I cannot really see her: only a shimmer of her flesh as I chase her through the corridors. I have skills that I don’t have in real life, the ability to dance through this lack of gravity as if I was born in it. I catch glimpses of Inna’s tattoos as I chase her: the head of that bird, and in my dream, the way it coils around her body, turning into chimera, bird and snake and lion, all drawn around her body. She stops and turns, and the tattoos shift around her, like a story come to life. The lion eats the bird. The bird eats the snake. The snake somehow consumes the lion, slackening and dropping its jaws and taking it all in. This is all I can see: the swirling colours of the animals, so bright and crisp and deadly. I wake up and I am at the console, and I am drifting slightly upwards, my body slack. It’s scary, this feeling; and my mouth is dry, and my neck throbs and aches. ‘It’s definitely the Ishiguro,’ Tomas says over the speakers, and that is what wakes me. I look at a clock: I have been asleep for three hours, as best I can tell.
