The song for this chapter is I Am The Actor, by the little-known but brilliant South African band, Falling Mirror. 

The toll currently stands at fifty-eight dead, with six still missing. Crews have been working into the night, clearing debris and searching for possible survivors in thick forest nearby. And now we cross live to Helena Brown, who is at the scene. Helena, what can you tell us?

The screen flickered with endless reruns of footage from earlier in the day, interspersed with live reports from the scene. The figures on the screen momentarily blurred out of focus as drowsiness took hold, my eyes still glued to the screen.

Fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight.

The number repeated in my mind, over and over again. It felt like just an arbitrary number.

A volunteer crew of four of our people were there helping out. They probably wouldn't be sleeping tonight.

The entirety of the Highlands was on high alert tonight. I had just returned from a shift patrolling the pack border, and Laura had a shift later in the night. Through the curtained bedroom window, I could hear the faint sound of conversation.

Laura nudged me.

I briefly shifted my eyes from the rectangle of rapidly changing color before us, to the contents of the letter from yesterday, spread over the bedsheets.

"What are we going to do? Academic Probation says there's nothing they can do now that he's officially dropped out from all of his courses, and he isn't answering my calls."

"That's precisely it. We do nothing. Give him some time. He'll figure it out. He's probably safer staying in Corviston anyway. He'll find a job. Plenty of jobs there. Young people still have a future there, you know. I've got plenty of contacts if he needs references."

"He should come home. I want him to come home."

"What now? You're scared of him doing a bit of hard labour? When I was his age I was working in a bar in West Berlin, trying to scrape together enough for an airfare back."

She sighed. "I want to talk to him. Face to face. I want him to come home in time for the next full moon. The one after this coming one."

"He's old enough to make his own decisions. I can't tell him what to do."

"What do you know about what he wants to do? You don't even know him anymore! He hasn't even talked to you in nearly eight years. You were always too busy. You never had any time. You just paid the school fees. It was always my problem."

I continued to stare at the screen, too ashamed to reply.

Community leaders from around the island have unanimously condemned the attack. The issue of security will be a hot topic at tomorrow's Pan-Lycan Congress in Port Mirabel.

The perpetrators are still at large. Comparisons have been made to the acts of terror during the 1990s...

Laura shifted the subject. "Well. That pack meeting went well."

"You can't please them. You'll never please them. They want action. They want to see stuff happen. They want blood spilled. They want the good old days, when packs fought to the death over literal spilt milk and the word of the Alpha was law. The good old days.""

"Most of their criticisms were justified, to be fair."

"Maybe they should have listened a little closer to what you had said. You had some good points."

"Shh. They've updated the death toll." I returned my attention to the TV.

She wrested the remote from my hand. I didn't stop her. "They're gone, Jim. Gone. Watching news reruns isn't going to bring them back from the dead."

I continued to stare at the screen as she flicked through the channels. "They were lovely people. Why did they have to die?"

All the news channels were running the same thing. More news channels all still stuck on rewind. A wildlife documentary about frogs. An ad for the new line of Thunder Falls paperbacks.

She stopped on Fang!, the premier Zirconian cable channel.

The Real Lunas of Corviston, the top-rated reality show in Zirconia, was on.

I mentally braced myself. "Really?"

"It's better than nothing." I was too fatigued to argue.

On screen, Madison had invited Heidi, Chantal, and Serena over to confront them about their gossiping about something. Or at least that's what it seemed like to me at a glance; they were in the dining room of Madison's palatial fifteen-bedroom, sixteen-bathroom mansion, and they appeared to be on the verge of a big fight. I suspected Brian would have some constructive criticism about the interior décor.

The conversation was just getting heated.

"Don't ******** touch me you ******* ***** slut!"

"YOU DUMB ******* ****!"

There was a rough scraping sound as Madison, eyes bright yellow in half-shift, dragged a shrieking Chantal halfway across the room by her hair.

As a mass of arms and legs and nails careered into the cameraman and the other guests jumped in to break up the melee, the camera panned upwards momentarily towards the expansive ceiling, decorated with elaborate cornices and lead-window skylights.

Laura switched the TV off. "I can't imagine how I'd be able to live in a house that big. I just can't. I'd get the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that's called..."

"Agoraphobia."

"That's it. I'd be such a basket of nerves I'd have to lock myself in the omega quarters."

She stared at the screen in front of her. "I could have left everything and emigrated to Zirconia. Hell, I could have been one of them by now. I could have had all of that."

"Laura, what the hell are you talking about?"

"We already watch their TV shows and use their currency. Don't tell me you don't want to be like them, Jim. We don't hate Zirconians of their trashy culture or the land that they occupied. We hate them because they've done the exact thing we've been trying to do since the dawn of time: beating humans at their own game."

"Laura. We're not moving there. Don't be ridiculous."

"They've achieved everything we wanted to achieve. They worked hard, they invested wisely, and now they've got the best education system in the world. Third highest life expectancy. Human countries look up to them as role models. We could do it. There's no reason we can't be exactly like them. We're the same people, the same flesh and blood. But no. we're stuck here in the Middle Ages in the middle of the forest."

"We are not emigrating and that's final."

"Here we go again. We mustn't show any weakness, because we're werewolves and we're strong, unlike those weak, useless humans who need a functioning society to keep themselves from dying! We'll deal with just about anything Monagh throws at us without a thought as to why we must continue. We'll let a bunch of alpha pricks lord over us! We'll line up for three hours to buy groceries with trillion-dollar notes and send our kids to school without textbooks or uniforms, and we'll all endure all of this because it'll all be worth it in the end when we go to meet Monagh in the sky!

She turned to me. "Remember when we were younger, Jim? When we wanted to change the world? We were going to beat those uncultured Zirconian upstarts at their own game, we were going to put the Independent Territories on the map. What are we doing with our lives, Jim? Do you even care anymore? Tell me that you care."

"Of course I care," I said flatly, somewhat aware of the irony of my reply.

"So what's the master plan? Where do you see us in five years? Ten?"

I didn't answer. I had no answer.

"We're going nowhere, Jim! Just sitting on our arses, letting the grifters and kleptocrats drag us down. We're afraid, Jim. We're afraid of stepping out of our little circle. We don't want to make changes. We're too fucking selfish to change. Admit it. You just dress up nicely to go to Congress every year and that's it. We don't even talk to the other packs outside of Congress. We're very lucky to have Stone River, but we barely know any of the other packs at all. We just hole ourselves up with fences and borders and strips of neutral land. This isn't how we were meant to live, this isn't how Monagh intended it!"

She stretched out. "Maybe Ruth Gray was right. Maybe there is something rotten at the very core and we need to start from scratch."

I stared at the dark screen of the TV. "So you want a fresh start, over the border? Are you crazy? Do you really think this is going to go down well with the other pack members? What are the other packs going to say?" I fought the sleep in my eyes.

'If they want to come with us, then they can come. Otherwise they can go to the other packs. We'll sell the land to Stone River, buy a nice big house in Corviston. Or a penthouse suite in Briarleaf or something like that."

"Are you seriously considering this?"

"I'm completely serious," she replied.

"I still think you're crazy." Out in the darkness of the outside, the noise had subsided. All was still now.

Laura's eyes had that dreamy look in them again. "Or maybe we'll go live in a human country. Australia or New Zealand or somewhere like that. People are always telling us about how nice it is down there."

"Lars and Gunhild, right? Well, they have to. They work for the Australian government. Of course they'd tell you that Australia is the greatest country ever. They probably got paid for that."

"They're honest people. They wouldn't lie!"

"Never mind. I could never live like that, trying to hide among humans. Nosy bastards, the lot of them. Trying to keep one step ahead of them is fucking impossible. They'll get us in the end."

"There's plenty of open wildernesses in Australia. Up in the Kimberley or something. They'd never find us."

"I'm telling you, you have no idea how hard it is to teach humans the concept of privacy. You have no idea how many close calls I went through during my backpacking years."

"Maybe we should sleep on it. You have Congress tomorrow-" she checked the alarm clock on the bedside table, "-and my pack patrol shift is coming right up." She got up and got dressed.

"You said Congress is a pointless exercise."

"Well, you should still get a good night's sleep."

"I feel so useless. Sleeping here, while my mate goes on border patrol."

"Lucky you," was her reply. "Good night."

"Good night." She turned the lights out as she opened the door. I lay still, listening to her footsteps as she walked out into the night.

I continued to lay awake for some time, staring at the slivers of moonlight filtering through the curtains, listening to the very faint noises of the pack patrol.