‘I can’t remember. Someone important. It’s annoying when that happens.’

‘The idealism of youth,’ she said with a dismissive snort. ‘We can’t fail, not now. We’re too big, too integrated into society. All that we’ve done. All that we can do. All that we will do.’

They stared at me without speaking for some moments.

‘So what do you want from me?’ I asked.

Goodnight stared at me for a moment, and then walked from the small room, beckoning us to follow.

‘I want you to meet someone.’

She led me across to cell 4-H. I guessed who was in there but looked through the peephole anyway. Birgitta was lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling. Her hands were drawing circles in the air; pretend pens on pretend paper.

‘What are you going to do with her?’

‘Nothing for the moment, but she’s a good candidate for retrieval, and we do conduct tests from time to time. How about if we were to retrieve Birgitta right now? In exchange for the cylinder? She’d never know anything had ever happened. She’d be missing a thumb, of course, but that could be explained away as rats or mould or something.’

I had to think very carefully on this one. I could have given them the cylinder, but I had a pretty strong feeling that once the cylinder was secured, anyone remotely attached to it would end up in the night pit covered by a spadeful of lime.

‘I don’t know where the cylinder is.’

The Notable Goodnight cocked her head on one side.

‘Then we could redeploy Birgitta instead,’ she said, ‘next on the list. She’s very Tricksy so might be able to manage simple data entry. The problem is, one in every hundred do not survive the redeployment procedure. I can’t say it will be Birgitta, but we might have some bad luck.’

The implication wasn’t lost on me. I was to play ball – or Birgitta died. But again, I had no guarantee that wouldn’t happen anyway.

‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ I said, ‘but I don’t have the cylinder.’

The Notable Goodnight stared at me again for a few moments.

‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’

‘I probably would, actually,’ I said, ‘about some things – y’know, like personal stuff. But not about this.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s perfectly acceptable and understandable,’ replied Goodnight, suddenly coming over all sunny, ‘we just had to be sure, that’s all.’

She gave me a smile and then, the ‘orientation’ over, asked Aurora to show me where I would be staying.