She frowns. ‘Is this a joke?’

‘No. No joke. Think of something to tell your family because we’re sleeping together tonight.’

Awake

Awake

It’s getting late when Shandy emerges from the cloud to help me do this thing with Meera. She deactivates Rodney at my request; even so, her presence lends a slumber-party atmosphere to the proceedings. Meera thinks all of this sleeping-together is some kind of weird initiation rite, contrived so that I can convince myself she’s harmless – and to some degree, it is. I’m going to get inside her head and find out what she’s really made of.

We drag my mattress into the sitting room and haul out extra blankets and pillows. Shandy has taken all the sharp objects away. I’m leaving nothing to chance.

If O was really the mastermind behind everything, then no one will try to hurt either of us now. If Meera herself was the mastermind and somehow manoeuvred O into taking the actions that she did before killing her in the name of the Agency, then I’ll find that out soon enough as well. She won’t be able to hide from me. The fact that Meera’s willing go along with this says one of two things: either she’s keen to convince me to cooperate with BigSky so she can keep Little Bird going, or she’s looking to mix it up with me in dreamspace. As unlikely as the second option feels, I’ve been wrong about nearly everything so far. I’ve got to be ready for anything.

She tosses and turns. Finally falls asleep around two. The last thing I remember is the image of Shandy curled up in a chair under a reading lamp, absorbed in an illustrated book about the history of pubs. Then I close my eyes and slip into Meera’s dream.

It’s a strange intimacy, dreaming with someone you barely know. So backwards to find out someone’s deepest insecurities and wishes before you even have a clue how they like their coffee or where they grew up. But I doubt it’s much of a secret that even in her dreams, Meera is to be found in her lab.

She’s working on a 3D simulation of the agent as it embeds in the skull and invades the white matter. She’s using code to mimic the effects of drugs on different receptors to predict the agent’s behaviour in vivo. The simulation is covered with flags and notes so that it looks more like a map of a battle than a blown-up section of microscopic tissue.

‘How does sleepwalking fit into this?’ I ask her quietly. She looks up, sees me and frowns.