‘No clue how you can know these things,’ I mutter, cowed by O’s confidence.

‘I know these things because I am nosy and overpaid and have too much time on my hands,’ she says. ‘We live in an age of groupthink, mind-reading AIs, covert control via anxiety and a large helping of deliberate blindness. Now you tell me you can awaken within a dream of an evolving city, walk around inside it, interact with it, find anyone there and get into their head. And someone is already wandering around there tricking dreamers into sleepwalking. Well, who is that someone? What is that someone? And why are they doing it?’

I poke at the onions with a wooden spoon, trying to separate the salvageable bits from the char.

‘The why is the easy part, I suppose,’ I say. ‘There are so many nasty things you could do by dreamhacking, and sleepwalking kind of crosses a bridge between the psychological and the physical. I mean, look at my narcolepsy. Caused by an infection. Only manifests when I’m under stress.’

‘Yes. Well, the brain is just an interface between the physical and the abstract.’

I’m close to the edge of another idea, but before the thought can form fully it’s interrupted by Edgar. He has committed too much weight in moving towards the bowl of whisked eggs on the counter and dislodges one of O’s giant wine glasses which I’ve unwisely balanced at the top of the tower of dishes. Out of the corner of my eye I see it begin to fall but I’m too far away to hope to stop it. O’s uninjured hand shoots out and catches it in mid-fall. Absent-mindedly, she passes it to me without ever taking her eyes off the birds on the roof.

‘Bad cat,’ she says to Edgar, who is now lapping at the bowl of beaten eggs.

I stare at O. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast, let alone an eighty-something-year-old lady.

‘How—?’

‘Used to play squash,’ she says, but doesn’t meet my eye. ‘Reflexes, you know. Are you watching that pan this time?’

‘Trying,’ I say grimly.

‘About the commotion last night. I fear you’re in danger from yourself.’

‘I’m fine. It was unpleasant, but no lasting damage.’

‘And you couldn’t move. At all.’

‘Not at first. I was right on the edge between being asleep and being awake. I could see the room, but I could see the Creeper, too, until it sort of crawled onto my skin and became part of me. I guess that’s the frightening part, how the Creeper didn’t only terrorise Mel in her dreams, but actually controlled her body while she was sleeping. It’s too fourth-wall for me. I don’t want to be zombified.’