“For my part, I’m going to feed a stall warning up the pipeline and tap-dance around it to give you a one-week window of opportunity. I repeat: regular work is cancelled for one week, and I’ll do whatever it takes to cover for you while you get to grips with our new toolkit. Unless anyone wants more than that one-week extension?” (Nobody nods.) “Good. So right now you’re going to sit down and we’re going to brainstorm the stories we’re going to generate tasks from for the one-week sprint on vampirism. On this theme, you are the customers and your work is going to define our deliverables. The definition of done for this sprint is: we will know what hurts us, we will know what helps us, we will know what we can do that we couldn’t do before, and we will know what extra things we can do when we go back to business.”

He grins, toothily. Is it Alex’s imagination, or are Oscar’s canines longer than they were yesterday?

“Note that I didn’t say ‘back to business as usual.’ Because I don’t think we’re going to be playing the same game again. We just got a power-up, people. And once we find out how big it is, we’ll be in a better position to know how high we can raise our game . . .”

• • •

MIDNIGHT IN THE SPRINT PLANNING MEETING. ALL THE PIGS and most of the hens are present, standing around the table (to keep things moving). They’ve barricaded the door to the suite to keep the cleaners out, ordered in a pile of pizzas (for though the stomach ache is ubiquitous and insatiable, the old mammalian metabolism still demands food), and Mhari is keeping track on the whiteboard.

“Okay, what else?” she demands, brandishing a red marker.

“Sunlight, threat, or menace?”

“Thank you, Evan.” She swings to the board, writes SUNLIGHT and circles it in yellow. After a moment she adds rays. “Well?”

“I got burned,” says Alex, “but only my hands and face.”

“Protective clothing,” mumbles Dick. His suit probably qualifies as such, at least if it’s his virginity he’s trying to protect—it came from a charity shop, a coarse green tweed pig farmer’s number that is more effective dissident garb in this environment than any amount of tie-dye and patchouli oil. “Hey, what about latex face paint, like in Mission: Impossible?”

Mhari adds two linked circles to the board: PROTECTIVE CLOTHING and LATEX MASKS.

“Hats,” offers Janice. “Becca gave me a lovely new trilby . . .”

HATS goes on the board.

“Keep it moving, people,” Mhari says briskly. Alex’s attention wanders. He notices she’s wearing opaque black leggings under her dress.