Lucy Knapp was the next person of note to walk through the doors. We’d seen each other daily for eighteen years until she left to go to HiberTech Training College. Friendships ebbed and flowed in the Pool, but Lucy and I had always been close. In the six years since she’d left we’d spoken at least once a month.

‘Hey,’ I said, and we tapped fists together, one on top of another, a sort of secret handshake from way back I-don’t-know-when.

Lucy and I were responsible for the dried smear of banoffee pie still stuck to the face of St Somnia on the ceiling frieze overhead, a reminder of a memorable food-fight back in ’96. There was even the dent in the plasterwork where Donna Trinket, intent on breaking the ground-floor lap record on roller skates, had come a cropper owing to some recklessly spilt Heinz spaghetti hoops by the kitchens.

‘So what’s this about you joining Prudential Winter Life?’ she asked with, I think, a sense of friendly derision.

‘Anything to get me out of this dump,’ I replied, ‘but it’s not like I can only sell Hibernational Cover with optional Redeployment and Mandatory Transplant payments – there’s also whole-life insurance, term, dental, fire and auto, not to mention frost damage. What do you think?’

‘I can hardly contain my indifference.’

‘I feel the same way, but, well, y’know, Morphenox.’

I would be expected to work the first ten years at minimum wage, but it would be worth it. Not for the job, of course, which was dull as meltwater, but for the specific perk that went with it: Prudential would transfer my rights to Morphenox across from St Granata’s without interruption. I could, quite literally, sleep easy. Despite the strict contractual obligations, lack of job mobility and freedom of choices that it entailed, the career move would be a no-brainer. I could finally get away from here with pharmaceutical privileges undiminished.

*   *   *

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘did you hear that Ed Dweezle danced the Night Fandango?’

‘Yeah,’ said Lucy, ‘I heard.’

Dweezle always had trouble keeping weight on. We used to sneak him part of our food to help him out. I don’t know how he’d lasted three Winters on his own once out of St Granata’s, but it must have been expensive. Despite being dosed up to the gills on Morphenox he’d entered his fourth Hib way too light and run out of reserves three weeks short of Springrise. He’d nightwalked and been redeployed as a street-sweeper somewhere up north, then parted out eight months later.

‘Useful until death and beyond,’ said Lucy, ‘as the company likes to promote itself in slogans.’

The company to which she referred was HiberTech, who made Morphenox, redeployed any nightwalkers that were suitable and then supervised the transplant potential of each. Their nightwalker policy was neatly – some said perfectly – vertically integrated. There was another slogan:

Everything of use but the yawn.™