By Felix's third day as a guardian spirit, he had learned four important truths.

First, sleep was no longer his problem, which was useful because Agnes Wibble treated wakefulness as an underfunded hobby and could be relied upon to begin new emergencies before breakfast.

Second, subtle intervention was theoretically elegant and practically ridiculous.

Third, the Training Booklet had been written by an optimist.

Fourth, Agnes should not, under any circumstances, be allowed near moving machinery while carrying soup.

"I only need three things," Agnes said cheerfully as she entered Brimble's Department Store with a tote bag, a list, and the expression of a woman tragically unequipped with foreknowledge. "Tights, batteries, and a sensible lamp."

Felix floated beside her, reading over her shoulder.

The list also included nutmeg, string, and "those biscuits with the little sugar window if fate permits."

"Fate should not be permitted," Felix muttered.

At once his lapel badge appeared in midair before him.

PROBATIONARY SPIRIT FELIX MARR Intervention Index: 11 Composure Rating: Variable Remarks: Sarcasm is not warding.

"Rude," he said.

A woman in a fur hat walked through him and sneezed.

Brimble's was six floors of carpets, perfume, polished brass, and hazards masquerading as civic progress. Agnes loved it on sight. She paused to admire a rotating display of umbrellas that looked as though one good opinion could tip it into weaponized choreography.

Felix peered upward. A giant sale banner had come loose from one corner and was swaying over the cosmetics counter with predatory uncertainty.

"Maybe just the batteries," he suggested aloud, forgetting again that Agnes could not hear him. "Maybe order the lamp from a catalog. Maybe live in darkness."

Agnes took the escalator to the second floor.

The escalator had brass trim, deep red steps, and the personality of a villain making a social call. Felix disliked it immediately. The mechanism clanked with excessive self-regard. A loose strip of advertising vinyl at the base fluttered like a tongue.

Agnes, who was balancing a paper cup of tomato soup on one hand while rummaging in her tote with the other, stepped on without looking.

"No, no, no, absolutely not with soup," Felix said.

Halfway up, the man in front of her bent to tie his shoelace, which is a deranged thing to do on stairs in motion. Agnes swerved politely. Her heel caught. The soup sloshed. The paper cup flew upward and emptied itself over the shoulder of a waxed mannequin in a display labeled EVENING CONFIDENCE.

The mannequin, recently repurposed from the seasonal wedding section, tilted forward.

Felix reacted by throwing himself at it with the focused panic of a dead man who had begun to take personal offense at fate. The mannequin twisted sideways, missed Agnes by inches, and knocked a pyramid of boxed electric kettles into a display of novelty clocks.

A sales assistant screamed, "Mind the launch items!"

Agnes reached the top of the escalator, stumbled onto the landing, and righted herself by sheer habit.

"Good save," she told her own ankles.

Felix floated up after her, panting despite the lack of lungs.

"You are not appreciating the effort this is taking."

"Can she hear you yet?" asked a voice beside him.

Felix turned.

Perched cross-legged on the information kiosk was a girl in a navy blazer with a silver whistle around her neck. She looked about twelve until one noticed her eyes, which held the ancient exhaustion of somebody who had once supervised volcanoes.

"Who are you?"

"Auxiliary field support," she said. "Temporarily. Muriel. I do spot assessments, minor haunt harmonics, and outcome tabulation for the Probation Office."

"I wasn't told there were inspectors."

"If we told probationers about inspectors, you'd all perform like schoolchildren."

Felix looked back at Agnes, who was now examining lamps while standing directly beneath a wobbling ceiling fan display.

"Is she always like this?"

Muriel took out a clipboard.

"Agnes Wibble? Yes. Most accident-prone live mortal, Northern Hemisphere division. Very high incident clustering. Strong natural resilience. Modest awareness."

"Modest?"

"She thinks patterns are bad weather."

Across the aisle, Agnes picked up a brass floor lamp and tested its switch. The bulb exploded with a sound like an offended champagne cork.

"Oh, honestly," Agnes said to the lamp.

Muriel made a tick on her sheet.

"That one wasn't fatal."

"Is that the standard now? Congratulations, no death?"

"In guardianship, we celebrate the achievable."

Agnes moved on toward housewares. Felix followed, feeling more like a frantic stagehand than a spiritual protector. The store had grown crowded with Saturday shoppers: toddlers in dangerous moods, pensioners wielding umbrellas, husbands parked near curtains with the stoicism of condemned explorers. Overhead, a recorded piano melody drifted through the air, somehow making all peril seem better dressed.

Felix's badge flashed.

ACTIVE RISK CLUSTER DETECTED Converging variables: balloon promotion / wet tiles / ornamental sword

"Why," Felix said slowly, "is there an ornamental sword in a department store?"

"Seasonal heritage display," said Muriel.

"Of course."

On the ground floor, the store manager was preparing some sort of anniversary promotion involving helium balloons, a string quartet, and a ceremonial cutting of a ribbon tied to a fake castle turret. Beside the turret, mounted on a velvet cushion, lay the sword.

Agnes leaned over the balcony to watch.

Felix saw the sequence assemble itself all at once: a little boy tugging too hard on a balloon bunch, a janitor mopping polished tiles below, a quartet violinist stepping backward, the ribbon jerking, the sword tipping free.

"Agnes," he said, uselessly.

She waved at someone on the ground floor and shifted her weight onto the one loose patch of runner carpet on the balcony.

Muriel clicked her pen.

"Ooh, nasty chain."

"Don't narrate it!"

Felix looked around wildly for something he could move. Not much answered to him yet. Small cloth objects, mostly. Loose papers. Once, memorably, an aubergine.

Then he saw the sale signs.

Hundreds of bright card placards hung from threads over the central atrium: HALF PRICE, FINAL REDUCTIONS, BUY TWO SAVE LATER. Light, flimsy, ridiculous.

Perfect.

Felix surged upward and flung himself through the display with every concentrated ounce of probationary indignation he had. The threads snapped. Cards whirled loose in a blizzard of discount optimism.

Shoppers shouted. Balloons scattered. The quartet ducked.

Below, the sword slid from its velvet cushion exactly as predicted, only to be smacked sideways by a descending placard reading HOME EVENT in aggressive red lettering. It struck the fake turret, rebounded into a basket of promotional teddy bears, and vanished beneath plush.

At the same instant, the shower of signs startled Agnes into stepping backward off the loose runner and onto solid floor instead of over the railing.

She put one hand to her chest.

"Well," she said. "Retail has changed."

The store manager was now screaming into a microphone. The microphone, due to the universe's warped sense of pacing, fed back with such force that three decorative balloons burst and one elderly gentleman shouted, "This is exactly why I buy socks in person!"

Muriel finished writing.

"Good intervention. Messy. Unsustainable. Strong initiative."

Felix stared down at the ground floor, where the ornamental sword was being retrieved from teddy bears by a man who looked philosophically altered.

"That was nearly catastrophic."

"For Brimble's," Muriel agreed. "Agnes is still fine."

Agnes, meanwhile, had found the battery display. She selected the wrong size, corrected herself, chose a lamp shaped like an artichoke, and headed back toward the escalator.

The escalator gave a low mechanical groan.

Felix narrowed his eyes at it.

"Don't you start."

It was ridiculous to suspect hostility from a staircase. Yet the thing seemed to be waiting for Agnes with the patient malice of an uncle who enjoys card tricks involving fire.

At the top of the descent, Agnes balanced the artichoke lamp, a packet of batteries, and, inexplicably, a discounted fondue fork set she had no memory of picking up.

"No soup this time," Felix said. "We've learned something."

Then a child dropped a toffee wrapper onto the steps.

Muriel looked up from her clipboard. "Mmm. I may stay for this one."