I’m still scared, but now I’m also angry, in a rooted, unreasonable way that I know is not helpful because I can’t back up my anger with any kind of practical power. This is a time for me to be cold and to think really really fast but I’m not put together like that. He’s right: I’m all over the place, I’m a mess, and being threatened like this isn’t suddenly turning me into somebody more competent and quick-thinking like you always somehow hope it will. Like in the movies. No, I have no magic tricks.

The neural gates that Martin manipulated to make Melodie sleepwalk. He can stop muscle atonia. If I fall asleep, he won’t have to murder me. He can come into my dream and trick me into sleepwalking to my own death. Just like what he tried to do when I was on my bike in traffic, in that dream that turned out not to be a dream.

‘It doesn’t have to happen now,’ he says. ‘It can happen whenever I choose. You can be taken out any night at all. Any afternoon nap.’

He watches my face as the implications sink in. He can let me walk out of here and wait until I get home. Until I’m on the Tube. He can wait a year or a day or a month, and I’ll never have a moment’s peace. He has me on the run.

Or does he? The Dream City is my town, too. Unlike London, where he’s powerful and I’m a prole, in the Dream City I’m strong. I have a hammer and stuff.

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ I say. ‘I’m afraid of a lot of things – not spiders, not rats, but a lot of other things, like sometimes even lint scares me if I see a big wodge of it in the wrong light. I’m pretty much a giant bundle of fear, but I’m not afraid of you. Go ahead and try to hack me again. See if you can do it. You’ve tried a couple of times now to get to me, but you haven’t succeeded.’

‘You can thank your defenders for that.’ He smiles warmly. Ooh, I hate him.

‘I can defend myself now. I know what you’re doing, how you’re killing people. I’m not afraid of you.’

‘You said that before. I don’t really care about you. But you keep getting in the way, despite all the extra clients and other incentives you have been given to mind your own business.’

‘Don’t you dare try to take credit for my new clients! People are coming to me because they need help, and they need help because the world is so fucked-up, and it’s fucked-up thanks to people like you!’