checking the time so I wouldn’t be late for the policy-directive meeting, made my way slowly toward the elevators.

  24.

  Policy Directives

  The Council of Genres is the administrative body that looks after all aspects of BookWorld regulation, from making policy decisions in the main debating chamber to the day-to-day running of ordinary BookWorld affairs, from furnishing plot devices to controlling the word supply coming in from the Text Sea. They oversee the Book Inspectorate, which governs which books are to be published and which to be demolished, and also Text Grand Central and Jurisfiction—but only regarding policy. For the most part, they are evenhanded but need to be watched, and that’s where I come into the equation.

  I didn’t go straight to either Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres but instead went for a quiet walk in Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells. I often go there when in a thoughtful or pensive mood, and although the line drawings that I climbed were not as beautiful nor as colorful as the real thing, they were peaceful and friendly, imbued as they were with a love of the fells that is seldom equaled or surpassed. I sat on the warm sketched grass atop Haystacks, threw a pebble into the tarn and watched the drawn ripples radiate outward. I returned much refreshed an hour later.

  I found Thursday5 still waiting for me in the seating area near the picture window with the view of the other towers. She stood up when I approached.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why?” I responded. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But it certainly wasn’t yours.”

  “That’s the thing,” I replied. “It was. She’s a cadet. She has no responsibility. Her faults are mine.”

  I stopped to think about what I’d just said. Thursday 1–4 was impetuous, passionate and capable of almost uncontrollable rage. Her faults really were mine.

  I took a deep breath and looked at my watch. “Showtime,” I murmured despondently. “Time for the policy-directive meeting.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Thursday5, and then searched through her bag until she found a small yellow book and a pen.

  “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “An autograph book.”

  She said nothing and bit her lip.

  “If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.”

  She sighed and dropped the book back into her bag.

  The policy meeting was held in the main debating chamber. Jobs-worth’s chair was the large one behind the dais, with the seats on either side of him reserved for his closest aides and advisers. We arrived twenty minutes early and were the first ones there. I sat down in my usual seat to the left of where the genres would sit, and Thursday5 sat just behind me. The Read-O-Meter was still clicking resolutely downward, and I looked absently around the chamber, trying to gather my thoughts. Along the side walls were paintings of various dignitaries who had distinguished themselves in one way or another during the Council of Genres’ rule—my own painting was two from the end, sandwiched between Paddington Bear and Henry Pooter.

  “So what’s on the agenda?” asked Thursday5.

  I shrugged, having become somewhat ticked off with the whole process. I just wanted to go home—somewhere away from fiction and the parts of me I didn’t much care for.

  “Who knows?” I said in a nonchalant fashion. “Falling Read-Rates, I imagine—fundamentally, it’s all there is.”

  At that moment the main doors were pushed open and Jobs-worth appeared, followed by his usual retinue of hangers-on. He saw me immediately and chose a route that would take him past my desk.

  “Good afternoon, Next,” he said. “I heard you were recently suspended?”

  “It’s an occupational hazard when you’re working in the front line,” I replied pointedly—Jobsworth had always been administration. If he understood the remark, he made no sign of it. I added, “Are you well, sir?”

  “Can’t complain. Which one’s that?” he asked, pointing to Thursday5 in much the same way as you’d direct someone to the toilet.

  “Thursday5, sir.”

  “You’re making a mistake to fire the other one,” said Jobs-worth, addressing me. “I’d ask for a second or third opinion about her if there was anyone left to ask. Nevertheless, the decision was yours, and I abide by it. The matter is closed.”

  “I was down in the maintenance facility recently,” I told him, “and Isambard told me that the CofG had insisted on upgrading all the throughput conduits.”