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of babies in suburban bliss. When the pandemic hit, she was just seventeen — and facing the prospect of premature ovarian failure and infertility. A year later, she took up with Michael Bannister, the prayer leader of the local church, and two of her three desires were quickly granted. But without the hoped-for babies, I can’t help wondering if suburbia became more a prison for her than a paradise.
    Michael turns to a companion, suited and heavyset in the shadows behind him, and speaks briefly. As the otherdisappears inside, he detaches from the doorjamb and walks over. His perusal of me is expressionless.
    â€˜You done?’ he asks Helen.
    â€˜Yes,’ she says to a spot on the pavement, and he steers her away with a proprietary arm.
    I can’t shout. I can’t cry. In Lord Place no one makes a scene — no one who doesn’t want to be noticed, that is. I feel glances from the neighbouring kegs. I pull up my hoody and leave in the opposite direction.
    More than anything right now — more than family reconciliation or my sister’s love — I want Inez’s arms wrapped tight around me.
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    The Animal Protection Vigilantes never meet in the same spot twice. This week it’s a Salvation Army hall in Carlton, a suburb away from where I live. Nation First tolerates the Salvos because they shelter those in the community the NFs have no compassion for. How the Salvos cope with their massively increased workload, I don’t know.
    Inez and I go there together in her ute. It’s a throwback to halcyon days: a lovingly restored anvil-grey FC Holden that she got from her dad. The car was the thing he did to ease the boredom and disappointment of retrenchment, but he never got to enjoy the fruits of his labour, being one of those taken early by the flu. Inez, thumbing her nose at the purists, had the engine converted in compliance with the city’s strict new emission laws, and drives it in his memory.
    She parks under a big elm a couple of streets from the hall. A block out, we don our prayer shawls and walk with carefully measured steps, as if already soliciting favours from our ungenerous Maker.
    The APV is how Inez and I met. She joined our cell when she moved here from Sydney. For me it was lust at first sight, but she took a while to warm to me, and we worked together for nearly a year before the pilot light even went on for her.
    The seven of us gather in the shuttered kitchen area at the back of the hall, more than the usual level of tension in the air. We’re coming to the pointy end of an operation we’ve been planning for many weeks. This rescue is one of our most ambitious, and only countenanced because another APV cell contacted us to ask for our help. Three months ago, they were approached by a disaffected employee at Greengate Farm, fifty kilometres northeast of the city in the Yarra Valley. To all intents and purposes it’s a dairy — there are cows, and it produces milk — but the employee gave up its dirty little secret. Deep inside its rambling set of buildings, where the dairy workers aren’t allowed, is a series of connecting internal yards: a farm within a farm, for horses only.
    Of course, all the workers there know about it, but need their jobs more than they need to rock a cruel and illegal boat. Our informant, Lars, a security guard, felt the same way — until he saw something he wasn’t meant to on a CCTV screen. Something he couldn’t forget. Somethingnobody should do to any creature. He handed the farm’s details to the other cell and offered to stay on to help with the raid. It was too big for that group to manage alone, so they appealed to us.
    â€˜What’s the latest?’ Brigid asks.
    The prayer shawl discarded, her shoulders look tense in her sleeveless top, her hands shoved defensively in her jean pockets. She’s been against trusting a third party from the start. I must say I can’t blame her