I’ve seen what Daphne can do. It shouldn’t even surprise me that it’s my turn to be targeted. After all, the other experimental subjects have been picked off one by one, Bernard is dead, Martin Elstree is dead – I’ve served my purpose and now it’s time for me to go.

I have no tricks up my sleeve. I have no one to save me. This is it. Me and Death dressed up as the Old Woman. Daphne comes very close to me. I want to push her away but I can’t escape. The white face looms large in my vision, the lightless holes for eyes and mouth, the sense of oxygen starvation. I can suddenly feel my heart very loud but I can’t move or breathe. There’s something captivating about it, like when a wolf picks out a sheep for death and I’m the sheep and I just stand there and let it take me. That’s how I feel.

‘I know what you did,’ Daphne says, ‘and I’ve been given a new target by the Agency.’

The giant white face comes closer and closer, my breath stops, maybe my heart stops— And then it’s like something passes through me and out of the other side, bone for bone, vein for vein, molecule for molecule. Then I can’t feel my body at all. I appear to be floating near the ceiling of the room, and I’m looking down on O’s bed where she lies curled up and vulnerable. Only now there’s a big brass key in her back, and it’s turning slowly.

As before, I see Daphne shrink and climb inside O. But I am still in O’s dream. In her dream, the sideways tower has turned to a shard of ice, she and I have fallen, and she is waking in her own bed.

She stirs and thrashes her head, jaw working. I see the veins standing up in her arms and neck and legs. Her veins turn green. They grow branches that pop through her skin and spread across the bed, swelling and extending like the tendrils of a plant. The tendrils thicken to vines and then roots that spread into the floor, gripping the entire room.

Like stars showing through fog, O’s eyes open halfway. She struggles against the bonds, breathing rapidly. She tries to sit up, but she’s restrained by the plant that has grown into her blood system. Her physical weakness is evident. The vines crush her chest. They wrap around her throat.

O stops breathing. Her eyes fade.

She hasn’t even managed to kick off the coverlet. There is no sign of a struggle. Her last will and testament isn’t even wrinkled.

I fall out of O’s dream onto O’s sofa, where I waken reeling in a marsh of sweat and racing heart, my breath coming in sobs.