take a moment to recalibrate their instruments and reboot, and he knows that he only has seconds before they wake up fully. Their realignment to the alpha in the next street would take a moment. A moment he couldn’t waste.

Moving through the tightly packed bodies, he bumps up against some of them and they snarl as if to correct him for moving out of turn. He should be standing in formation, in his row according to rank, not running through them. They begin to notice him behaving strangely.

As he navigates through the bodies one of them moves to stand in front of him and stares intensely, as if denying him entry to a club. It’s a woman, but a fairly heavily built woman and he recognises her as a mother to a particularly noisy pack of kids that used