The song is Trans-Island Skyway by Donald Fagen. Temperatures are in Celsius. 

The Moon Goddess glided along effortlessly in fifth gear, engine thrumming away at a steady 3500 revs, just a hair under eighty miles an hour. The road was unsealed and heavily washboarded, but she just floated over the bumps like they weren't there.

The happenings of the past week seemed miles away. I felt completely relaxed.

The truck ahead of us was taking it slow due to the poor condition of the road, and the supercharged Goddess was quickly catching up. I checked that the opposite lane was clear before pulling out.

We cruised slowly past the semi-trailer, and then a black G-Wagen with Golden Fir plates. Its suited occupants were clearly not enjoying the ride too much. Brian waved, briefly taking his hand off the windowsill. They didn't wave back.

I suddenly noticed the familiar slim black book in Brian's hands as I merged back onto the right side of the road. "Seriously, Brian?"

"It's the greatest book of all time. You don't know what you're missing out on. It's got everything. Alpha kings, next-level mate bond pseudoscience, a rank system that maybe three Alphas could actually understand, the works."

I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel a little, until I had just two fingers on the wheel. "Sounds interesting."

We were in the High plains. The forest had long given way to barren grasslands. through which the road ran, straight as an arrow. Once upon a time, wolves had struggled to survive here, eking out a meagre existence trapping the burrowing rats that were the only source of food on the barren plains.

The windows were down and the radio was tuned to Sunshine Beach Radio. Mine by Zenia, the official anthem for every 1980s teen wolf, was belting out of the stereo.

He's mine

Mine!

Mine...

The music faded. replaced by the inimitable opening chords of Josie.

Brian looked puzzled. "How the hell did they skip from Zenia to Steely Dan?"

I sighed. "It's what happens when you give full control of a radio station to someone whose only previous experience with human music was the Nokia ringtone."

"It's not that I don't like Steely Dan," Brian mumbled. "I'm just sick and tired of them."

"They're still a damn sight better than that lycanpop dreck Zirconians keep on trying to flog to us," I offered, seeing Brian's pained expression.

"Zenia's pretty good."

"She was one of the last. All the new music is manufactured garbage."

"You know what? Let's switch to Quaking Tree FM." Brian put his hand on the radio dial. "At least I can get behind lycanfolk, however mediocre it may be."

I shrugged. "You know, I've never understood the appeal of songs titled 'We Will Crush The Zirconian Scum For Five Hundred Years To Come.' Anyway, go ahead."

Brian switched the channel.

***

My predecessor as Alpha had always had some crazy get-rich-quick schemes. Back then, Interpack Bus Lines was just one rusty old Leyland bus that we occasionally loaned out to other packs, and we spent most of our days praying to the Moon Goddess that we would have food on the table tomorrow and the power wouldn't be cut off.

Then one day he had been visiting another pack, when he heard Deacon Blues playing in the pack house.

And so my acquaintance with the body of work of Messrs Becker and Fagen had been born. One minute we didn't know who the hell Steely Dan were, and the next Alpha Daniel had somehow managed to get a loan from the Ebony Oak Pack, and we were sitting on three thousand copies of Aja and trying to flog them as fast as possible.

This was back in the 1970s. The OPLU had just been founded, and the Special Industrial Zone was just a barren grassland. Rogue attacks were still a very real threat, and the relationship with Zirconia was still rocky. So most of the time we'd load the records into the then-Beta's old pickup truck, and drive out the neighbouring packs and attempt to convince them to pay for some fine human music. Usually we'd get chased away. Sometimes we'd come home with bite marks.

So in the end, we just lazed around the pack house and listened to the records until we knew the lyrics off by heart, until Alpha Daniel had come up with his next scheme of rebodying some secondhand school buses from somewhere in the US and running them under the brand name of Interpack Buslines.

They were good memories.

***

All highways within the Sunshine Beach Pack were tolled, and the main gateway was an enormous gold-plated tollbooth, in the middle of a dust bowl. On the sides of the road a long jam of long-haul trucks sat idling, waiting for their cargo to be checked.

Everyone was still on high alert. and security was tight. Private security personnel in heavy black uniforms swarmed around the tollbooth. They waved us right through.

Past the bottleneck of the tollbooth, the dirt road very quickly transformed into four lanes of perfectly laid tarmac, most of them empty. To the left of the road, an enormous golden statue of a mother wolf and her cubs rose twenty metres into the sky, welcoming us to the pack territory. There were visible spots where the gold coating was beginning to tarnish.

I hit the accelerator, letting the supercharger spool up.

All access to the highway had been blocked off. The alphas had the road to themselves.

A road gang was at work on the side of the highway. We watched on as they put down their tools as one and bowed their heads in submission at the oncoming convoy of vehicles.

Brian waved, a little more enthusiastically than what was needed. "Welcome to Zombieland."

Twenty miles later, the road took a sweeping right turn, as it reached the turquoise waters of the lake. From here on the road hugged the coast all the way to Port Mirabel.

A canary-yellow Bentley passed us like we were standing still, closely followed by a signal green Porsche 911 and a purple Lamborghini. On the water, they were being paced by a speedboat, and in the air, by a helicopter. I wondered how they were going to decide the winner.

We were getting close.

A gathering of small chalets set onto a lush green embankment hove into sight on our right, almost ethereal in its perfection. idyllic beauty. This was the image of the Sunshine Beach Pack Cameron wanted to project onto the outside world. Strong. United. Independent.

Neon-lit casinos and hotel towers rose up around us as we entered Port Mirabel proper, looking completely ill at ease in their lakeside backdrop, as if they had been dropped there from the sky.

The Corniche, the palm tree-lined main avenue that wound along the lakeshore, was narrowed down to one lane in each direction due to preliminary works for a new light rail line, and we slowed to a crawl as we approached the centre of town. Every second car seemed to be a Mercedes G-Class.

Brian looked at the construction crews, busy laying tracks and pouring concrete in the median of the wide boulevard. "They got sweettalked into adding stuff like ground-level power collection and leather seats. Who puts leather seats into a tram? The Canterbury Transport people are probably shitting themselves laughing right now."

I watched some workers laying concrete. "They asked me for advice on the design of the stops. I politely told them to fuck off when I read the design brief and found out they wanted air-conditioned stop shelters. It doesn't even get higher than about twenty degrees here in summer."

"How does that even work?"

"I think they have them in Dubai."

"Why didn't they just put a big freeway viaduct over this? It would make it a hell of a lot more beautiful." Brian cringed at a particularly egregious attempt at a faux-Gothic storefront. "This place looks like Tim and Eric got hired to design a town."

We made progress at an excruciating pace. The Moon Goddess was surprisingly at home in this rarefied environment of supercars and luxury SUVs. There were plenty of stares directed at this strange Gallic beast as it glided by. I saw several camera flashes.

Beachgoers frolicked on the famous white sands, against which the blue waters lapped gently. Yachts and other pleasure craft were moored on a marina which stretched out into the lake. On the other side, luxury boutiques lined the road, housed behind faux-classical facades. Hublot, Balenciaga, Chanel. More flags emblazoned with Alpha Cameron, flying at half-mast. A coach regurgitated its load of human tourists, a small fraction of the many who flocked here to seek their fortunes at the casinos.

We passed the construction site of the Mirabel Heights casino tower. When completed it would be the second-tallest building in the Independent Territories, after the Ebony Bank Tower in the Special Industrial Zone. It stood on the former site of the Crescent Moon temple, one of the oldest and most historically significant temples in the wereworld. Packs from as far abroad as New Zealand and South Africa had unanimously condemned the demolition. A group of Zirconian archaeologists and historians had gone one step further, travelling over and chaining themselves to the temple.

Being intent on making his legacy and showing no weakness, Alpha Cameron did not relent, and true to his word, one frosty morning, several hundred of his men had descended on the site, dragged the protesters away, and the temple had been reduced to rubble in front of their eyes. It had taken some expert diplomacy on the part of the Zirconians to get them back home in one piece.

The western façade of the temple had been left standing, a thin veneer of stone heavily ringed by scaffolding, standing sadly by itself on the edge of the construction site, to be incorporated into the side entrance to the new casino.

Finally we cleared the bottleneck and left the town centre. The lapis lazuli waters of the lake spread out beyond the white sand. Up on the cliffs above the road, opulent holiday homes looked out onto the waters of the lake.

We passed a small valley, which one of the tributaries feeding into the lake had carved into the hillside over millennia, and for a split second one could see the dense clusters of one-room wooden shacks that lined the valley and most of the foothills above Port Mirabel, which housed the majority of the workforce. There was a reason most official photos of Port Mirabel were either taken at the other end of town or from high above, looking out onto the lake.

And then the valley disappeared behind us, and Alpha Cameron's residence loomed up ahead, a vaguely neoclassical white marble monstrosity that looked like the result of a medieval castle's one night stand with the Parthenon.

Brian winced audibly. "Get that thing away from me."

The previous Alpha of the Sunshine Beach Pack had lived in a low-rise modernist affair. It clearly had not been flamboyant enough for Cameron's tastes.