‘She’ll only be on shift for another three hours,’ he said as he got to his feet, ‘and if we miss this opportunity we’ll be without Toccata for eleven hours – and have the added burden of Aurora to contend with.’

Dr Gwynne also departed, saying he had to take Wendy back to her quarters, a converted janitor’s cupboard on the fourth floor, just below the rotunda. I sat there trying to make sense of how my situation had changed so dramatically, and in just a few hours. Last night I was dreaming I was working for RealSleep in a life-or-death struggle against a pharmaceutical corporation with only the slenderest grasp of morality – and now I was doing the very same thing, for real.

‘Hey,’ said Josh as he was walking past, I think to his quarters somewhere.

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happens to you now?’

‘I get to stay in Sector Twelve until Springrise then try and make it back to Canada without HiberTech noticing.’

He gave me his hand and I shook it gratefully.

‘May the Spring embrace you,’ I said.

‘And embrace you,’ he replied, then smiled, and moved off.

I watched him go, then felt hungry and rummaged in my shoulder bag for my spare Snickers, while at the same time wondering if the feelings I held for Birgitta were actually mine at all, and not simply Webster’s, projected into my subconscious by the Somnagraph. I opened the bag as I couldn’t find the Snickers, and took out my purse, spare pants, paracetamol, the Polaroid of Birgitta and Charles and Laura’s Instamatic camera. No sign of the Snickers. The Gronk must have taken that, too. I looked at the camera again and frowned. All four flashes had been fired, even though I had replaced the flashcube after the attack by the nightwalkers. I looked at the back of the camera; the window showed I’d taken eight pictures but I could only remember taking four.

Out there on the way over, when I was upside down in the snow and cooling rapidly, I must have taken four pictures of something.

And that something may have been the Gronk.

White-out

‘ . . . Although the shock-suit wouldn’t protect the wearer against the kinetic effects of a thump, it would negate the primary effects to the lungs, sinuses and Eustachian tubes, and greatly reduce secondary effects such as capillary rupture, internal bleeds and axonal shearing. The more modern suits have H4S, cooling and wireless, with a power pack to give ten hours’ survival down to minus forty  . . . ’

– The Elegant Simplicity of WinterTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng