There’s a series of popping sounds like fireworks, and then the floor of the lift punches into the bottom of my feet and I stagger, grabbing on to the wire cage as the lift goes hurtling into the sky, shuddering, jerking and making the most godawful bird-of-prey screams as metal grinds on metal. As it rises, the cage begins to bank to the right, and I feel my wrapped hair tugging sideways on my skull as if I’m on a roller coaster.

Then, without warning, all sound ceases and I’m momentarily weightless. The cage is now perpendicular to the canal and I’m floating with my face towards the sky, its deep-purple skin freckled by constellations that light pollution can’t erase. Now my feet are level with the sprawling sideways-restaurant and I smell seafood.

The lift cage jerks once again and my sense of weight returns. I am at a ninety-degree angle to the side of the building, with its walls acting as the new ground beneath my feet. The entire Dream City appears to be sideways. I don’t entirely trust my own senses, but I can stand just fine.

A rude buzzing sound coincides with the flashing of an old-fashioned incandescent red light bulb over the door. Then silence. I try the cage door. It opens with a grinding noise and I step out onto the polished black glass of the building’s exterior.

The open-air restaurant is spread out over the side of the building, but all of the chairs and tables are orientated so that the patrons are facing the sky. Delicacies from every continent clutter the tables, while the candles burn sideways. Most of the people are beautiful, and I stare rudely. I am barefoot and my PJs refuse to turn into a better outfit despite all my efforts. A waiter comes up out of a hatch in the floor, sees me, lifts his eyebrows and makes a point of skirting wide around me.

I find O sitting alone at a banquet table. There’s no food in front of her, just a half-finished glass of red wine. I pull up a chair next to her and she glances briefly at me, gives the slightest shade of a nod before turning her attention to the sky. As if it’s just an ordinary evening. The righteous fury that has been burning in my belly is quenched as abruptly as if someone tossed a bucket of piss on my campfire. I don’t know how to begin.

‘I don’t even know what to say to you.’

‘Then don’t say anything. If you’ve come to kill me, you may as well get on with it.’

‘Kill you? No, I came to talk to you. To try to understand.’

‘You’ll never understand me. We are fundamentally different kinds of creature.’

‘Did you send Daphne to kill the other people in my study?’