“Stay on the line. Go to your computer. Open your web browser.”

The laptop was in the en suite, half-buried under a pile of laundry. Lycanthropy hadn’t made me any tidier. I went back through the bedroom—Walker gave me a now what? look to which I raised a hand: Hang on. I sat down on the bathroom floor and powered-up the laptop.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m online.”

“Good. There’s something you need to see. Go to Google. Sign in to Mail with the following address. Don’t worry. It’s an account I’ve set up just for this.” He gave me a sequence of letters which didn’t spell anything in English, at gmail.com. The password was numbers and letters that meant nothing to me. Naturally the thought that this was being traced or hacked—or that the entry would set a time bomb under the villa ticking—occurred to me, but I dismissed it. Not with good reason. Just out of impatience. I was doing this, whatever the fuck it was.

An inbox opened, with one mail item.

“Open the email and click on the link,” Olek said. “It’s secure, I promise you. When the link page opens, it’ll ask you for another password. You there?”

“Yes. Page open.”

More numbers and letters.

I hit enter.

“What you’re about to see is a real event,” Olek said. “I’ll stay on the line. Just watch. I’ll explain when it’s run.”

Video clip. Very high resolution. No sound. Timecode in the bottom left corner. Another sequence of numbers on the right.

Blue sky. Sunshine. A long line of what appeared to be Chinese people filing into a solitary low-lying white building with no windows set in manicured grounds. Heavily armed military everywhere.

Cut to inside.

Processing. Desks with more military personnel. People one by one presenting driver’s licences, passports, documents—and being issued in return with numbered paper wristbands of the kind used at music festivals.

Cut to: An overhead shot of a room the size of a soccer pitch, divided into rows of concrete cubicles, several hundred, each with a set of steel bars down one side and another set across the roof.

The people in the holding cells, looking scared shitless. Some of them in tears. Families incarcerated together, single people alone. One armed soldier per three or four cells. Men and women in civilian dress with iPads and walkie-talkies.

Cut to: A large digital stadium clock. Counting down.

Cut to: Wide angle. Twenty or thirty of the cells visible. A sudden silent flurry of activity. Soldiers and iPad personnel moving. Prisoners screaming—all with the terrible visual intimacy of silent film.

Jerky zoom in.

In one of the cells, a woman of around twenty years old is turning into a werewolf.

Because, I now realise, the countdown has reached zero—and the full moon, though we can’t see it, is up.

Two soldiers empty magazines into her.

Silver, manifestly, since she falls, immediately.

18

“THAT WAS SHOT in secret three months ago at Zanghye, Gansu Province, in the People’s Republic of China,” Olek said. “It was one of dozens of such actions currently being carried out by the Chinese government. They’re starting small.”

I was still, absurdly, sitting on the bathroom floor. I was thinking three things. First, that the footage was genuine. Second, that it wouldn’t be possible to roll out extermination like that openly and nationally—to industrialise it. Third, that that was naive. It had been done before. Many times. Which gave birth to a fourth naive thought: In China, maybe, but not at home. Not in the U.S.

Wrong. It couldn’t happen here was exactly the thinking that made it happening here possible. Wherever “here” was and whatever “it” might be.

“You’re thinking, perhaps,” Olek said, “that even if what you’ve just seen is genuine, it’ll be confined to places like China. Places without what the West likes to call freedom.”

“I’m a little ahead of you, thanks,” I said.

He laughed. A sound of genuine delight. “A pupil of Mr. Marlowe’s,” he said. “Of course. And perhaps his Conradian namesake. ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Very good. This saves us time. We have a sensibility in common. I’m so much looking forward to meeting you.”

“Now you’re ahead of yourself,” I said.

“You wouldn’t want to spare your children extermination?”

“It’s going to be a long time before they’re at risk.”

“You have a long time. All of you. Four hundred years, give or take. The writing’s on the wall, Talulla, and people with a big simple enemy will have no trouble reading it. Extend logically from what you’ve just seen. Extend twenty years. Fifty. A hundred. Your species—and ours—is living in the last days of its liminality. China is the New Inquisition’s first whisper in secret. But soon the whisper will be a proud global shout. Genocide has always depended on getting people to see the enemy as not human. A redundancy, if the enemy isn’t human.”

Walker had appeared in the bathroom doorway. I hit the video’s Play button and handed the laptop to him.

“I’m offering a way out for you, for your children, for any of your kind who want it,” Olek said. “You’re too smart to dismiss it out of hand.”

“What makes you think we’re going to line up for this?” I said. “You think this is going to happen without a fight?”

“Of course not,” Olek said. “I imagine you’ll raise an army. Turn as many as you can. Maybe you’ll win. Maybe you’ll become the new master race.”

I had a vision of myself and the pack going through city after city, biting or scratching everyone we could. News reports of escalating panic. A world map showing a werewolf population exploding. But it was followed by a vision of the Chinese model turned into a primetime game show, bets placed, just another outlet for the viewing world’s already rapt boredom.

“Maybe you’ll elect to roll the dice of all-out war,” Olek said. “If anyone could lead a species … Well, you’ll think this is just flattery. But I think the truth is you know they’ll win. They have that thing. They have collective durability. It’s a sort of stupidity, really, a lack of refinement, but it keeps them going.”

I felt tired, suddenly. Claustrophobically irritated. Questions I hadn’t wanted to ask myself were here now whether I liked it or not, petitioners who, once they were in, simply wouldn’t go away. Even the sunlight and the garden’s sleepiness felt like the soft edge of the world’s incipient threat. It’s coming for you. They’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time.