While I was studying at Excelsior-Barking, we learned about complexes and how they can act like independent entities that control you, but in reality they’re just sort of psychic parasites. Maybe this is what the Agency is. Maybe it’s not a full-blown AI, but a mental or emotional parasite that lives in collective consciousness. It advances its own interests by using us like pawns.

Maybe the Agency is making me think this. How can I even know? I’m not at all sure my consciousness is located inside my body, at least not any more. Apps are in the cloud; why can’t consciousness be in the Dream City?

I can’t escape the knowledge of what is going on, either. I run but I have this terrible feeling of being overtaken, of being in the path of a wave, and it’s too late but I just can’t face the truth.

Meera’s black Creeper dress slaps wetly against my thighs and back as I run, gasping. Then I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window, and I don’t see my own reflection. I only see the Creeper, running, stopping to stare at itself, then running again. Maybe it’s the dress. I fling it away from me. The mask bumps down the road and disappears in the shadows, but the dress turns back into Meera. She’s running alongside me, her eyes wide and fearful.

I look in another shop window and still see the Creeper, now with Meera running alongside.

‘Charlie! Where are we running to?’ Meera gasps. ‘What’s happening?’

‘You put the Agency in my head!’ I scream at her. ‘It’s inside me now. I can’t get away!’

I can’t run any further. Already I’m out of puff. I stop, bending over, gasping for breath. I shield my eyes from my own reflection. Meera stops, too.

‘I’ve been trying to help you,’ she says. ‘I didn’t put it in your head. BigSky did, remember?’

I want to blame someone, I need to blame someone, but the truth is it doesn’t even matter who did it. Or, as Mel put it, whodunnit. It’s too late for blaming.

My eyes are everywhere. My ears are everywhere. My skin is the sky is the stone.

I can feel the writing in my flesh.

I can feel the writing in my bones.

I am the Dream City.

I am the Agency.

And the Agency is me.

I tell Meera this. I say: ‘It can’t exist without me because it’s in my marrow and in my myelin. For better or worse, we are wedded and we are one.’

I am starting to cry, and not just because my alliteration is so poignant.

‘Meera, if the Agency and I are entwined with one another, does that make me accountable for its crimes? What the fuck am I going to do?’