Jasper Fforde_Thursday Next_05 by First Among Sequels Page B

usually used to refer to something or somebody that had crossed over unexpectedly. Bradshaw handed me a scrap of paper with the title of a book on it. “I feel happier with you handling it, because you’re an Outlander. Appreciate a woman who’s proper flesh and blood. By the way, how’s Thursday5 doing?”
    “She isn’t,” I replied. “Her timidity will end up getting her killed. We had a run-in with a grammasite inside Lord of the Flies while dealing with the glasses problem, and she decided to give the Verbisoid the benefit of the doubt and a very large hug.”
    “What type of Verbisoid? Intransitive?”
    I shook my head sadly. “Nope. Ditransitive. ”
    Bradshaw whistled low. He hadn’t been kidding over recruitment troubles or Senator Jobsworth’s involvement. Even I knew there were at least three totally unsuitable candidates Jobsworth was pressuring us to “reappraise.”
    “She’s lucky to have a single verb left in her body,” said Bradshaw after a pause. “Give her the full three days before firing her, yes? It has to be by the book, in case she tries to sue us.”
    I assured him I would and moved back to my desk, where Thursday5 was sitting on the floor in the lotus position. I had a quick rummage through my case notes, which were now stacked high on my desk. In a rash moment I’d volunteered to look at Jurisfiction “cold cases,” thinking that there would only be three or four. As it turned out, there were over a hundred infractions of sorts, ranging from random plot fluctuations in the Gormenghast trilogy to the inexplicable and untimely death of Charles Dickens, who had once lived long enough to finish Edwin Drood. I did as much as I had time for, which wasn’t a lot.
    “Right,” I said, pulling on my jacket and grabbing my bag, “we’re off. Stick close to me and do exactly as I say—even if that means killing grammasites. It’s them or us.”
    “Them or us,” repeated Thursday5 halfheartedly, slinging her felt handbag over her shoulder in exactly the same way as I did. I stopped for a moment and stared at my desk. It had been rearranged.
    “Thursday?” I said testily. “Have you been doing feng shui on my desk again?”
    “It was more of a harmonization, really,” she replied somewhat sheepishly.
    “Well, don’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “Just…just don’t. ”
    5. Training Day The BookWorld was a minefield for the unwary, so apprenticeships were essential. We’d lost more agents through poor training than were ever taken by grammasites. A foot wrong in the imaginatively confusing world of fiction could see the inexperienced Jurisfiction Cadet mispelled, conjugated or reduced to text. My tutor had been the first Miss Havisham, and I like to think it was her wise counsel that had allowed me to survive as long as I did. Many cadets didn’t. The average life expectancy for a raw recruit in BookWorld was about forty-seven chapters. W e stepped outside the colonnaded entrance of Norland Park and basked in the warmth of the sunshine. The story had long ago departed with the Dashwood family to Devon, and this corner of Sense and Sensibility was quiet and unused. To one side a saddled horse was leaning languidly against a tree with a hound sitting on the ground quite near it. Birds sang in the branches, and clouds moved slowly across the heavens. Each cloud was identical, of course, and the sun didn’t track across the sky as it did back home, and, come to think of it, the birdsong was on a twenty-second loop. It was what we called
    “narrative economics,” the bare amount of description necessary to create a scene. The Book-World was like that—mostly ordered, and without the rich texture that nature’s randomness brings to the real world. We sat in silence for a few minutes to wait for my taxi. I was thinking about the mostly bald Pickwick, Friday’s ChronoGuard pre sen ta tion, Felix8’s return and my perfidy to Landen. Thursday5 had no such worries—she was reading the