What were the other symptoms? Tendency to become distracted by irrelevancies. Slowness in answering. Blurred vision.

“The star,” I said. “What does it look like?”

“What do you mean what does it look like?” Carruthers said, not at all slow to answer. “It looks like a star.”

The bells stopped chiming, their echoes lingering in the smoky air.

“What do you think a star looks like?” Carruthers said, and stomped off toward the verger.

Irritability was a definite symptom. And the net guidelines specifically stated that time-lag sufferers were to be immediately “removed from the environment” and from duty, but if I did that, I would have to explain to Lady Schrapnell what we were doing in Oxford instead of Coventry.

Which was why I was here poking about in the rubble in the first place, because I didn’t want to try and explain why I hadn’t landed at eight o’clock on the fourteenth in front of the cathedral like I’d been supposed to, and it was no good trying to explain that it was because of the slippage because Lady Schrapnell didn’t believe in slippage. Or time-lag.

No, so long as Carruthers wasn’t completely incoherent, it was better to stay here, find the bishop’s bird stump, and then go back and be able to tell Lady Schrapnell, yes, it had been in the cathedral during the raid, and then get some sleep. Sleep, that knits the ragged sleeve of non-AFS uniforms, that soothes the sooty brow and shuts out sorrow, blessing the weary soul with blissful, healing rest—