They walked back through the knotweed and the dodder to where Adrian had parked his car. The plan was that he would drive him to a few blocks shy of Carleton and they would split up. He would go to his art exhibition and he would pick up the suits from Graydon who would also drive him home.

Adrian realised immediately that something was not right. The car was sitting too low. He checked the wheels, in the long grass. Four slashed tires. The Jag was not going anywhere fast. "Ah fuck," He muttered under his breath.

"That's not good," Brendan said, somewhat unhelpfully."

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Adrian pulled his phone out. "I need to be there in 30 minutes."

"Where?"

"The gallery. Same one where the conference was. The exhibition. I need to be there." "Can't you afford to be a little late? Just to show the kiddos you're just a person like them." "Well, I could do that, but I have a bunch of their work in my car. It needs to get there asap. Otherwise everything's ruined. This could be the difference between them wanting to drop out or not."

"Look at me. I dropped out and I'm fine. OK, I am the family disappointment and I should probably be seeing a therapist, but overall I'm doing pretty okay."

"We need to get there. I need to be there for my students. We've worked hard together all semester, and I'll be damned if something comes between us. Dude. Do something. We have half an hour left." Adrian checked his watch. "Not even half an hour. A go faster spell. Anything." Brendan let out a fart he didn't even know he'd been holding in. "Well, if we need a go faster spell we need a vehicle first, in working condition. Which we don't have." "Would it work on us?"

"I wish I had that much magic in me. I don't think anyone has. The amount of potions you would have to drink for that to happen would kill someone stone dead. The only way it could possibly work is if it was midnight on full moon and we were both in wolf form, which we are not."

"So what do we do?"

"Well, we only have one option." That was not exactly true, as Brendan was still running through the other options in his mind. The M2 Express bus would take too long, and catching a train was out of the question. OK. There was only one.

"Adrian looked at him. "Hitch onto a high-speed train? I'm not getting you."

"No." Brendan peered over the train line. The nearest main road would be about five minutes' walk away. "Get your stuff out of the boot."

"An Uber?" Adrian pulled out a bunch of canvases with one deft hand movement, then a sculpture with the other.

"No. They're too slow." Brendan motioned for him to hand a bunch of his cargo over. Adrian obliged. "What then?"

***

Traffic was bumper to bumper on the Ring Road, but still fluid.

"It's a fucking waste of money," the taxi driver yelled, at nobody in particular, two fingers on the wheel. "Look at this. It's not even peak hour and it's a fucking disaster. You know when they opened this? 1975! It had three lanes. And look at it now! Still three lanes. 45 fucking years later. It needs five lanes, at least! I don't know what they're doing. Do you have any idea how much we're fucking paying them to sit around and do fuck-all. Look, I'm not a fan of those people over the border, but at least they get things done when they need to."

There was an opening, to their left. The taxi driver took it without a moment's hesitation, nailing the throttle. The left lane was flowing at the same speed as the one they had just left, and they soon settled back to a more sedate speed. But now they were next to the bus lane at the hard shoulder of the freeway.

The driver indicated left and dodged into the bus lane just as the traffic came to a complete standstill again. There was honking from behind. Brendan saw the squinting maw of a bus bearing down on them, three-pointed star glinting in the late afternoon light.

And then they were off, as the taxi driver gave it the beans, rowing through the gears. Adrian could feel the tires struggling to keep up. The tops of buildings rocketed past. The speedo was hovering around 140 now. They merged back into a gap in the outer lane barely bigger than the car itself.

The driver was complaining about the rest of his day now. "I wait at the airport, maybe two hours. Nobody. Fucking waste of time. And finally, someone turns up. He needs to go to the city, but he isn't sure exactly where. He says he'll phone a friend and get him to give me directions. Idiot."

Brendan briefly considered doing a spell to slow down the car. Normally there were only go-faster spells, but theoretically you could just reverse the equation and you would get a go slower spell. But at this rate of speed that might actually have some serious side effects. He binned the thought.

The traffic thinned out and started flowing again, somewhat. Dodging a bus by a hair's breadth, they rejoined the left lane. They briefly veered back into the emergency lane, and into another impossible gap in the traffic, followed by a bout of honking horns behind them.

They were entering the tunnel under the hills above the city now. Somewhere above them was Ruth Gray's mausoleum. This had little noticeable effect on their driver's driving.

They blasted through a ludicrously narrow gap between a car and a semi-trailer and emerged onto the spaghetti junction between the M2 and the Ring Road, hitting an expansion joint on the way. Brendan swore the springs bottomed out.

A phone rang, filling the car cabin with the sound of heavily compressed Bruce Springsteen. The taxi driver dug the phone out of his pants pocket while keeping one hand on the wheel, carefully manoeuvering around a slow-moving florist's van while pressing the phone to his ear with his right elbow, shouting into the phone in Arabic.

Adrian felt glad that he had decided to hold onto his students' artwork rather than chucking it in the boot. He had never envisioned his death, here, in the livery-grade backseat of a Skoda Octavia.

"Is this even legal?" He wondered to Brendan.

"Dunno." Brendan looked around the sea of bleak gray plastic. "Come to think of it, I think we've done work experience for these guys before. Minor body damage, cleaning, roll back the odometers, that kinda stuff."

"Do they have contracts with every single company?"

"Probably. We're very hands-on." Brendan relaxed. They were getting near the gallery. They'd changed the plan. They would take the taxi straight to the museum, and then Brendan would catch a tram to meet Graydon. "All part of the education."

***

Brendan left the noises of the main road behind, walking down a familiar tree lined street. He was meeting Graydon a block away, beyond the reaches of the surveillance system that protected Carleton, but he wanted to come back and see things for himself. It was undoubtedly a risky move. But he could not stop himself.

He wasn't sure if he could have come in the daytime. The memories were still too much for him. It would be too risky as well.

He reached the gap between the two properties he was well familiar with. He could hear the gurgling of the water behind the fence. Pushing through a gap in the palings, he entered the concrete chamber of the creek. It had rained and the water was running swiftly, but even in the light of dusk he could see the water was shallow and clear.

Through the fence on either side he could see the lit windows of the houses overlooking the creek. People were moving around.

The creek passed into a tunnel. He instinctively ducked his head, careful in the arched opening. Water dripped down from the exposed brick, the only noise apart from the rushing of the water. He was under Carleton's oval right now.

Even in the dark, Brendan knew exactly where the steps were, having paced it out countless times before on impromptu excursions from the school grounds. These had increased exponentially in the year he had dropped out.

He walked up the stairway through the passageway down to the drain, counting the steps. There were 42 exactly.

He emerged in a well-shaded corner of the quadrangle that he had walked through hundreds of times in the course of his schooling, surrounded by the familiar silhouettes of the double storey buildings, gently lit with floodlights, clad in limestone from the quarries in the hills. The quarries were long gone, now diving spots for scuba enthusiasts.

It was exactly as he remembered. It almost felt like he had simply stepped out for a while and came back. The memories came flooding back. He winced. But he could take it.

Was there still people around? Brendan didn't dare to step out further than his secluded corner. Some of the teachers worked until late. There might be cleaners around at this hour.

He realised he needed to hurry back to his rendezvous point. He heard a noise. He ventured back into the tunnel, resisting the urge to look back one last time.

***

"Brandon, was it?"

"Brendan." He relaxed. It seemed a bit suspect here, sitting in Graydon's idling car, but he guessed it was better than standing outside.

"Ah. we meet again. Hadn't expected that it would be here." He offered a hand. "I heard you became acquainted with Ryan. He met you, in, uh, not the best of circumstances, I understand." "Kinda beyond my control," Brendan said, a little quieter than he would have liked. Why couldn't he just pipe up? Was there something caught in his throat?

"But he's a good person, really. A gentle giant. Loves his kids. Sends money back to them each month. He works odd jobs in the city. Whatever work he can get. Hope he didn't scare you too much."

"He told me all that." Brendan put on his seatbelt. "Eh, no big deal. I've seen worse."

***

"We're learning about Hemingway." Graydon tapped a rhythm on the steering wheel. "Ice. Berg. Theory. Ice. Berg. Theory," he hummed, to the beat of Ice Ice Baby.

"Thanks for the lift," Brendan mumbled. "If there's any way I could repay you-"

"Oh, no need," Graydon said. "It's what anyone would do. I live in Bramble Glen. So it's along the way. Kind of."

"You live that far away?" Brendan was surprised. "It's like an hour each way. If the traffic's not completely stuffed up, which it often is."

He shrugged. "Only affordable housing I could find. Well, the only affordable house that wasn't a studio apartment the size of a shoebox."

"Yeah. The housing situation isn't great." Brendan stared straight ahead, listening to the muted collective tyre roar of hundreds of vehicles, on these two broad ribbons of asphalt carving their way into a nightscape dotted with yellow and red. It was strangely majestic sight. A sublime sight.

This was the M2, the freeway from the wealthy northwestern suburbs. Above the bridge carrying the tram to the hills arced across.

It's one of those houses that backs up onto a park, right?" Brendan thought of the unit he had done on Crestwood homes at uni two years ago. The typology had been a flop in other places due to concerns about crime, but here full moon meant that new developments under the same principles were still being built. With a higher density of course. Newleaf had been the first experiment in that direction.

"Yep." He opened the driver's side window a crack. wind gushed in through the crevice. The smell of the city floated through. "Space to roam around, that's important to us." "So how have you found the neighbours?"

"There's like a dozen of them that shift every full moon. Out of the fifty or so houses overlooking the park. I think it's different people every time. They take their turns. They don't really talk or try to link minds with you. Just do your own thing. I totally respect that, but it gets a bit lonely after a few times. It's so different from how we do it back home. You know after doing that your whole life, not having that strong connection, just bouncing off the walls in a glorified park... it's just not the same. Sometimes I've contemplated just taking the pill and sitting it out at home. But I've only done it for that one night when I first got here. I was too tired to shift."

"Full moon is so different here," Graydon continued. "It's everyone for themselves, a bunch of rogues running around. Back home it's so much more spiritual. Your minds are all linked. And when you shift you can feel each other's No wonder a lot of you guys just take the pill and sit it out."

"Yeah. I only do it once a year," Brendan said. "Just enough to keep me going."

They entered the massive spaghetti junction between the M2 and the Ring Road. In the midst of a sea of red tailights, Brendan got the sensation of being completely insignificant in a huge world, hurtling towards their destinies...

"So this is your first time in the Republic." Brendan felt curious, and they had a long trip ahead of them.

Graydon nodded slightly. Almost imperceptibly in the glow of the lights. "I'm settling in. It's alright."

"Do you all live in a big pack house back home?" Brendan knew it was a stupid question, but he couldn't resist.

To his immense relief, Graydon answered with grace. "Well, some packs do, some packs don't. We used to have one, but it was so old and rotted that we demolished it a few years ago. Now we have a bunch of houses overlooking a central square. A real walkable community. A lot of the other packs are like that these days. There's so much difference. We aren't just all the same as people seem to think here. There's packs that are just three or four families, no Alpha. Then there's Port Mirabel, which is like Las Vegas for werewolves."

"It can be very lonely. It's just the same people over and over again. It's a very tight knit community. Everyone knows each other, everyone knows each other's business. It can feel suffocating. That's why so many leave and never return, I guess."

"Have you ever thought about that?"

"Well, I did when I was fourteen, fifteen. That was the only thing I wanted to do. Escape. I had it all planned out. The bus fare, the plan, everything. I was going to hide under a truck and pass through the border that way. Find my way to Corviston and find my long-lost aunt in the city. Then my father fell ill and I had to take care of him and the rest of my family. That sorted my priorities out quite fast."

Brendan wanted to ask about Graydon's rank, but he knew it was rude to ask pack wolves about that. He decided to keep it to himself. Maybe if he met Ryan again he could ask.

"I'm happy here. It's nice. But my heart is back home." Graydon took the exit off the freeway. "I will return there one day. I can feel it in my bones. But you know, the trend is towards leaving. It's getting worse every year. But personally it's a bit too quiet to really suit me. You know, when you live in a pack, everyone's always talking, something's always going on, it's quite hectic sometimes. I never really thought I'd miss that."

They turned left, entering the heavy flow of traffic on Diggory Road, a place Brendan knew like the back of his hand. The congestion felt almost soothing after everything that had happened. He was only a quarter of an hour from home, if things went smoothly.