I was standing on the margin of the main road, a thin ribbon of asphalt threading through the barren plains between the concrete skyline of the Industrial Zone on the horizon, to the forest and the mountains beyond. Cars roared past, throwing up clouds of dust. The sky was an almost completely uniform blue, with the faint dusk of late afternoon setting in.

I was waiting. We had talked briefly before, on the phone, as I walked from Copenhagen Town to the road. Nobody seemed to have any more than an inkling of who I was, and neither did they seem curious to find out. It felt strangely liberating. Something in the crisis years of the 1990s had quietly defused the centuries-long hostilities, or maybe they had just pointed out the sheer absurdity of it all. Or maybe the paranoia had finally scrubbed the last irrational vestiges of pack prejudice.

Of course, hanging over all this in my mind was the ominous and omnipresent thought that this was all going to change very soon.

It did not take long until the familiar shark-like snout appeared in the steady stream of counterpeak traffic coming down from the mountains. El Tiburon, the Spanish called it. The Shark.

It veered onto the shoulder towards me. There was a screech of brakes. The car rocked on its haunches.

"Careful with the brakes," I shouted into the open passenger-side window as Brian pulled up. "Just a light touch."

"That's exactly what I did. It's literally like an on-off switch."

"I mean light." I got in. "The tiniest effort possible. Like you're tickling it with your toe. The whole point of this car is as little effort as possible."

"I can see that in the rustproofing."

"They bought some shitty Russian steel. Everybody makes mistakes."

Brian flicked the column shift into second and rejoined the traffic, cutting off a Toyota van which honked in our wake. "This thing is actually pretty nice to drive. It has more power than I expected. So, where are we going?"

"We're going to back to the, uh, crime scene. We're going to take a look around. See if there's anything we missed."

"So Herman's being putting ideas in your head again? Was this his idea or yours?"

I was keeping an eye on the steering wheel. I didn't exactly trust Brian's driving skills, at least with the Moon Goddess, but then the heavy traffic meant we were not in danger of doing anything more than walking pace for the time being. "Surely they're going to have it guarded. To keep the evidence pure. They are absolutely not going to just let us in. Have you even thought this through?"

"I have."

"OK, Jim, then, run me through this great plan of yours. So what's our story if there are people there and they get suspicious that we've turned up?"

"Well, all things considered," I reasoned, "they should have nothing to hide. You know, we're just curious, We are just two high-ranking wolves who want to see some things for ourselves. We're not armed or dangerous. If we do get turned back, then I guess they're doing their job. So we'll just go home."

"Hmm. Maybe there's just nothing to see. Maybe everything happened like they said it did."

"You know, none of this woul have happened if everyone had everyone else's back, and we weren't just a bunch of atomized, isolated packs fighting against each other. I know it sounds cheesy, but we should be working together, not just delegating it all to some pack that just made contact with the outside world for the first time in twenty years two months ago."

"But we are. That's what the raid's about, right?"

"That's just Thunder Falls leading us by the neck. More precisely, that attack dog of his. Stevenson. It's like we're drugged. Like he's put something in the water. We're not being skeptical. We're not questioning. What are his intentions? What does he want to do?"

Brian did his 'I knew you'd say that' facial expression. "He wants to make money selling his shit to us. For fuckssakes, Jim, sometimes I can't believe you've lasted this far as fucking Alpha. Alpha my fucking arse. Why can't we work together? Why do we have to kill so many rogues? Why do we even bother with this alpha-beta shit anyway? Human scientists disproved this stuff back in the seventies! I just want to know. Why are we even doing this shit? Why do we have to do an impromptu roadtrip right now?"

"Well, do you really think that thousands of innocent people should die on the weight of very flimsy evidence?"

"Well, no." Now that the traffic had sped up to something resembling an usual pace, Brian had let go of the steering wheel, except for two fingers perched on the very top, something which was giving me quite pronounced pangs of anxiety. "I think it's a bit heavy-handed too. But do you think they're more important than your pack?"

"Ah. Their souls weigh less than ours. Therefore it is okay. Where have I heard that one before?"

"Jim, why the fuck do you care about them so much? What do we have to do with them?"

"Well, what the fuck did humans have to do with the moon? We fucking worship the fucking moon goddess, we should have fucking beaten them to it! But they l there anyway. Just because they could. Because they fucking believed it was a great thing to do. We need to have more of that kind of mindset here. Doing stuff just because we can. Doing stuff because it's the right thing to do. Not sort of driving around uncomfortably in cars that they made while wearing clothes that they probably also made and doing diss tracks on them using audio equiment that they definitely also made. We absolutely have the right to investigate further and we absolutely have the right to put a stop to this. They haven't seen the wolves that did it. We did, remember? We should be the ones investigating this, we're the only ones who have seen them up close." I was staring into the sun, still high in the sky, its rays changing gradually into the pastel tones of sunset. "We came that close. We should have hunted them down. We should have ambushed them. They shouldn't have lived to see another day."

"We didn't have the manpower."

"The Stone River guys were just around the corner. We could have gotten their attention. It would have been a cinch."

"I still think this is a bad idea," Brian went on. "What we're doing right now. It's just half-baked in every way."

We passed the concrete hull of the Thunder Falls supercenter. They appeared to be wrapping up for the day. "What do they even sell?" Brian wondered.

"Food, mostly. Their meat is very well regarded, apparently. Pork is their specialty, from what I've heard." 

"Where do they even get it from?"

"Imported, who knows? All we know is it's cheap. And it tastes good. And that's all that matters, to most people."

"W should get Thurgood to join us," Brian opined. "He'll almost definitely agree to this, and he'll know about what to look out for more than us."

"Leave him out. Leave them out. The less people the better. Less suspicious that way."

"You know people are just going to do it anyway, right?" Brian didn't take his gaze off the road. "They're not even going to listen to us."

"That's exactly what Herman told me half an hour ago," I answered without skipping a beat. "This has to do with last night, right? You want to prove them wrong. You wanna go against the narrative, go the third way, put a stop to all this, some kinda noble Hail Mary shit."

I didn't answer. Brian took that as his cue to continue. "I mean, I have to admire you. Going against your own pack to save some rogues. That takes balls."

"As I said before, I'm just very skeptical," I replied. "According to the re-enactment, there was no way they could have sneaked through the border in the way that we think they did. The stuff they had on the black box just doesn't add up."

"So they had inside help?"

"Something like that. And the bodies had butcher marks exactly like the ones they use to slaughter cows in slaughterhouses. Do you really think that rogues would be that methodical?"

"Maybe the rogues were slaughterhouse workers in a past life or something."

"This is the East Side we're talking about. That's on the entire other side of the Industrial Zone from all of the slaughterhouses. It's, like, a two-hour commute across town. If the traffic is good."

"They would travel that far for a job. That's not even that unusual. Some of us really distant packs commute six hours a day."

"So why didn't you mention any of this stuff at the pack meeting. The butcher's marks, I mean?""Would that have made a difference?"

Brian shook his head. "Why does it have to come to this?"

"The existence of your family explains quite a lot of it, if I'm to be honest."

"Why my family, in particular? There's plenty of other people with the same opinions. My dad can be pretty insufferable at times, but still, it's not like he's the only dissenter."

"Well, they appear to be the ringleaders among the contrarians."

"Don't you ever wish you could just tell them what to do?"

"Of course I have. Many times. But that's a very impulsive and shallow thing to think. It's not good for the long term. This is their pack as much as mine, and they should have as much as a say in it as I do. Even if their ideas are sometimes worse than any old-school cokehead dictator Alpha could have dreamed of, that just means they should do more thinking for themselves. We are really not accustomed to, y'know, that kind of thing. The alpha tells you to do something and you just do it, no questions asked. Hundreds of generations later, it's hardwired into us. We don't ever question. We just do. I'm offering you an alternative, one that doesn't involve moving over the border and becoming an inner-city hipster or some kinda Lycan Front real estate developer scumbag, and this is the thanks I get?"

"I've always looked up to you, Jim, you know. Ever since I was little."

"That's what happens when you grow up with zero exposure to any real male role models."

Brian snickered at that.

The conversation petered out as the road wound into the mountains. The rest of the trip was spent in silence.

***

The Granite Peak pack village had long been deserted. The houses had not sat long enough to show any particularly egregious signs of neglect; they just looked like their inhabitants had taken an unusually long vacation. Cobwebs were starting to appear in the crevices. The grass was starting to grow out. We had barely been here for twenty minutes and the place was already beginning to creep me out. I was glad I'd at least taken a few people along with me.

We were standing in the woods at the edge of the main settlement. The eponymic outcrop was casting a long shadow over us in the afternoon light.

Brian stared into the distance, as if he was trying to parse the silence. "What are we even looking for?"

"I don't know."

The place where we were standing had been trampled to kingdom come during the re-enactment, and once again, presumably, while the Thunder Falls people were investigating, so there was no real clues there.

We walked further into the dead, waist-high grass, cutting a line behind the pack territory, where I had been walking on the night of the re-enactment. There were probably snakes in here somewhere, but snake venom was no match for were blood. At least that was what the legends said.

I was suddenly struck by the intense feeling that we were being watched. I turned around suddenly.

Brian looked at me. "What is it?"

I looked around for what seemed like an eternity but must have been fifteen seconds at the most. There was nothing I could see or smell or discernibly hear. There were just the trees and the empty houses and the wind.

"There's nothing here. Let's go home. This place is giving me the creeps." Brian made to turn back, and I began to follow him, but something in the corner of my peripheral vision made me freeze.

I felt the pit of my stomach drop.