Outside, the asphalt was shiny from rain. The sun had come out, and a rainbow stretched across the skyline. People walked briskly on the footpath. It was quiet now that it was the school holidays. Usually there'd be hordes of bright blue blazers hurrying along at this time of the day.

It was rather therapeutic, watching the world go past silently from the warmth of the third floor, behind a layer of double-glazed glass.

He had been quite ecstatic when his application for the job had been accepted. Marshall & Berger had been the only practice he had applied for. It didn't really matter that the hours were a bit inconvenient, or that the pay was lousy, or that he frequently found himself running out of time for his uni assignments. He was loving every minute of it.

He had fit in perfectly. They had inducted him quite rapidly into the studio culture, the office banter, the weekly get-togethers in a small cafe down the road that served bacon-and-egg sandwiches dripping in grease.

Downstairs, he could hear David dealing with a supplier over the phone. A few cubicles down, Wenxue was running the work experience kid through ArchiCAD. Tony and Maryam were discussing something over Tony's desk.

It was quiet. Soothing. No raised voices. Warm and cozy.

David was taking him down to the site today, the new civic centre in Sewellstown. They were pouring the foundations. It would be wet and windy and cold out there, but there was nothing he could do about that, apart from dress for the occasion.

He looked at the thick sheaf of A3 pages in front of him. He had been warned beforehand that this was a top-secret project. The people, or to be more precise, the person - Alpha Xavier of the Silver Moon Pack - who had commissioned it wanted it that way. The practice previously tasked with the project had abruptly quit at the eleventh hour, for some reason or other. They had more or less finished the plans already. All he had to do was to look over them and make sure that everything was in order.

***

Most of New Carinthia had long given up on their pack-dwelling brethren over the border. There had once been hope and goodwill towards the Independent Territories, but that had all vanished in the wake of the 1994 recession and the turmoil that followed. It was not an uncommon view among heads of industry that the lands beyond the border fence were a sort of black hole where your hard-earned funds vanished into thin air and eventually materialised in the form of some alpha's twenty-two bedroom mansion and matching pair of gold-plated Rolls-Royces.

The built industry sector was a notable exception to this. It was common knowledge that the packs were a reliable source of quick and easy cash. The fact that some of the wealthier Alphas were now big players in the New Carinthian property market had probably helped things along quite a bit.

David did seem to have an awful lot of friends over the border. He'd heard the rumours. Wild parties with sushi served on the bodies of nude she-wolves. Trips by private jet to Port Mirabel, the playground of the Independent Territories rich and wealthy. None of this gelled with his image of the meek, unassuming man who had become his mentor over the past few months, and he had dismissed them as mere follies of the tabloid press.

It was easy to see the allure of working in the Independent Territories. It was easy work, and well paid. All they really had to do was make sure the building was structurally sound and could be built with the technology they had at hand up there. No environmental ratings. No NIMBYs. No pesky heritage overlays. No government oversight whatsoever. Full carte blanche, as long as the Alphas approved of it.

The Organisation of Pan-Lycan Unity did have a building inspection department on its books, but it was common knowledge that it served entirely as a money-siphoning exercise, thirty pretend workers in a pretend department, drawing thirty distinctly non-pretend salaries that went who knew where.

Of course, people had started noticing the architectural marvels suddenly sprouting up in the middle of the forest. The rumours spread like wildfire. Design magazines did flashy four-page spreads showcasing the veritable Pre-Cambrian explosion happening across the border. Blogs gushed about the forward-thinking visions of this Alpha and that Alpha. Certain members of the Alpha fraternity had become regular fixtures on the New Carinthian motivational speaker circuit.

***

He checked the structural drawings first. There were some photos of the existing site enclosed between the first and the second pages, in a plastic pouch. The existing building looked like a normal sentry tower, a roughly-hewn stone edifice with wooden doors and windows, situated at the periphery of the pack village, almost set into the forest.

There was nothing wrong with it, as far as he could see. It looked well kept and structurally sound. One of the top-floor windows facing the forest was shattered and some of the masonry seemed to be damaged, but there was nothing that seemed to warrant its demolition and replacement.

But then, he'd heard stories of Alphas who'd bulldozed newly-built pack houses because they were convinced that they had been bugged by New Carinthian authorities. They were never the most rational lot to begin with. They were deeply superstitious. They blamed the weather. New Carinthians. Humans. Spells. Witches. Vampires. Demons. The phase of the moon. They blamed pretty much everything except themselves when things went wrong.

He thought that the tower looked inviting. He wondered what it would be like to live in it. He wondered what it would take to rescue it, to take it apart, brick by brick, and reconstruct it in someone's own backyard, in the vein of the old London Bridge, or Captain Cook's childhood home.

Its replacement was a completely different creature, looking somewhat like a lift shaft rising out of the ground, a rectilinear, near-windowless building, fifteen metres of poured concrete rising into the air.

The formwork required would be massive. His civil engineering sensibilities told him that precast walls supported by a fabricated steel frame would have been a much better choice. But maybe they had supply problems. They must have a good reason for it, he told himself.

He flipped through the rest of the structural drawings. The footing details were what he expected, a massive pad footing spanning the entire base of the tower supported by a staggering amount of blind concrete. It was obvious that the proposed structure was perfectly sound. It was gloriously overbuilt. Anything short of a cruise missile would probably not make a dent on it.

He moved onto the architectural drawings.

He scanned the elevations. There was only one window, on the top level, at the southern side of the tower. That seemed odd. Sentry towers usually had windows on all sides. The only other opening of any kind was a small hatch at the base.

The roof design also seemed a little odd for a sentry tower; it was entirely concealed between the walls. The two halves of the roof sloped down towards the middle, draining into a box gutter in the centre. The gutter fed into a downpipe concealed within the concrete shell of the structure.

It all seemed so oddly... specific. It seemed as if someone was making a concerted effort to keep the outside of the building as flush as possible. He wondered why.

Then he noticed that the tops of the walls were not capped. There was an annotation with an arrow pointing to where the capping should have been. He peered at it. EXTERIOR WALLS TO BE PAINTED WITH UV-RESISTANT WATERPROOF NON-STICK COATING.

What on earth? Was this some kind of new technology? He felt his gut tighten.

He flipped the page. A bunch of wall sections, showing a tremendous amount of soundproofing, so much that he was sure it would have contravened at least a couple of fire safety regulations, had it been built on the other side of the border. Was there even noise in that part of the Independent Territories? Surely they weren't living anywhere near the Industrial Zone or anything.

But then it occurred to him that the soundproofing might be to block noise coming from the inside. One of his freshman design studio assignments had been a recording studio on a busy arterial road (his professor had jokingly stated that it was for entertaining the whims of some Alpha's grossly untalented demon-spawn), and they'd not used nearly as much soundproofing.

His sense of unease growing, he flipped to the next page, where the window was shown at a larger scale. There was a pane of plexiglas, several inches thick, on the outside, to be fitted flush with the concrete. Then there were steel bars set deep into the concrete walls, to be lapped with the steel rebar inside the walls, and to top it all off, a triple-glazed window on the inside. He'd never seen anything like it. What were they trying to keep out?

He moved on from the elevations and sections, to the floorplans. The tower was empty, except for a service lift running the entire height of the tower, and a single room at the very top. A single bed, a chair and a desk, and to the right, an ensuite- a sink, a toilet, a shower and a bathtub.

What kind of sentry tower had a bathtub in it?

He realised that this was no sentry tower. This was meant for somebody to live in. But who? Maybe it was like one of those lighthouses.

He studied the ensuite plans closely. The bathroom sink was huge, a long trough that stretched the entire length of the counter. He wondered if it was an error, a CAD block the other poorly-paid intern who had most likely drawn this had copy-pasted by mistake. They often drew things wrongly on the architectural plans, he knew that. He remembered his first year Construction 101 professor's dictum: never measure off the architectural drawings.

Still, the feeling of unease nagged in his gut. He flipped to the architectural specification. Sinks. He was looking for sinks.

A vitreous porcelain bathroom sink, 600 x 2400mm. His eyes had not deceived him. He recognised the manufacturer. An high-end Italian firm which specialised in custom bathroom fittings.

He tried to think of what Alpha Xavier might be trying to keep in the tower. A political prisoner? That seemed unlikely. He was sure they would not put in a bathtub for a dissident, however well-connected he was.

He knew that Alpha Xavier had a daughter. He had seen her in a family photo in one of the tabloid papers once, a pale sylph-like creature with long flowing blonde hair that almost came to her knees. But surely that couldn't be.

There were rumours. They were a very private bunch, but word still got around. But surely they were not true. Surely they had conceived naturally.

Surely it had nothing to do with this.

But that wasn't what bugged him. There was something else about the floorplans nagging at his subconscious.

Then it hit him. The room had no door. There was just a hatch leading to the service lift, which, from the looks of the hatch at ground level, could not accommodate anything larger than a small child.

He checked the drawings again. He went over the entire drawing set. Surely there was some kind of mistake.

There was no mistake. There was no door. Just the opening to the service lift.

But how could that work? Unless they intended to move someone in first, and then...

He felt his heart race in his chest. He flipped back to the photos of the old sentry tower. He scanned through the photos of the interior of the tower, looking for signs that it had been lived in. There was a music stand lying on the floor.

He looked closer at the photo. His eyes zeroed in very quickly on the broken window he'd noticed before. He looked very closely at the window frame. He had no way of seeing it from the outside views of the house, but the bottom of the frame was heavily damaged, as if something sharp had hooked into it.

What could have caused that?

On a hunch, he flipped back to the exterior photos of the tower, the one that showed the broken window.

He hadn't noticed it before. He'd just assumed it was just natural imperfections in the masonry. But just under the window, there was a large chunk of stone missing. There was a similar damaged area a few metres down.

Suddenly, it all made sense. The heavy-duty footings and walls. The weird gutter design. The coating for the exterior walls. The plexiglas. The steel bars. The elongated bathroom sink. The soundproofing. He could see it all unfolding in his mind, the singing, her long flowing hair, the harpoon gun, the rescue attempt.

He felt his breakfast reach the tip of his throat, the acrid taste of stomach acid burning his esophagus. He felt the urge to retch.

He took a deep breath. He let his saliva pool up in his mouth for a few moments and swallowed down, diffusing the taste of the vomit, washing it down back to where it belonged.

***

He picked up the plans, shuffled them in line, and dropped the whole thing into the filing cabinet by his desk, quietly twisting the lock, relishing the snick as the tumblers fell into place. He'd come back to it later.

He sat at his desk, staring out at nothing in particular. The walls felt too white. The wood of the desk felt too light. The light streaming in from the window felt too bright. The people outside felt like ants. He swallowed, trying to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth.

The door opened. It was David. He had come to take him down to Sewellstown. "How are the plans? Computer-drawn stuff can get sloppy now and then, as you probably already know."

He nodded. "They did a good job. I couldn't find any faults."

"It's quite an innovative design." David's bald head gleamed. "I don't think there's anything else like it. Alpha Xavier was very particular about what he wanted."

He nodded, only half-listening to David's words. The detached, quietly confident tone he had admired before now seemed utterly repugnant to him. He tried not to think too deeply about it. He still felt faintly nauseous.

David jangled his car keys. "We need to go. The traffic's always a nightmare on the M2, you know."

Outside, it had begun to rain again. Umbrellas sprouted from handbags. People ducked into shopfronts to escape from the downpour.