‘I don’t know.’ She turns her attention back to her work. ‘We haven’t actually identified the mechanism that shuts off R.E.M. atonia. You’d think it would be simple, but it isn’t. There may be more than one mechanism. We know that our agent can switch it on and off, but not how.’

‘Do you always dream about your work?’

‘Yes, if I’m thinking about it, which I usually am.’

‘There must be something else on your mind,’ I suggest, and nudge the walls of the lab with my awareness.

The setting abruptly changes. We are in the HQ of BigSky, which manifests in the Dream City in the form of a literal head. It’s a giant transparent thing plopped in the middle of the grey plane of the Sweet Dreams platform. Inside there are workstations and stairways just as in a real building, but everything is transparent so that the Dream City is visible just through the walls. It’s chaos, with crowds of people moving around us like schools of fish. Meera and I are dressed in navy and grey suits, respectively, and she is carrying a burgundy attaché case.

‘We have to present our ideas about how Little Bird and BigSky can best cooperate to stem the security crisis,’ Meera says. ‘This will include our advice to minimize sleepwalking risk until we can pinpoint the cause. We have to convince BigSky to roll back the beta and run more safety checks on Sweet Dreams. It’s sensitive because of the IP conflict; they didn’t like losing the IP to Little Bird and will try to manoeuvre us into sharing it with them. The fact that you carry the tech in your head will help us. They can’t claim to own you, after all.’

I’m not sure about that, but I don’t argue. This is just her dream. I’m not interested in her subconscious worries about BigSky, I’m looking for signs of what’s really going on in Meera’s mind. I need to know her intentions. We are just about to step into a meeting room when I suddenly realise Meera isn’t with me any more.

She’s collapsed. She’s lying on the floor and there’s something on top of her. A kind of shadow, a formless thing with a white face.

Not this a-bloody-gain. The Creeper. I throw myself down. I try to peel the Creeper off her but I can’t. I roll Meera onto her side, recovery position, and that’s when I see the keyhole in her back.

Before my eyes, the Creeper turns to a black stripe of smoke and flows into the keyhole with a shrill whistle like a steam kettle.

It has her.

‘Who are you?’ I shout at the Creeper, shaking Meera. ‘What are you, damn you?’