I lay for a while in sheets tangled to my waist, listening to the animals and the harsh male whoops of the feeding crew on the gantries above them. Segesvar had taken me on a tour of the place two years previously, and I still remembered the awful power with which the panthers nailed up to catch chunks of fishsteak the size of a man’s torso. The feeding crew had yelled then as well, but the more you listened the more you realised that it was bravado to shore up courage against an instinctive terror. With the exception of one or two hardened swamp-game hunters, Segesvar recruited pretty exclusively from the wharf fronts and slums of Newpest, where the chances of any of the kids having seen a real panther were about even with them ever having been to Millsport.

A couple of centuries back, it was different—the Expanse was smaller then, not yet cleared all the way south to make way for the belaweed mono-cropping combines. In places, the swamp’s poisonously beautiful trees and float-foliage crept almost up to the city limits, and the inland harbour had to be redredged on a twice-yearly basis. It wasn’t unheard of for panthers to turn up basking on the loading ramps in the summer heat, the chameleon skin of mane and mantle shimmering to mimic the sun’s glare. Peculiar variations in the breeding cycles of their prey out on the Expanse sometimes drove them in to roam the streets closest to the swamplands, where they ripped open sealed refuse canisters with effortless savagery and occasionally, at night, took the homeless or the unwary drunk. Just as they would in their swamp environment, they sprawled prone in back alleys, body and limbs concealed beneath a mane and mantle that would camouflage to black in the darkness. To their victims, they would resemble nothing so much as a pool of deep shadow until it was too late, and they left nothing behind for the police but broad splashes of blood and the echo of screams in the night. By the time I was ten, I’d seen my share of the creatures in the flesh, had even myself once run screaming up a wharf-shed ladder with my friends when a sleepy panther rolled over at our step-freeze-step approach, flapped one corner of its sloppy, tendrilled mane at us and treated us to a gape-beaked yawn.

The terror, like much that you experience in childhood, was transient.

Swamp panthers were scary, they were lethally dangerous if you encountered them under the wrong circumstances, but in the end they were a part of our world.

The snarling outside seemed to reach a crescendo.

To Segesvar’s crew, swamp panthers were the bad guys of a hundred cheap hologames and maybe a school biology class they hadn’t cut, made suddenly real. Monsters from another planet.

This one.