Early Riser_ The new standalone - Jasper Fforde Page 0,154

I needed to get us both into HiberTech to meet them head on, and there was only one person who could get us there. I swiftly climbed out of the shock-suit and then stared at Toccata with a sense of morbid fascination as she changed from one person to the other. Her unseeing right eye moved violently around in its socket, then, after some jerks, a quivering foot and some swearing, her eyes swapped: the left eye became the unseeing eye, and her right popped open.

‘Charlie?’ said Aurora, sitting up and looking around. ‘Is that you?’

‘It’s me.’

‘Where are we?’

‘The Siddons,’ I said, feigning a quivering lip. ‘Thank goodness you’re here. Hugo Foulnap and his RealSleep nutjobs tried to kidnap me – I think they killed one of your agents up on the ninth.’ I gave out an award-winning sob. ‘You’ve got to help me.’

‘Everything’s all right now,’ she said in a soothing tone, taking my hand in hers. ‘I promise.’

Orientation

* * *

‘… The HiberTech facility was originally designed to alleviate the long-term suffering brought on by the occasional side effects of hibernation, before medical science began to get a handle on potential cures. Hibernational Narcosis sufferers constituted the majority of patients, and those with emaciatory muscle loss and calcium migration equal close second …’

– HiberTech: A Short History, by Ronald Fudge

It was lucky I did what I did when I did it. Six more HiberTech Security agents were through the door of the Siddons within a minute of Toccata turning into Aurora. She seemed curiously accepting of the fact that she was in different clothes in a strange place, but presumably she was used to this by now. While the HiberTech Security agents went up to the ninth floor to investigate, Aurora sat me down and quizzed me on what was going on.

‘Hooke and I were ambushed when he was taking me to safety at HiberTech,’ I explained, trying to make it all sound plausible. ‘He goes out in the Winter and vanishes, and I go to look for him and I find him, dead, but then I lose the line and make it to the – um – museum, and Danny Pockets is there, who is actually Hugo Foulnap, and he gives me all this bullshit about needing a cylinder and the dreams being projected into my head and we go to the Siddons because he’s convinced there’s a dream machine in 902 but then one of your agents killed Foulnap who is then killed in turn by … Toccata.’

Aurora looked around nervously.

‘She’s here?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘she left just before you arrived.’

Aurora frowned and her unseeing eye twisted and turned in its socket.

‘She keeps on doing that. Why does she keep on doing that?’

The last part of her sentence she delivered in an angry, almost frightened tone, and she gripped my arm so tightly it was painful.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Toccata’s up to something,’ she continued. ‘She wants to bring me down. Why would she want to bring me down?’

She glared at me dangerously.

‘I still don’t know.’

She stared at me some more and then seemed to relax.

‘Tell me more about the cylinder that Foulnap mentioned.’

‘I don’t know anything. He didn’t elaborate.’

One of her agents came downstairs and whispered in her ear.

‘So the Foulnap part of your story is correct,’ she said. ‘Do you know what he was doing in Sector Twelve? Something to do with RealSleep?’

I decided to just play dumb.

‘That’s above my intellect and pay grade,’ I said simply, staring at my feet. ‘I’m just a stranded Novice with narcosis, having bizarre dreams that I’m remembering backwards.’

She stared at me for a while longer.

‘Okay, then,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘we’ll debrief more at our leisure. The job at HiberTech still stands. Light duties until the narcosis clears. Up for it?’

I said I was, and after being checked for weapons I was ushered into a waiting Sno-Trac and driven across to HiberTech, the storm still raging, the small vehicle buffeted by a wind that on occasions seemed to blow in all directions at once. I sat in the back without a plan of any sort – I’d seen too many plans come to naught recently to have any hope that if I made one, all would be well. But if I’d learned anything from Logan, it was that plans often get in the way of a fast-moving incident-rich landscape, so better to have on-the-hoof flexibility – and objectives.

I so had objectives. And, as I said earlier, a couple of