Alex, Evan thinks, is not merely a nerd—nerddom, and even a degree of Asperger’s syndrome, is entirely forgivable in the hothouse conditions of the Scrum—but a coward. He’s hungry, probably as hungry as Evan, but he won’t act. He’ll just sit there in a blue funk, shivering and complaining as the hunger gives him ulcers.

Evan happily embraces his inner geek, but harbors the conceit that he is an actor, a doer, not a sitter. He’s hungry. They are all—those he’s spoken to—hungry, having taken Mhari’s caution about feeding to heart. But there are limits, and this goes past anything that’s reasonable. They’ve told their HR contacts that they’re starving. And they’ve all received responses ranging from blank incomprehension to bovine fright and a promise to refer it to some sort of internal committee as soon as next month. Who will presumably look into the logistics of ordering blood donations from expired stock in the transfusion service and get around to it sometime in the next year, by which point the Scrum will resemble refugees from a death camp.

Evan’s been with the Bank nearly two years longer than Alex; long enough to climb the pay ladder a couple of increments, even if he hasn’t qualified for a major bonus yet. He’s got a very nice flat in a former Seaman’s Mission, and his eye on a Porsche Boxster after the bonus season. Evan pays a cleaning service to handle his clothing, along with his everyday mess: every day he gets home to find the laundry basket empty and the bed neatly turned back. It’s a lot like living in a gigantic hotel suite. Since the turn to the night side, he’s made special arrangements: had motorized blackout blinds installed inside all his windows, converted a cleaning closet into a panic room with a reinforced door frame and a futon on the floor.

When he gets home, Evan ditches his work kit (including the annoying necklace-gizmo), then undresses and showers briskly. Afterwards he sorts through his wardrobe for an outfit. He would normally inspect himself in the wardrobe’s floor-to-ceiling glass mirror, checking for imperfections, but that’s impossible now; instead, he has to use his computer’s webcam to show him a suitably rotated view of himself. He’s aiming for a blandly anonymous clubbable hipster look, just distinctively different enough from every other aspiring Silicon Roundabout wannabe to be hard to describe from memory: skinny sixties mad men go after-work casual with big horn-rimmed glasses. (Never mind the optically neutral lenses.) He nods to himself, smiles, and inspects his dental work. Then he opens the locked medicine cupboard in the bathroom and removes his works.

It’s time to go hunting.

• • •