to take Wendy back to her quarters, a converted janitor’s cupboard on the fourth floor, just below the rotunda. I sat there trying to make sense of how my situation had changed so dramatically, and in just a few hours. Last night I was dreaming I was working for RealSleep in a life-or-death struggle against a pharmaceutical corporation with only the slenderest grasp of morality – and now I was doing the very same thing, for real.
‘Hey,’ said Josh as he was walking past, I think to his quarters somewhere.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happens to you now?’
‘I get to stay in Sector Twelve until Springrise then try and make it back to Canada without HiberTech noticing.’
He gave me his hand and I shook it gratefully.
‘May the Spring embrace you,’ I said.
‘And embrace you,’ he replied, then smiled, and moved off.
I watched him go, then felt hungry and rummaged in my shoulder bag for my spare Snickers, while at the same time wondering if the feelings I held for Birgitta were actually mine at all, and not simply Webster’s, projected into my subconscious by the Somnagraph. I opened the bag as I couldn’t find the Snickers, and took out my purse, spare pants, paracetamol, the Polaroid of Birgitta and Charles and Laura’s Instamatic camera. No sign of the Snickers. The Gronk must have taken that, too. I looked at the camera again and frowned. All four flashes had been fired, even though I had replaced the flashcube after the attack by the nightwalkers. I looked at the back of the camera; the window showed I’d taken eight pictures but I could only remember taking four.
Out there on the way over, when I was upside down in the snow and cooling rapidly, I must have taken four pictures of something.
And that something may have been the Gronk.
White-out
* * *
‘… Although the shock-suit wouldn’t protect the wearer against the kinetic effects of a thump, it would negate the primary effects to the lungs, sinuses and Eustachian tubes, and greatly reduce secondary effects such as capillary rupture, internal bleeds and axonal shearing. The more modern suits have H4S, cooling and wireless, with a power pack to give ten hours’ survival down to minus forty …’
– The Elegant Simplicity of WinterTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng
It was half an hour before we were ready to leave, and we talked continually as we prepared. Toccata had been roped in to assist, despite her often erratic behaviour, which explained amongst other things why there were so many nightwalkers in the Cambrensis: she’d decided one day that no more would be retired or deployed, so had falsified the HotPot overheat to clear out the Cambrensis to make room. Quite how long they could be held there was never discussed, nor if this was a practical or well-thought-out policy – which it clearly wasn’t. But if it was a gut decision like the one I made about Birgitta, I totally got it.
Dr Gwynne was not coming with us. He viewed himself as being possessed of ‘Fortitude Lite’62 but was good at technical support.
‘Good luck,’ he said as we were preparing to leave.
I thanked him and passed over a scribbled note.
‘I know this is a long shot,’ I said, ‘and the weather’s bad and everything, but I have a suggestion as to how you could redeploy at least one of the Golgothas to greater effect.’
He looked at the note and nodded slowly, then patted me on the shoulder, told me to take care, and we parted.
‘The plan is simple,’ said Foulnap as we walked down to the museum’s basement. ‘We go to the Siddons and retrieve the Somnagraph, then head to the Cambrensis for the cylinder. If anyone tries to stop us, we thump them.’
‘It has the benefit of simplicity.’
‘The best plans always do.’
The museum basement was used mostly for storage and contained a fairground ride, an entire Railplane tractor unit and half-scale educational models of a HotPot, both the closed thermosiphon and sintered hotplate version. There was also a collection of the now unfashionable hyperbaric deep-sleep chambers and a moth-eaten animatronic giant tree sloth, which had been doing the rounds as they were on the brink of extinction. More relevant to us there was a Welsh licence-built Sno-Trac branded a Griffin V, which looked as though it had just been pulled off display.
Foulnap instructed me to start her up and drive her out so I climbed in, my shock-suit more restricting than cumbersome. I hadn’t actually wanted to wear the