“Goats, chickens, whatever.” She waves it off. Alex stares at her, enthralled. They had to duct-tape Mhari to her Aeron and lecture her for six hours straight before she could wrap her head around just enough of the Core Theorem (as he and Evan had named it) to open her inner eyes to whatever they were all seeing in the visualizer, but eventually she got it. Vampirism becomes her. Her skin is paler and clearer than before, her hair more golden-blonde, as if some personal contrast slider has been turned up; and the city slicker uniform of sharp jacket, black dress, and heels goes well with the territory. The effect of turning post-human on the boy-pigs isn’t quite as obvious—they already had the self-aware swagger of the masters of the universe, apart from Alex—but the change has bestowed an odd desmodontid magnetism on the Scrum Mistress, and Alex is an iron filing trapped in her field.

“We need to try the blood thing. I’m dying for a drink,” says Dick. It’s true: every last one of them has become aware of an unpleasantly intimate thirst since the change, a thirst unslaked by water or champagne. Denial isn’t an option.

“Where are our fangs?” Evan deadpans compulsively.

“Who the fuck knows? Maybe they don’t come out until we hunt.” Dick hunches around his stomach as if he’s in pain.

“Teeth don’t grow overnight,” Evan says, more thoughtfully; “maybe we ought to book a dental X-ray?”

“We could corner one of the cleaners,” suggests Janice. The Scrum’s sysadmin got with the program immediately, and now she’s even scarier than ever: her hair spikier, her trouser-suits sharper. Alex half-expects her to whip out a red and black armband and announce that backsliders will be shot. “Use the hypnosis thing. Even if it doesn’t work, how are they going to identify us? We all look the same to them—pasty-skinned Anglos in suits.”

“Have they found Mr. White yet?” Alex had coughed to telling the smirking chimp in the bathroom to get lost during the daily stand-up meeting. (That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.) Oscar’s discreet digging had subsequently revealed that one Barry White from the Rare Earth Futures desk had not returned to work since the evening of the confrontation; according to the police he was last seen booking a one-way flight to Mataveri airport on Easter Island.

“Not so far.” Mhari wrinkles her nose. “That’s a loose end we’ll have to tie up. What were you thinking, Alex?”

“I was thinking I had sunburn and someone had slipped me some acid.”