‘Where are you?’ I shout it into the general darkness. The architecture of the Dream City crowds around me. I’m standing under an iron bridge that spans the canal, and high overhead the neon cycleways scroll in vivid pink and green, parting around the scaffolds that cloak BigSky’s nascent platform. Down here it smells like algae and sump. I cup my hands around my mouth.

‘Hey! Creeper! You! Show yourself!’

But nothing happens. After a while, I find a flight of cracked steps that leads up to a roadway where shuffling greyscale dreamers walk by in bowler hats and eyeless white masks like a twenty-first-century Magritte painting. All along the road, buildings poached from real-life London march higgledy-piggledy, complete with chimney pots and subsidence; above their gables, the sleek curves of the Dream City shine like a long-exposure night shot of highway spaghetti. Past and future grafted uneasily upon one another.

I start walking, noisily because there’s water in my trainers. The streets themselves twist as I move, leading me around corners and down flights of stairs and over bridges. I keep going, choosing the way by instinct. It all feels like I’m unravelling a tangled cord or solving an algebra problem. Like following a dangerous thought to its logical conclusion.

Eventually, I come to a courtyard. Its once-grand stone buildings are worn and subsiding, its paving stones buckled. A defunct fountain sits in the centre, once bronze but now pale green, carved in the shape of a broken harp and presiding over a half-full pool of moondark, mossy water.

I am spooked out right now.

Above me in the darkness there’s a noise of wings, and then a gothic creaking sound as a door opens in the building to my left. A wedge of yellow light falls across the pavement of the courtyard. In the half-open doorway, I glimpse part of a person in silhouette, but before I can focus properly, they turn and disappear inside the building, leaving the door open.

I’ve seen enough to know who it is. Who it has to be.

Still carrying the sopping black dress and mask, I bolt forwards and stumble through the door.

The lighted room is decorated like an early-twentieth-century salon. The furniture is gleaming cherry wood with Prussian-blue velvet upholstery, and there are delicate incandescent lamps and a fire burning in an open hearth. On the walls are oil paintings depicting Bernard, Melodie, O, Martin Elstree . . . And one empty frame. For Meera?

Or for me?

Opposite the fire stands Mel, dressed in a sheer red empire-waisted gown as if she’s attending the opera, one hand resting lightly on the strings of a great harp. When I enter, she takes her seat and begins to play softly with her head bent, in her own private world.

I drop to my knees on the floor, dripping. I’m shaking with silent sobs.